Better quality from Doga

[Ed Kolis]

I decided to give Doga L3 a try, and it looks really cool (a renderer that supports CEL SHADING ) but one thing that turned me off is there doesn't seem to be any way to render curved surfaces accurately - they always get turned into this weird polygon mesh... also, how the heck do you do extrusions?

[mlmbd]

Ed Kolis, rendering curved surfaces accurately is done by tweaking the settings of each part of your model. There are enough setting to tweak any 'curved' surface making it accurate. Mesh or no!

What are you calling 'extrusions'?

mlmbd

[Ed Kolis]

But even if I create a simple sphere, say to represent a planet, because of the small number of polygons Doga is using, the sphere doesn't look very spherical - create one and look at the outline, it's not a circle! My question is how do you increase the number of polygons so you can model such surfaces more accurately? It just seems there are too many prebuilt complex objects to add and not enough basic primitives or ways to reshape an existing object beyond stretching and squashing it. For instance that face that comes with the program - how the heck was that created? Certainly not in Doga... there don't seem to be any commands to do that - you'd probably need some sort of polygon mesh editor. Or maybe I just don't understand Doga....

Oh, BTW, an "extrusion" is what you get when you take some figure and move it through space, possibly rotating or resizing it as it moves. For example, a cylinder - take a circle and move it through a straight line and you get a cylinder.

edit: And maybe it's because I can't read the manual - every time I try to load it, Acrobat says I'm missing some "CMap" character set or something...

[ January 24, 2003, 23:34: Message edited by: Ed Kolis ]

[Phoenix-D]

"It just seems there are too many prebuilt complex objects to add and not enough basic primitives or ways to reshape an existing object beyond stretching and squashing it."

If you've used the previous Version, DOGA started out more like a lego set than a modeling program.

Phoenix-D

[Ed Kolis]

Guess that explains it... wonder what accounts for its popularity for creating SE4 shipsets then?

[Captain Kwok]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
Guess that explains it... wonder what accounts for its popularity for creating SE4 shipsets then?

It's a lot easier to use than most other 3D programs because it's more of connect-the-blocks rather than creating complex objects on your own. I personally don't like it all that much because I find it limiting and the renders are kind of distorted, but you can do some interesting work with it.

[pathfinder]

For me DOGA L3 good because very low cost and is butt simple to use. I get raging headaches trying to use things like Moray/Povray...

[Atrocities]

The program is limited, but never the less a lot of fun to use.

If you want to spend the time to learn it, I guess you could do some really detailed sets. There are a lot of excellent ship sets out that were created with this program, but I agree with Kwok, I'd rather learn Povray/Moray.

[Gryphin]

Its popularty in my case is price and ease of use. as kwok put it, my Tessellates are "connect the blocks" which for my vision is just right.

[pathfinder]

This link gives more parts for a bit more variety:

http://zircher.iwarp.com/fots_3d/library.htm