I''m using Animatek World Builder 3.0 Pro and I''ve got to say the company seems very much on the unprofessional side. It''s almost as if they''re trying to shovel out a product asap in order to get what little money they can. User Interface is questionable, documents are littered with spelling mistakes, broken links, and the app itself is more volatile than Windows 3.1. They say they have plugins for 3d Studio Max 5 but it apparently they forgot to include it. And upgrading to 3.2 means nothing more than using their 3.2 demo. WTF. Maybe I''m missing something about this company and product. The output, from their website, seems very interesting. And a few things I''ve managed to create (before crashing) were acceptable. I love the skeleton approach. But in the end I would rather use a professional product. Can you provide me with a list of decent terrain makers. They can be commercial apps, standalone or a plugin for 3DS Max 5. What i demand is a good manual, intuitive interface, and nice looking results. In the end i would like to import this generated terrain into my Virtools Dev composition. So, I will need to trim the superfluous polygons and divide up the landscape into patches (I still have no idea on how to do this in 3DSM, still reading thru its tutorials so that it becomes practical for real-time application. Poof.

If rapid creation of simple(relatively) terrain is your objective, i''d recommend delving into the scripting language built into max (maxscript).

This is relatively easy to use and can provide you with a whole set of useful tools specific for your own implementation. You could possibly even implement poly organising and naming procedures in your script, hence making 3dsmax a complete terrain development environment.

I would probably use a subdivided poly displaced with a height field bitmap (yay for Perlin), then add extra details in. You could create a whole toolset, ie. ADD RIVER, in which you provide a spline along the terrain then the function extrudes relevant polys or moves relevant vertices.

Though i could be aiming in the wrong direction here.

-Cheers



_______________________
|my signature uber sucks|
|_______________________|