Posted by Larry Martin on August 28, 2000 at 13:04:42:Hello Everyone,
I just wanted to tell you how great the walkthrough tool in Lights & Textures (L&T) is. If you haven't been using it, (it is my opinion that) you should. I have found that there are many times when I need to show a building to a client or another designer. Instead of spending a weekend having Artlantis render a movie that is relatively static, I use the walkthrough tool for live dynamic walkthroughs of the model.
The tool is the one on the lower right side of the tool palette that looks like a pair of shoes in plan view. Here are a couple of tips about using the tool.
Make sure that you set the eye and look point to the same height before you go into L&T. This will give you a two-point perspective that will stay constant. I usually make them both 5'-0" so that it is close to the eye level of the average person. You can set that in the "z" field in your coordinate input fields at the bottom of the DW modeling window.
Also, you can back up and turn around without losing your two-point perspective. If you change the eye level to view the model from an aerial, you can realign the points by just making sure that the vertical lines of your model don't have any jaggies on the screen and you should be back in the two-point perspective mode.
If you have a slow computer that doesn't like to render L&T on the fly, stay in the L&T mode and drop back into wire frame. Not only is the wireframe very cool to look at it is very fast.
Anyway, so many people I show my models to are so impressed with this tool when I use it in a demo that I thought it was worth mentioning.
Larry