Ahh. I was under the impression that you had written your own non-photorealistic renderer for MAX, with shading and such. This post really gives that impression:
http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...ead.php?t=5563&
What you are doing is pretty cool and I wonder how many other people have really thought of this technique. We did this very same trick back in 2001, shortly after developing our plug-in.
Incase there are people who don't know the technique, you can read about how to do it here:
http://www.pangolin.com/_Files/Laser...pt01-LCMAX.pdf
Basically you render things "twice". You render first to generate the laser lines themselves, then you render normal 3D graphics as a series of bitmaps or AVI, then "impress" the color from the 3D graphics onto the laser lines.
It's not a bad way to go, and we were impressed with the initial results we got (especially since it was conceptually easy), but later we were dissatisfied with the quality and consistency so we built the shading aspects right into the plug-in itself.
Anyway, good job. But let me ask you, what does this do that LaserBoy does not? I have heard people using LaserBoy to import DXF and of course ILDA, and I have heard that there is some kind of "optimization" in LaserBoy, but beyond that, I don't know much about it. Does LaserBoy allow for the recolorization of laser frames based on a bitmap?
As I think of it, it seems like there a few free software packages out there that also import DXF and ILDA, and have built in optimization, and such and can even impress bitmap color onto the laser graphics.
As an aside, it's great to see all of the activity of PL members contributing to this artform! This community sure is thriving with talent!
Bill