I believe someone was discussing the T1000 "melt" morph effect
from "T2: Judgment Day" on the Imagine Mailing List.  I posted a reply
as to how I would, if I were them, write a program to perform the
melt, and this got me really thinking about it.  I've been wanting to
learn C++, so instead of re-using T3DLIB to mess with the Imagine
objects, I decided to put my money (uh, er... source code) where my
mouth was and write a program in C++ to perform the morph, thereby
helping me to learn the object-oriented paradigm at the same time.

	It takes a single object, and then produces a given number of
frames that "melt" the object down into a round puddle.  I have tried
it on a couple chess pieces and Carmen Rizzolo's NCC-1701-D (thanks,
Carmen!), and the results are interesting.  I like the melts of the
chess pieces, but the melt of the Enterprise is rather bizarre, and
probably not terribly usable.  But I had expected this, because the
way I designed the algorithm, it works best on "star-shaped" objects.
In a star-shaped object, you can find a single point within the object
such that all rays casted outward from that point intersect the
object's surface once and only once (i.e. hits only one face).  And
specifically, objects that are block-ish or vertically cylindrical in
nature.

	The resulting objects are morphable within Imagine.  In other
words, I only modify the location of the points in the object such
that the objects' topologies are identical to the original (all
points, edges, and faces corresponding one-to-one in the same order).
So we can crank out 10 objects, and then let Imagine smoothly morph
the in-betweens if you want more frames than 10.

	I'm now thinking of writing up an article about the algorithm
and sending it to a magazine (to get my name in lights so I can land
that job at ILM, and also for a couple bucks :-), and then after the
article comes out, just release the code into the public domain.

	So anyway, here is an example of what it does to the Imagine 2.0
"cow.new" object.  The effect, as you can see, is rather bizarre.  :-)
"cow_010.iob" is the original "cow.new" object.

	Comments are welcome, of course.
						-- Glenn Lewis
						glewis@pcocd2.intel.com