Subject: Re: Hypernauts...
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 10:27:31 -0800

> One thing that seemed to lack, and I know it's hard to do, is imparting a 
>feeling of weight to the mechs. The motion tends to make them look a little 
>plastic, not the sheer tons of metal weight that they should be. This could 
>be subjective, I know this is one of the hardest for me to acheive when I 
>do characters, having a lot to do with LW  limited IK features. 

In a LWPro artical on the new IK features, someone mentioned this- it could 
be fixed by having the size of an object determin how much IK infulenced an 
object.  For instance, a leg attacked to a large body would take-on more 
movement as a result of the foot being moved.  Perhaps the ideal solution 
would be you could set the "mass" of an object, either based on its size or 
just input a number- humm, maybe I'll send it to [email-masked], I'm 
assuming that movement constraints have alradyt been suggested (along with 
rotational constraints)

		Perhaps, another thing was the way they quickly bounced around, if they 
had walked slower, plus had a bit more give when the guns swung around (i.e. 
something that heavy, moving that fast would not come to a dead stop without 
affecting the whole mech: IMHO).  Check out The Empire Strikes Back & Return 
of the Jedi, on the ATATs (4 legged things) for a good example of something 
heavy walking, the Mechs in Hypernaughts are smaller, like ATSTs, but even 
these moved like big metal things as opposed to plastic kits.

Zoltan