letters.(Letter to the Editor)

Avatars for Atmosphere

I read the Product Spotlight on Adobe Atmosphere on pg 10 of the July 2001 issue with great interest, but was disappointed that there was no mention of Poser 4 and Pro Pack. While Discreet and Alias|Wavefront have well-developed, feature-rich exporters to insert animated 3D objects into Atmosphere, the only way to insert animated, bending 3D characters into the Atmosphere environment or any Viewpoint-based scene is via Poser Pro Pack's Viewpoint exporter. Curious Labs developed the bending primitive component for Viewpoint and also the Viewpoint exporter that enables the use of smooth, single-mesh bending characters in the player. Even on the Adobe Atmosphere product page, the only single-mesh, bending avatars are those we created using Poser and our Pro Pack exporter. You can check those out at http://www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere/avatars.

Additionally, collecting and trading Poser Pro Pack custom avatars in the various worlds has become a popular endeavor with our users. To see a few other great animated 3D avatars from Pro Pack in action, check out the Atmosphere world of our parent company Egisys AG at the following URL: http://www.egisys.de/and browse its 3D world.

 
Steve Cooper 
President, Curious Labs 

Time to Walk the Walk

The timing of the "Walk This Way" Techwatch article on pg. 16 of the July 2001 issue was perfect. Several days afterward, I saw the animated movie Shrek. The level of realism in CG animation that has been achieved today is truly amazing in all areas except motion. In Shrek, the CG characters looked fantastically real until they moved. By far, the last hurtle seems to be getting the motion to look as real as the rest of the visual aspects.

 
John Johnstone 
Oakhurst, NJ