This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (35 messages)
>> what I want is to have full peer-to-peer networking going, so that each machine can access the other's hard drive transparently. My best advice is to contact the Enlan-DFS people. I think they can accomodate. Jim Shields Regal Rodent Development
I currently connect my Pentium and A2000 via a null modem cable. Procomm Plus on the PC side, and Term on the Amiga side. 115Kbaud transfers. It takes a while, but it works. Legendary Design Technologies supposedly has a product called LinkIt! that connects PCs & Amigas via Parallel port,…
>> I'll bet the guy who developed the lens flare routine wishes he'd patented it "… It was the Dawn of the Third Age of Lens Flares. The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for Lens Flares…" Yah. Jim Shields Regal Rodent Development
>> I would find the guy who stiffed you and bounce his head of the conrete. I would amend that to say, "…find the guy who stiffed you, get your money back, and then bounce his head off the concrete." Failing that, sell *him* something… Jim Shields Regal Rodent Development
>> I'm looking for a software package that I can combine computer animation with real video. Is Imagine a product I can do this with? Imagine can indeed combine video with computer animation, within certain constraints, the main one being that it needs the video somehow captured into the computer.…
PMFJI, but re: pentium bug: I've rendered about 10,000 frames on a P5 in the last six months or so, and have not seen any evidence that Imagine is affected by the FDIV bug in the Pentium chip. I frequent the Dell user group, and am amazed at the way…
>> Have you seen AVR27 yet? I think that one's the convincer. Is AVR27 a Discreet Cosine Transform (DCT) compression scheme like JPEG, or a different (i.e. Wavelet or ASC) scheme altogether? Jim Shields Regal Rodent Development
>> it usually turns out that the maker of them saw a low-resolution image without realizing it. That's certainly possible, but the user of this Avid told me that I was looking at a hi-res "broadcast" signal. I have only the information he gave me; in this case, the video…
>> non-linear systems as is Avid. But we found the output to be less than the digital systems we work with now. Yah, no kidding. I remember the first time I saw a completed project on the Avid, with the Broadcast Output Option (read: $10K extra) and I just about…
>> The Avid will import and export sequences of Mac .PICT files, so it would seem that the best way is to use Adpro to convert Imagine output from either rbg8 or iff24 files into pict files, write them to a mac formatted photo optical drive and port them across…
I wasn't talking about an alpha channel feature of Imagine; as far as I know there isn't one at this time, but it is planned for a future release. I was talking about using travelling mattes and alpha compositing, probably within ADPro. That's how I do graphics over video capture…
Sounds like you could use alpha channel for the compositing, it'd make your job easier, and maybe use it for the heat signature stuff, too. Let me think on it for a bit, and I'll upload a text file. Jim Shields Regal Rodent Development
I also found the problem of the last file rendering in RGB8 format, on the PC version of the software. Now doubt that'll be fixed soon, Impulse is pretty good about fixing such things quickly. See also my message on rendering fields with Sentry and the PAR. I think I…
3.1 fix PAR field render
Message #92383
Well, not a fix, but a workaround, I think. Now before I get into this, let it be known that I don't have 3.1, just 3.0, but I am 99% sure this will work for outputting field rendered frames to a PAR. You need ADPro (you all have that, right?…
My guess is to what is happening is this: 1. Imagine renders a continuous stream when it renders to regular frames. When it's done, it closes the file, and the PAR munches it, and everybody's happy. 2. When rendering fields, Imagine does its setup, renders the first field, but in…
If you have ADPro, you could use the Sentry program to monitor Imagine's rendering to a disk file, and then when the file is done you can have Sentry copy it to the PAR and delete the disk file. I've had similar problems with other software, and that's a solution…
>> So when we reach 4.0 in May of 95, maybe the tooth fairy will have bestowed upon you the needed moola to get the next upgrade. As I remember it, tooth fairy revenue is in the $.25 to $.75 per tooth range. Gonna have to get a pet shark,…
>> 8 megs ram… I don't think I could be running out of memory Um, I hate to tell you, but you're running out of memory. Objects, or parts of objects disappearing are the classic "you're running out of memory" symptom. I was having problems myself with my P90 and…
Ya know, after you pointed it out, I realized that it wasn't the way I did it, for just the reason you mentioned. I haven't done it in a while, and so I needed my memory jogged. Now I remember: I copied the project, after I got the animation right.…
#91419-
#Texture Morph w States?
