Blue Moon

A Frax 4D Object Movie.

 

About Frax 4D and how this object movie was generated: Frax 4D is a fascinating Photoshop and Painter compatible Plug-In from the MetaCreations Filter Suite: Kai's Power Tools 5. It allows you to take a "slice" through a shape generated from a fractal equation and extrude it into a virtual 3D shape. The 4D part of the name comes from the type of "slice" used to generate the intersection and hence the shape. You can alter the "slice", lighting, reflections and detail to generate beautiful, 3 dimensional abstract images, which render on the fly in the preview window, but which can only be output as flat 2D representations. You can't output those wonderful rotatable shapes as a 3D mesh or animation. There are no precise rotation controls either. You get the rendered view and no more. How then was our object movie constructed? How is it that we can show our fragile 3D sculpture to others? With care, the Frax 4D sculpture can be rotated in small increments with the mouse, and a rendered image generated at each step, progressing through 360 degrees. These images can be stitched together with QTVR authoring programs such as VR Toolbox's ObjectWorx or Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio, so that the 'Virtual Sculpture' can be viewed interactively via a website or CD-ROM.

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