Intersting, When I was learning CAD I had to rock the 3d model back and
forth to se the image. The professor was quite curious as to why I was
dooing this. I needed to see the perspective shift in order to visulise the
3Dness of the model.
In one of the very early versions of Lightwave, one of the default viewing modes in the perspective view window in modeler was a wireframe that gently rocked back and forth continuously as you worked. It was very nice and it used some double-buffering techniques which at the time could only have been done easily on the Amiga, with it's blitter chip and DMA memory access. (easy to do as a background task that wouldn't slow you down on a 7mhz 68000 processor that is) That option hasn't been there since 3.0 (the software is up to 7.5 now) but occasionally I see a use for that feature and miss it. It has been mostly outdated by the ability of OpenGL to render the object on the fly as you twirl it around with your mouse (used to become a bounding box until you finished moving/rotating it, back in the day).
Mostly I am interested in photogrmeretry. What is taking multiple images
and creating a virtual model of the scene.
There have been lots of SIGGRAPH papers about this, but it has only come in to it's own recently due to the hardware catching up. There are now a whole lot of programs based around this concept, and it is used extensively in previs and rotoscoping to form the basis for set extensions and element interaction with live plates. There are pieces of software that will take a motion video or film sequence and extrapolate the geometry for you given some base information and reference points. We used some of these at Digital Domain and wrote our own, but I worked as an animator in 3D and not in the roto dept, so I only followed it lightly. One of the best standalone packages out there is RealViz MatchMover, at http://www.realviz.com/products/mpro/index.php. There's no magic bullet, but it saves a lot of time vs. doing tracks by hand frame by frame, the way we used to.
The technology is so commonplace now that simpler versions are bundled with a lot of popular FX software.
---Mike
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - XCOR Aerospace
Web/Photo/Video/Concept Art
