by Announcing another free plug-in currently available for Intel,
Amiga, and SGI users. It is a Level of Detail (LOD) object replacement
plugin for Layout.
Users in my lab have been asking for an LOD plugin lately, so I used
Jason Booth's BML LOD plugin as inspiration to write a C version that
could be used on our SGI machine. And anything I could do to make the
Amiga at home render scenes more efficiently seemed like it was worth
doing. Ernie Wright has also assisted by compiling the plugin for the
Intel platform (as well as providing other valuable assistance for
making my sample files PC friendly). If anyone would like to try and
compile it for the Alpha (and maybe even the Mac) I would love to know
about it.
Here is a short blurb about the plugin from the web page:
As the camera moves farther away from an object in a Lightwave
scene, the viewer can distinguish fewer details on the object.
Therefore, an object far from the camera needs fewer details
(smaller number of polygons, less surface texturing, etc.) than one
that is close to the camera. This plugin uses Lightwave Layout's
Object Replacement capability to allow an animator the ability to
use multiple objects with various levels of detail in a scene.
Based on the distance between an object and the camera position,
this plugin replaces the current object with other user specified
objects.
If you are interested, you can find the web page at:
http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/lod.html
or find a link to the LOD page from my plugins page:
http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/
--
Marvin Landis
WWW Page: http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/marvinl.html