The AC3D 3D Modeller

The AC3D modeller is a third-party program which is used to produce facetted models for use as blockages or fluid regions in the VR Editor.

The general manual is available at the AC3D Website. This document has two parts:

Some basic guidance to produce a simple model

A worked example to illustrate a useful case.

The program can be installed anywhere on your computer; under Windows we install it in \phoenics\d_ac3d. Within the installation directorythere is a sub-directory called 'Plugins'; extensions to AC3D can be placed in here, and the CHAM plugins (called chamdat.p, healong.p and gtsbool.p) should be in the plugins directory (normal installation of PHOENICS will ensure this is so). The CHAM plugins enable:

• the PHOENICS .dat file format to be read and written directly by AC3D,
• holes in objects to be 'healed', and
• boolean operations between objects to be performed.

The LINUX version should be installed in a suitable place.

Thus any existing vr-geom file can be read into AC3D, tweaked or modified and written out for use in your personal cases. This includes files created by Shapemaker, also available from CHAM.

AC3D also allows users to read DXF, 3D Studio, LightWave, VRML and other 3D Object file formats, or to generate simple shapes such as boxes, spheres, ellipses.