[Parametric road junction]

A parametric road junction with variable number of arms, angles, widths, with or without a roundabout in the middle would be great.

[Parametric tree]

A prametric tree with variable height, width, branch and leaf density, stem height, branch length and curving etc. would be great. The leaves could be made up by larger areas with variable transparent textures for greater variety and smaller file sizes.

[Mesh smoothing still not fixed?]

I posted this 11/16/06 both in the techboard and as a bug submit.

"I tried to render a quite complex mesh, converted from a terrain model to be able to apply an image texture to it. Everything worked fine until I turned mesh smoothing on in the document settings. Then the mesh turned black. So I did some experimenting and found out that a smoothed mesh with an image texture will not receive light other than ambient light. If I use a procedural texture it will render fine and smooth. There also seems to be a connection between the size of the mesh and the result you get. You never get a smooth mesh with image texture, it?s alway edgy and full of artifacts, when the size of the mesh (number of triangles) increases, larger parts gets black. This looks like a bug to me, but is there a way around it in the current version? I really see a potential for higher realism in rendering architectural models with this feature!"

The reply on the bug submit was that this would be fixed in the next upgrade, but it seems to me this hasn?t happened. I?is a pity since mesh smoothing is most interesting with photoreal rendering. I?ve tried many programs, also cheap ones, where mesh smoothing combined with image textures and raytracing isn?t a problem. I don?t think this should be so hard to fix and should be a standard feature in any 3D program. A drape surface isn?t an option since it reduces accuracy. The best thing in this particular case would be to smooth and texture the terrain model directly, but I imagine this would be harder to achieve.

Hans Jakob

[Interactive rendering]

Realtime rendering and baking of textures. Theese seems to be related and gives the possibility to do one radiosity or ambient occlusion rendering and move the camera, change light settings etc afterwards.

The LightWorks Real-time product provides customers with an easy way to give their users access to high-quality, interactive, hardware-assisted rendering. Applications that incorporate LightWorks Real-time enable users to:

Render photorealistic images interactively for easy material manipulation

Create accurate pre-visualisations of the final software-rendered image

Access thousands of ready-made Real-time materials in LWA archives

[LWA materials]

Does RenderWorks support LWA materials?

LWA stands for LightWorks Archive - it is a platform-independent and application-independent digital file format specifically designed for the distribution of elements used to accurately represent real world materials within LightWorks-based CAD applications. This ?Content?, can take the form of materials such as Mannington carpets, Benjamin Moore paints and UNS Metals, but also include lighting, backgrounds and scenery. The beauty of the LWA file format is its ability to wrap up any number of these elements into a single archive file that can then be used in any LightWorks-based application.

[SketchUp style 3D sketching]

What about SketchUp style 3D sketching? The first step is already there with the extruded polygon/rectangle tools. The next step would be automatic selection of drawing planes when you click a suface for drawing a new extrude to add or subtract the first.

[Collision detection]

If it?s not there already, I haven?t got 2008 yet, I would like to have collision detection when moving with the flythrough/walkthrough tool, so that the viewpoint follows the terrain when decending to a set height, say 1,6 m when walking, say 1,2 m when driving. The function could be applied to selected objects, say always to the terrain model, to walls and floors if you don?t want to walk through them, but not to doors.

[3D polygons]

Is there a way to trim, clip or subtract points from a 3D polygon or number of 3D polygons without deleting single points one at a time? Especially interesting if you want to make a rectangular terrain model from an irregular set of elevation curves (3D polygons)