CompuServe Messages

John, If you want basic images/animation, 3d Studio may not be for you. It is a BROADCAST quality, highly optimized 3d modelling and animation package, which is meant to produce high-quality animation, in a timely manner. You may be able to find ray-tracers even FREE which you might think produce better still images but that's not what 3d studio is about. I use 3ds professionally in my own animation business and don't think anything comes close except for maybe 5 times MORE money (Wavefront, Softimage, Alias etc) and they are much harder to use, and don't even run on Dos based systems. As a side benefit you can produce vga animations with 3ds but if you were just doing that then you'd probably be better looking at retail 2d animation packages or low cost 3d packages. I challenge you to do a 32-bit 3D 2000 frame animation at broadcast resolution (756×486) with field rendering of, say, a flyby and flythrough of an office complex in less than a day. I could do this on my 486/33 and then go out to broadcast-quality, frame-accurate vtr in any format and control it within 3ds. Can you do that with your Amiga? Do you even want that kind of feature? My point is that 3d studio sounds like it offers a lot of features that you don't need, so why pay for them? I suggest you download the feature list of 3ds 2.0 or contact a dealer in order to find out what 3d studio offers you. Martin PS: Sorry if I sound terse, but you sound rather critical rather than inquiring.