[This was in RTNews4] NFF Files from Thierry Leconte [I found some wonderful NFF files at the site irisa.irisa.fr [131.254.2.3] in the NFF directory. Particularly good is the Amiga computer model, but all of them are pretty worthwhile. BowlingPin.nff - guess amiga.nff - an Amiga 2000 keyboard and computer (no monitor) - very nice balls.nff - just a scene generated by SPD ball program crypt.nff - a mysterious crypt (with columns and whatnot) expresso.nff [sic] - T. Todd Elvins' Utah espresso maker in NFF format hangglider.nff - a hang glider jaws.nff - don't be afraid, it's just a nff scene matchbox.nff - a box of matches and some matches room.nff - an office with the desk and others things spirale.nff - a spiral spline thingie spring.nff - a spring thing sps7.nff - a bull sps7 computer box teapot.nff - the mythical one temple.nff - pseudo-roman pagan temple something tpotbis.nff - ye olde teapot, with lid ajar watch.nff - a wristwatch x29.nff - fighter plane Unfortunately, there are some problems with some databases. Problems included: - polygonal patches with normals given as [0,0,0]. - polygons with no area (usually a triangle with a doubled vertex). - inconsistently defined polygons. The NFF format specifies that you should output the polygon vertices in a particular order (counter- clockwise when viewed from above in a right-handed coordinate system). I suspect you use double sided polygons so that it does not matter. - other minor problems. The files I had problems with: amiga.nff - there are a few polygons with no area (doubled vertices). The first is around line 1518 of the file. jaws.nff - there are tons of polygonal patches with normals of [0,0,0] room.nff - polygons with [0,0,0] normals, and some no area polygons. The first two polygons in this file are HUGE. I cannot get the normals per vertex to display properly on my system, because some of the vertex normals differ inconsistently from the polygon normal (I haven't quite figured this out). spring.nff - the "Shine" and "Transmission" values are switched here, I suspect. Shine is 0, while Kt is 30! You should definitely fix the material setup line here. temple.nff - no area polygon around line 433. I can't get the normals to line up properly, similar problem to room.nff. watch.nff - lots of [0,0,0] normals here. x29.nff - on line 3641 there is an extra vertex - the polygon says it has 3 vertices, but 4 vertices appear (possibly my file is corrupt). Some comments I pasted together from Thierry Leconte (Thierry.Leconte@irisa.fr), who is the caretaker of the files: In fact I'm only a novice in ray-tracing area. I work on distributed systems and parallelism. But ray-tracers are good applications to test such systems. Now I work on a modified version of VM_pRay (the parallel ray-tracer of Didier.Badouel@irisa.fr) which run on our own distributed system (called GOTHIC). We are writing a motif based window interface for it and I am trying to collect as many nff files as I can in order to run nice demos on the Gothic system. I have made available most of these files and some utilities (among others yours) via anonymous ftp from irisa.irisa.fr. Most of the non classicals scenes I have come from a scene designer Xavier Bouquin who works on a amiga with the Scult4D program. and Philippe.Joubert@irisa.fr has written a sculpttonff converter. But if someone knows other converters or interesting nff files I will be happy to add them to my collection! VM_pRAY (ray tracer) of Didier Badouel is available at the same site. Feel free to use, copy ,modify and distribute these files provided that they are not use for commercial purpose and that the name of the author is mentioned. Most of these scenes was made on an amiga with Scult4D (a truly great modeler) then they have been converted to nff file with sc2nff (a PD converter available on the same site, same directory in the utils.tar archive). The author of crypt,jaws,matchbox,room,temple,watch is Xavier Bouquin (email to pjoubert@irisa.fr). teapot, x29 were ftp'ed from cs.uoregon.edu. amiga, hangglider, teapotbis were PD Scult4D files available on a amiga site archive (will try in the future to collect any PD Scult4D file an convert them to nff). sps7 was made by hand. balls and spirale - generated by program.