3d animator

Of the various 3d engines in existance (not game engines, or hardware accelerated) I've only come across two decent ones. Those would be 3d Studio (viz or max) and POVRay. And only 3D Studio supports animation. (You could always do frame-by-frame animation in POVRay, but it wouldn't be all that easy) For all those with programmer's block, I have this goal: Create an open source 3d animation utility that is better than 3d Studio.
Most who read this will probably think I'm crazy or something, but for those who know the price of 3d Studio (US$3500 and up), I think that this goal is in the reach of any smart vb programmer. Sure, even I would agree that a fast renderer could be created in c++, but keeping in mind that speed is not an issue...

Caligary Truespace is good and it creates animations. You can get a demo at http://www.Caligary.com You can't save anything but you can publish them.

I got a dns error while triyng to load that site. Was Truespace written in vb? Is it Open Source?

I don't think it was written in vb. And I don't think its open source. I used it a long time ago.

damn. Well maybe one of these various programmer groups will write one.

the above url is supposed to be http://www.caligari.com and.. also there's another 3D editor that many mod makers or gamers who are trying to customize games like quake2 or other game like that, are using. It's called milkshape3D. It's pretty good and costs 20 bucks.. I heard somewhere that when you buy it for 20 bucks you also get the source code? I'm not sure I could be wrong. But this thing is really good for it's price.. it can also do animations...

milshape3d was probably written in c++. I'm looking for a high quality raytracer written in vb.

Raytracers written in pure VB without using directx and stuff like that will be too slow to use. BUT I think there is one that exists. I saw it on PlanetSourceCode.. if you go there and do a search for 3D and look at the results you might find it.

Thanks for the info. Not worried about the speed. If necesarry, I can probably figure out how to link cpus over a home network and cluster are 7 pentiums 133 and up together and make a fairly fast raytracer. I'm mainly interested in this, because i don't want to pay for a copy of 3d studio, and i'ld like to see if it could be done in vb.

to all u out there, i have created a 3d program. all you can do is spin this small model around in a 3d enviroment. but the calculations i used in this program are somewhat off and you will see after a minute of moving it around, it becomes distorted and is way off track. but u can improve upon this because i am uploading this program to this post and u may download it freely.. to move the model, use the arow keys for the x and y planes, and pup and pdown for the z plane, have fun and goodluck

This is a list of some high qualitiy commercal applications for 3D animation/movie making:

1. 3D Max
2. LightWave
3. Maya (The movie Final Fantacy was made with this)
4. Truspace
5. SoftImage

These are good, but not as good as the ones above:

Bryce 4
Poser 4
RayDream
InfiniD

-Emo

Like i said, I don't have $10,000 for SoftImage. Don't worry, I managed to "obtain" a copy of 3d studio max. (Fell of a truck...)

Don't most movie production companies use their own propreitary software? The movie Shrek is one example.

In fact, the software used for Shrek was written specifically for the movie Shrek.

There's a book which covers ray tracing and some source code is included on the accompanying CD:

Visual Basic Graphics Programming

by Rod Stevens

published by John Wiley & Sons

ISBN 0-471-35599-2

If I was wanting to write a 3d graphix Engine... I would not use VB. I would use C/C++ just because of speed! Rendering and what not will kill you in VB.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Emo

3. Maya (The movie Final Fantacy was made with this)

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and toystory :D

The Models in toystory where made in Maya, but they where rendered in Pixars Renderman

Thats why the reflection maps looked a bit odd in the movie