Object making add-on.

I think that Alice would be so much better if your were able to make your own objects with-out buying another program. A good alternative would be a converter that converts normal 3D object files to Alice Objects. This would make Alice SO MUCH better. This would be a great feature for the new Alice version.

Thank you for looking at my suggestion and please reply to my thread. Thank you again,

Quag555

Two comments:

1. You don't have to buy another program - Anim8or, Biturn, Blender and several other programs are free and do the job fine.

2. A 3D modeling program is, in itself, a very large and complicated program. Adding that capability to Alice - which already bogs down when the worlds get too large - would just make Alice more cumbersome and difficult to document and maintain.

Additionally, I doubt that over 20% of Alice users would really take the time to make their own models. Remember, Alice was (and is) intended as a tool for teaching OOP. That is difficult enough in itself.

Yes, that is very true. Alice was only designed to teach and would get very slow when adding new features but, I would really like to see Alice be able to import "normal" or more used 3D file types. I have a feeling that the reason for having an odd file extension is because their are other types of things in the file such as bones, properties, and Methods. Yes, I know this would be a major change but, I believe this would greatly increase the number of users and more of them would make their own objects. I believe that the reason only 20% of the people using Alice make their own objects is because it is hard to convert to a file format used by Alice.

Originally Posted by Quag555

I believe that the reason only 20% of the people using Alice make their own objects is because it is hard to convert to a file format used by Alice.

Having just spent the afternoon working with Poser 6 (which is available at a bargain price right now, since it doesn't work with Vista), I have to disagree (though I may give you 5% ).

Making even OK 3D objects with anything is frankly difficult - making good ones is really hard. You have to be motivated to even try that - and it's not a skill really needed - or even wanted - by most folks.

But I do partially agree with you. As I've posted elsewhere, I'd really like to see Alice have the ability to import from the free version of Google SketchUp.

Originally Posted by DrJim

Having just spent the afternoon working with Poser ...

One case where a picture may be worth a 1K words - the attached is the result of my trying to import my Poser work into Alice.

The "problem" is fairly simple. The Poser export gave a model with well over 64K polygons - not at all untypical for a good 3D model. Biturn couldn't handle that directly and going through Anim8or didn't help much - though it did at least get a convertable image, as shown.

I know somewhere on my computer I have at least one program (plus Blender) that will reduce polygon count - but with resulting loss of detail (which I spent considerable time creating). On the other hand, even if I successfully imported the whole thing into Alice, the program would have real difficulty with the large file.

Alice is just a teaching tool (and I hope the Alice team is working hard to improve that aspect of it for Alice 3.0 ) - don't expect more of it than is there.

Rereading my last couple of postings, I started to feel a bit guilty for my negative attitiute. (But try working with a real 3D program for a bit - and see what happens. )

The attached shows a bit of what you can really do with such a program - and import into Alice - assuming you keep your sanity.

Just don't expect it from Alice - Poser 6 (which is outdated) is nearly 700 MB without libraries.