INFINI-D

 

1.     PLATFORMS, PRICE, and COMPANY:

 

·        Windows, Mac OS

·        No longer support

·        Meta Creations, Corps. http://www.metacreations.com/

 

 

2.     APPLICATIONS:

 

·        InfiniD deals with rendering and animation, with a focus on broadcast animation. Rendering speed is faster than most of its competitors. InfiniD supports procedural and composite surfaces as well as standard texture mapping. Procedural surfaces have mathematically defined properties and as such are three dimensional as they run through an object rather than just covering the surface. Composite surfaces are created by using several different maps; this allows ease of application in placing a label to a tin or bottle, for example.

 

 

3.     EXAMPLES:

 

·        http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Te

·        http://www.phase2.net/claygraphics/Intro.html

·        http://larzmachine.tripod.com/Lepercolony/buildings.html

 

 

4.     FUNCTIONS:

 

·        Animation: Has a set of tools used for creating animated deformation. These allow organic animated effects to be assigned to objects directly in the scene and animated over time. The twisting, bulging and wave effects are all stable and produce interesting results when used with text. Subtle deformations can be created by limiting the effect of the process on an object by using a percentage scale applied to the bounding box of an object. Lighting effects provide the means of generating realistic soft shadows. A gradual transition from one shadow to another can be produced, conferring a more realistic, fuzzy effect. All the standard lighting operations are available within Infini-D, including visible light rays.

 

·        Modeling: Vertex editing tools allows far more complex organic shapes to be modeled. Vertex editing works well with spline modeling tools in the creation of highly complex objects, such as a face, as individual points can be subtly adjusted.

 

·        Rendering: Field rendering is also available for outputting to video. Without field interlacing, where an image is split into two fields each with half the image data, images often show a tearing effect when played back.

 

·        Plug-ins: Infini-D's plug-in architecture supports third party plug-ins, including many designed for Photoshop and AfterEffects.

 

 

5.     WEB RESOURCES:

 

·        http://www.dmnforums.com/cgi-bin/displaywwugindex.fcgi?endday_index=&startdate=&dire=ture&forum=infini-d&startday=0&endday=180

·        http://www.phase2.net/claygraphics/Intro.html

·        http://www.public.iastate.edu/~nielandj/infini-d.html

·        http://usuarios.lycos.es/max3d/infinid.html/

·        http://www.computer-training-software.com/meta2.htm

·        http://listserv.uark.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind0108&L=infini-d

·        http://www.cebe.ltsn.ac.uk/learning/habitat/HABITAT5/infinid.html

·        http://apex.vtc.com/meta2.php

·        Books on Infi-D : http://books.bankhacker.com/Infini+D/