Been working on this one awhile... HASH was a massively popular 3D animation system back in the day & one big reason was that you could produce compelling animations on a grim desktop machine no problem... HASH spline patches are like 60 times as efficient as a single polygon in other 3D applications...
There are other advantages in HASH as well like there is no need for any UV mapping!... You apply textures which they call 'Decals' in HASH & that's it, they stay put & if the geometry moves or stretches they do as well & correctly too...
BTW any animations or stills thrown up on here are made using AM2000 or previous... Here's a still from 1993 which is pretty good for then-
Many extras are included with library items tested out in convenient overwrite folder, utilities abound including DarkSim Dark Tree 1.10 & extras for IT as well... AM2000 already installs with a dark tree plugin so it's already ready for dark trees-
In AM2000 you can open up as many tress as you want-
Some people didn't like modeling using splines & wanted to import models however it is difficult to switch a polygon model into a HASH patch model... I have tried everything but nothing worked... However after 'deep diving' I came across a Wings3D plugin that exports to HASH MDL format specifically made for it... It appears to work quite well but the plugin ONLY functions in that particular old Wings3D build... I have included it as well as the plugin-
HASH will do radiosity rendering too but is rather slow at it... You must also run a 'radiosity solution calculation' first which takes at least 20 minutes for just a rough solution which is like 10 million rays... Fast rendering of any kind is not HASH's strong suit... Doing small 320x240 or similar is pretty fast but as you go larger the times grow exponentially greater...
I can also recommend the book... 'The Animation Master 2000 Handbook' you can get it for 5 or 6 bucks... Mine was like new-
I have this uploaded to archive.organism, so hopefully it stays... Of course I am running it on XP but it should run down to win95 with a mere 32 or 64 MB RAM probably... After unRAR it will be 696 MB in size just enough to fit on a CD I have burned several copies as I do not want to lose all the frickin' work...
https://archive.org/details/hash-animation-master-2000-8.5h
There are other advantages in HASH as well like there is no need for any UV mapping!... You apply textures which they call 'Decals' in HASH & that's it, they stay put & if the geometry moves or stretches they do as well & correctly too...
BTW any animations or stills thrown up on here are made using AM2000 or previous... Here's a still from 1993 which is pretty good for then-
Many extras are included with library items tested out in convenient overwrite folder, utilities abound including DarkSim Dark Tree 1.10 & extras for IT as well... AM2000 already installs with a dark tree plugin so it's already ready for dark trees-
In AM2000 you can open up as many tress as you want-
Some people didn't like modeling using splines & wanted to import models however it is difficult to switch a polygon model into a HASH patch model... I have tried everything but nothing worked... However after 'deep diving' I came across a Wings3D plugin that exports to HASH MDL format specifically made for it... It appears to work quite well but the plugin ONLY functions in that particular old Wings3D build... I have included it as well as the plugin-
HASH will do radiosity rendering too but is rather slow at it... You must also run a 'radiosity solution calculation' first which takes at least 20 minutes for just a rough solution which is like 10 million rays... Fast rendering of any kind is not HASH's strong suit... Doing small 320x240 or similar is pretty fast but as you go larger the times grow exponentially greater...
I can also recommend the book... 'The Animation Master 2000 Handbook' you can get it for 5 or 6 bucks... Mine was like new-
I have this uploaded to archive.organism, so hopefully it stays... Of course I am running it on XP but it should run down to win95 with a mere 32 or 64 MB RAM probably... After unRAR it will be 696 MB in size just enough to fit on a CD I have burned several copies as I do not want to lose all the frickin' work...
https://archive.org/details/hash-animation-master-2000-8.5h
