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In this article I talked about how useful the PacSafe straps were. I still feel this way, but I discovered that there is a trade-off in the design.

(click any image for full size) The problem is flexibility. In order to make a strap flexible, it needs to use a wire rope that it made of lots of thin strands. The problem is that with these small strands, they will break off of the rope. A good design anticipates this and either coats the wire rope in plastic, or covers the rope in a material that the little strands can’t poke through. Unfortunately, neither of these precautions exist in the PacSafe CarrySafe 100 camera strap.

Right where the strap has to make a 180 degree turn, it is most vulnerable to fraying. When this happens, you will bring the very thin wire strand across whatever part of your body it is closest to. It is so small that you will never notice it-until it cuts your skin. And fray it did:
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I’m mostly concerned with realism in 3D. Making a rendering that people think is a photograph is a goal that makes things harder than they probably should be. While some may say that materials create realism, my vote is that lighting makes a bigger difference.

I’ll start out by saying that I am a V-Ray biggot. Finding a good lighting mechanism for realism has made me feel pretty let down by 3ds Max’s built in lights. My philosophy with regard to scenes is to use as few lights as possible, and obviously as few polys as possible as well. I have contemporaries that fill scenes with lots of lights, all kinds of lights, in an effort to make a scene lit properly. Even after I introduce them to Photometric lights, they can’t break the habit.

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“I made a torus primitive and want to detach a section of it. When I select splines or quads and detach as element or copy, the detached part won’t select by itself; the whole torus is still selected. How can I make the detached section a completely independent object?”

You mention both splines and torus primitive. Splines and the menu that torus’ come from (primitives) are not the same, so I can’t be sure which you mean. Maybe you mean both? You mention editable spline, which only splines can be converted to, yet you also mention “quads”, which may mean a polygon (mostly 4 sides) in an editable mesh/poly, which is really just 2 faces. Forgive me, therefore, if the following has no application to your project. Feel free to fill in the blanks.

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