CompuServe Messages

Jonathan, DCTV is definitely a good start. You can do pretty neat stuff including nice painting & some animation. As for Jpeg, both Imagine & DCTV does not support it for now. You have to get a public domain converter or buy commercial product like Image Master & Art Department Pro. <-You can get information on both product here on CIS. 3D software is definitely a hard decision. I use Imagine & Real 3D for myself. Not many 3D softwares support method other than TRI-View (Caligari2 & Draw-4DPro are NONTRIVIEW), so you'll have to get use to it eventually. The strongest point of Imagine is its flexibility in all areas such as Object making, Cycle editting, and several rendering method and so on. Un-fortunately documentation on the manual is pretty bad, but this can certainly overcomed by vast majority of Imagine user's help here on CIS or go buy 'Understanding Imagine' by Steve Worley. But there is still a tough learning curve! As for Caligari2, it seem to be much easier and intuitive than any other package (except for LightWave). Both weak and strong point of Caligari2 is that its not a Raytracer. You can render an image pretty quick, but you will not get the same looks as other Ray Tracing package does. As a results, Caligari2 gives out a distinctive 'Computer image' that one may like or dislike. I hope this can be your help. – THANX R.SATOH ->via Whap!