CompuServe Messages

How you do Phil? I'm an English chap living in L.A.,California and a 1 year veteran user of 3d studio. It is a standalone product with everything you need to model 3d objects, create and apply materials, create and edit cameras and lights, animate them all and view them. It is capable of producing broadcast quality animation (if you are) in true colour 32-bit (RGB and alpha-channel for compositing over live video) in the same league as Topaz and Wavefront etc. The interface is very user-friendly, even more so with version 2, so you can produce simple but effective animations quite quickly. Of course, the difficultly increases exponentially with the relative complexity of the animation. Price/performance wise, nothing comes close on the PC platform. Many users also have other types of software which compliment 3ds, but are not absolutely necessary. If you want to create animations to be played back on a PC then Autodesk's Animator Pro can be used as a combined paint package / post processing tool for painting texture maps and editting animations created in 3ds. If your animations are destined for broadcast then you would probably want a 24 or 32 bit paint package/image processing package like TIPS or Photostyler for Windows. To get it you'll have to contact Autodesk UK, for your closest dealer and it's price is $2995 here, so probably that many pounds, but I'm just guessing.