Free Canoma

A place to discuss non-Moho software for use in animation. Video editors, audio editors, 3D modelers, etc.

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bupaje
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Free Canoma

Post by bupaje »

This was one of a bunch of cool products that Metacreations spawned, was sold to Adobe but apparently was not developed any further. There is an old version available for free at the following url and I recommend getting it while it is available as I find it might be useful for creating simple 3D objects for Moho. Make sure you get the update and the serial number as well.



http://forums.auran.com/TRS2004/forum/s ... ght=Canoma

The product is dead but still a few users. Check here http://www.canoma.com a few free lessons are here http://www.computer-training-software.com/meta1.htm and some forums here http://www.tilman.com/forum/

While it has a few quirks it is very useful. You can add a single texture, select primitives like cubes, stairs, roofs, arch, table individually or you can stack them. Once you apply this texture then you can use the paintbrush icon to click each side and open them in your 2D paint program. (There was a minor quirk here as I had to close and open PSP after I modiefied each side but what the heck.) You edit the texture and you save and you see it instantly applied in Canoma. You can then stack other objects and change the textures and when you export Moho opens them up perfectly except that the origin seems to be too far away -still can't figure why.

Just quickly pasted some textures on a few shapes to see how it is done and brought them into Moho. The table with the triangle on top is one stacked object. There are roofs and so on in Canoma and while I found it a bit of a job to line them up this is really the first time I really sit down to figure it out (though I found this links almost a year ago).

Image



I like the fact that it is easy enough for even brain dead guy like me. :) You can build simple building shapes and then use your 2D editor to make vector style art, heck even draw it in Moho and then resize to match the texture size it your paint program, and you will have 3D objects that match the look of your scene -also can't beat the price. :)

Play with it , you might find it useful and I'm guessing it may disappear some day. :)
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pixelwks
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Post by pixelwks »

<<If someone is interested, I offer up an orphaned piece of software I had a part in creating, called Canoma>>

Perhaps I'm wrong, but this doesn't look legal to me. Orphaned software is not free to pass around.
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bupaje
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Post by bupaje »

I'm sure I read his explanation elsewhere of how he got permission to distribute this in this way but will have to dig around. as its been a year or so. In fact they have a newer version with more features but it was never released (he just showed some screenshots) and said that Adobe would not allow him to distribute that version (version 2).
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bupaje
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Post by bupaje »

I heard back from one of the three main former Canoma guys and he says there is no official 'ok' for it, nor official 'not ok' but the powers that be have let it be.

This seems to be something like Microsoft's 'free' Expressions program; MS purchased it along with Living Cells and apparently stopped developing it; they then posted a link with a serial number and download 'for Expression users' -but it is a full product and was mentioned on several sites -including About.com- as free. I contacted someone at Microsoft on the Expressions forums (via email) regarding and tried to pin him down on this and I was told that 'officially' that was the statement, but unoffically anyone could download and use it. I think the idea is that they want to keep their options open so that if they later release a product or find some use for the technology they can pull the plug or try to get users to migrate to a new product -until then I guess maybe they don't want to be seen as 'app killers.'

I'll leave it to LM if I should delete or leave this post. I believe it is ok based on the few posts available and this persons comments but given the lack of an 'official' response and pixelwks question I honestly can't say with 1000% certainty.
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spasmodic_cheese
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Post by spasmodic_cheese »

this looks great, Although it doesnt really work with irregular objects...
would have been cool to have my character knocked up in 3d quickly.. oh well!

i can still do my scenery =P
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bupaje
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Post by bupaje »

spasmodic_cheese wrote:this looks great, Although it doesnt really work with irregular objects...
They had cylinders and other rounder objects for the never released version 2. Having said that I read that you can approximate columns and cones by taking the stair primitive and setting it to 98 for columns I believe and 99 for cones.

The appeal for me was to in part for building a toon city street. I built some simple building shapes in Amapi but was having trouble figuring out how to texture map them. I was under the impression that there was only one texture per object in Moho but I see from using Canoma that isn't so .... anyway I want to try to load the placeholder textures from the objects into Moho to get the size and use them to draw and render textures using Moho. Figure this way the 3D objects will maintain a consistent 'look' with the other objects.
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