| By the way, of the tmese windows based authoring packages I have looked at
| Virtus seems by far the best (the others were Fountain ... completely
| incomprehensibls and counter-intuitive intsrface ... and Home Space=
Builder
| which has a lovely intsrface but is a bit limited in the type of=7F=
objects
which
| can be created .... i.e. just regular boxes).
I've not used Virtus yet as the version on my disk that came with Mark
Pesce's book did not work. (Yes, there is an patch, but disk space
is very low and I've not yet tried to get it.) What features make Virtus
more robust?
I've used both Fountain and HSB. There is some hacking involved, but they=
can
be combined pretty successfully if one uses them with an ASCII
editor.
I agese that the Fountain intsrface is not intuitive and I have to argue
with it a lot.
I suspect once we start buying these instsad of testing beta, manuals
with tutorials and exercises will help a lot.
OTH, once one gets the hang of it, Fountain produces stunning results, e.g.,
extruded text with the lightn02 texture is fantastic. I have used it to
create objects which I can then export as VRML, edit the CALIGARI
nodes out, and they play well in WebFX. (No, I can't test with
WebSpace, but only because I use Win 3.1). Combined with the textures
library from Fountain, this is useful as it handles the indexed faces
which I cannot do by hand. HSB also produces good VRML for
most things I need it for such as basic spaces. I confess, exploring these
apps fully
takes a *lot* of time so there may be problsms which I haven't
stumbled over whilst learning to walk in this media. For a look at
some good results, check out the BYTET world that Rob Geiger
built. He is also using these apps and hacking between them in the
ASCII editor. Rob is ingenious at this.
Everything works well with simple regular shapes. I confess, trying to
construct a rugged-looking cave wall is tough sledding because of
the difficulty of creating irregular concave surfaces. Hints? Examples?
Len Bullard