CompuServe Messages

Jerry, I'm a Mac user who is interested in the Amiga but has never tried Lightwave. I have also never used the SGI programs…. So what can I contribute to this conversation? Hmmmm… Well last summer a dealer here in NY hosted a series of in depth demos by Alias, SoftImage, and Waverfront (at the time I was considering switching to SGI). I went to them all and was blown away by their realtime capabilities. For instance in the Alias PowerAnimator demo they had a smooth rendered sphere on the screen, and could draw a spline on it's surface and then cut out a section all in realtime. They could also apply a texture and once again move it around in realtime until it was positioned correctly. PowerAnimator has some nice atmospheric effects also. You can shine rays of light through fog without having to cheat using cones etc. You can simulate gravity, magnetism, "blow" things around with wind etc. One nice modelling feature was the ability to take an object (a sphere for instance) and push & pull parts of it (like clay) into whatever weird shape you want…all in realtime. They created a detailed face very quickly this way. They also created a killer whale the same way; defined an undulating path (sine wave shaped) for it with a spline; then animated it along the path…the cool thing was that when it came to peaks & dips in the path, it would actually flex the way a real killer whale would…in realtime (wireframe)! There are also nice inverse kinematics features, animatible procedural textures, and a nice randomize feature in the timeline that would be great for doing things like flocks of birds, bubbles etc. This was all just in PowerAnimator. Wavefront had realtime particle effects, SoftImage had great animation features like being able to modulate objects movement from a microphone hooked up to the computer etc etc etc. Alas I will stick with my Mac for the time being. Even though these packages are getting more reasonable, the hardwear is still up there (a fully loaded Indy packs a lot of bang for the buck, but it's still very costly and SGI also makes you pay a high yearly fee for technical support). Long winded enough?????? Charles Brush P.S. What is a Raptor????!!! Is this a code word for the Screamer, perhaps a baby Screamer?? I'm confused!