Dear Seamless Friends
Both the French and English versions for Seamless3d 2.119 are available for download from:
http://www.seamless3d.com/download
Finally after just a little over a 3rd of the year of intensive work I have completed my first priority for the year, which was to update the immediate avatar tutorial with the acompanyment of a robot demo. I was expecting this to take only about 2 weeks initially but I came up with many new ideas along the way to make it so much better than I had first invisioned. This has resulted in seamless underging many improvments making immediate editing much easier than ever before.
To see the new Immediate Avatar Tutorial go to:
http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/immediate_av
What's important about the robot showing all the clicks from beginning to end, is the awkward little issues that are often ignored in abstract tutorials, get addressed. Unless there is a tutorial I am not aware of, this must be the most comprehensive on-line tutorial that shows how to create an animated VRML/X3D or Pov-Ray avatar using only easy straight forward techniques and free open source software.
Before starting the new demo be sure to put the contents of the updated file : http://www.seamless3d.com/download/files_for_demos.zip into the folder:
My Documents\Seamless3d\Application Data For Seamless3d\For Robot Demos Only
I have also updated and added some more tutorials which are relivant.
Survival Guide:
http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/immediate_commands
Seamless Navigation:
http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/navigation
Immediate Commands:
http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/immediate_commands
The 3 new nodes for 2.119, the RingBuild, MirrorGroup and MirrorEdit have been added to the seamless nodes index:
http://www.seamless3d.com/tut/node
Navigation has been significantly improved by making it so that the scene view position can now be dragged by simply left clicking on the 3d window and dragging. I wish I had added this simple intuitive feature years ago because it was unbelievably simple to add and makes navigation so much easier.
I tried for some time to make it so that the user can select both the vertex and a triangle sharing the same method but in the end after a lot of trial and error I most preferred to keep the old existing way for selecting a vertex and make it so that to select a triangle you simply hold down the Alt key while clicking the triangle. It is also a simple matter of selecting a specific edge of a triangle by clicking closest to the desired edge within the triangle. This makes commonly used commands such as splitting a triangle much faster than before.
The most noticeable difference for 2.119 will be the toolbar. Buttons that are only relevant for immediate editing are no longer displayed on the tool bar unless a blue part is currently selected and buttons that are not relevant to immediate editing are not displayed when a blue part is selected. This allows for more buttons to occupy the same amount of space and reduces clutter at the same time.
The option of mirror tugging has been reintroduced for 2.119 and improved significantly over earlier attempts at mirror editing for earlier versions of seamless.
Because Griff had problems with his mice interrupting the robot (assumed to be due to an unstable signal being sent by the mice), the tolerance has been changed from 1 pixel to 3 pixels. This can make the robot seem to fight more for control then before when we want to take control over the mouse but so long as the mouse is moved enough and fast enough it will be sure make the robot gives up the fight swiftly.
Six preset view orientation buttons have been added to the toolbar which makes it much easier for getting the 6 basic orientations and I understand is a common feature for 3d editors.
The right angle offset orientation buttons have been changed back to how they use to behave (to being relative rather than absolute) and the reset orientation button is now a quantize view orientation because the front view preset now has it's old role of reseting the view to this orientation. For more information on setting the view orientation see the navigation page
Some old bugs that had been left undetected for years have been found, isolated and fixed for 2.119 thanks to the robot testing seamless out under an increasing number of different conditions.
Because of this self verifying feature, 2.119 should be the most robust version of seamless yet.
Thanks for your patience and best wishes to All
))