Message #91536
To morph from one object, with no textures applied (say, a red plastic ball) to one with textures applied (say, a yellow gas giant planet) you're gonna have to fake it, with two objects. Here's one suggestion, assuming you have IM3.1: Object 1: Color 240 0 0 Specularity 200 200…
We do gas streaks by drawing them in a paint program (Fractal Painter on the PC, usually) and then using the resulting image as a color and/or transparency map.
I've been doing this 3D thing for several years now, and went through the classic "Lightwave or Imagine" quandry a few years ago. Both programs are good for a lot of things, but I think I made the right decision in putting most of my resources into Imagine. IMHO, you…
As for scripting, I talked to John Greiggs the other day and his Imagine Staging Language (ISL) for 3.0 should be ready soon. It allows you to write scripts that are then compiled into Imagine staging files. I've used it for doing particle simulations and animations with large numbers of…
I think you should seriously think about investing in more memory. I've used virtual memory schemes before, and they have a tendency to slam system performance into the dirt. No doubt a custom designed virtual memory setup (i.e. written by Impulse, for Imagine) would be better than a general scheme,…
I don't know if you changed other things in your system when you upgraded, but I recently had similar behaviour after running DOS 6's MEMMAKER. Turns out the culprit was EMM386 — Imagine 3.0 doesn't get along too well with EMM386, apparently (there was mention of this in the docs)…
One option is to use states. Start with the flat plane, get your checkerboard texture the right size, it should work with default values, and then create a state, (i.e. FLAT) with shape and maybe properties. Go to your texture, specify the lockstate as the state you just created. Then…
Actually, I was an Amiga user before the IBM, so I was happy that the IBM interface mimics the Amiga. I was actually quite impressed with the fidelity of the port.
One thing I found with working with bones is this: "Bones are a wonderful tool to get deformation in an object, but they shouldn't be thought of as an end-all in modeling." That is to say, when you make bones and states and such in the Detail editor, you still…
Yah, going from Amigas to PCs can be frustrating. Even tho the PC is much faster, I still like the Amigas better. Things like being able to just pop to the Workbench to create a directory to store the neat object you just created, or jump into DPaint and fix…
Ugly black things
Message #85441
I've uploaded a file, FLPL.ZIP, to the library section. It contains a project file with the correct object & staging. Unzip it with the -d option (PKUNZIP -d FLPL) and it'll re-create the right directory structure on a PC. Take a look at frames 80 through about 90 — there's…
I have an Amiga 2000 w/ Fusion 40 68040 @25MHz. I recently leased a 90 MHz EISA PC for rendering. In my initial tests, I used an old logo animation and rendered it on both machines. Frames rendering in 3:55 on the Amiga rendered in 0:29 on the PC.
Standard Framestore size is 752×480.
#Starfield problems
Message #84015
I am using Imagine 3.0 for PC. I am rendering a scene that has a starfield in it. When the camera pans across the scene, the starfield does not move. Shouldn't it?
re: recording live video I have a MacroSystem US VLab Y/C real time frame grabber. It does a thing called "interleaved" single frame record. It grabs in 24 bit, full fidelity. You have to make several passes over the source tape to get full 30 frames per second grabbing, but…
I've noticed that sometimes the slice function has problems with perfectly coplanar faces within the objects slicing each other. One of the things you might try is selecting one of your obects, rotating it, say, .1 degrees in each axis (use the transformation requester) and then re-trying your slice. This…