CompuServe Messages

Ed, > … I also assume there must be a lot of interest in doing animated > text with Animator, something I wasn't aware of. I suspect that there are a lot of presentations done with Animator, maybe even its main professional use. I know that's becoming more true in my case, almost via a back door route. We originally got it to supplement 3D Studio. But once you had a flic from 3DS, you needed charts to introduce & explain it, for which Animator was the logical tool since you already had to face up to the complications of having to handle flics/video. When we got Animator Pro, we also discovered POCO inside of Animator, which for us offered huge possibilities, so it became more than just a supplemental tool in its own right. But then we were generating even more flics that required introductions, explanations, etc. which means more basic chart work. Then management comes along, likes what it sees (to the point where we bought a dedicated system with one of those expensive 37" monitors for our conference room), and we end up doing a whole lot more presentation only type material than I would have imagined. To make a long story short, the tail is now wagging the dog, and 3D Studio has actually become for us, a supplement to Animator. My hunch as to why my stuff has had a fairly high download count is that they are basically tools to ease some of the drudge work that one runs into in putting together a presentation. > … Until you have spent a lot of time with Animator, it is not easy > to predict how long it would take to do something, an uncertainty > that's unacceptable in this business. I think this is the main reason > the program, and related material is in low demand. It strikes me that all of Autodesk's products have a couple of things in common that affect demand: (I'm basing this on the 3 I use; Autocad, 3DS, & AnimatorPro) Relatively high price and EXTREMELY stiff learning curves. The learning curve in particular is a problem. I know that for myself, if my employer didn't let me take a machine equal to my office machine home where I can just play with (play here is synonomous with learn!) the program, you never will really find out just what you can do with it and how it can help you. My own feeling is that it took me about 6 mos. to truly get up to speed with each of the program's I mentioned. There aren't many business situations which will knowingly allow several months of charging overhead to get somebody "up to speed" with a new tool. Animator has an additional handicap because it's not intuitively obivious what its intrinsic worth/purpose really is. What I mean here is that it's not doing something that you're already doing, only faster and better, rather it does something that you don't realize you want done. Perhaps with all the multi-media hype floating around, that will change. – – – George.