RenderMan standard
Jeff,
You're definately right about Sculpt 3D being overpriced on the Mac Market.
A couple of products have recently released that have rendering and motion
that retail for around $895 list. I think Byte-by-Byte is going to have to
rethink its pricing.
On the amiga, I am very enthused by the Lakeforest announcement, if we can
just get a reasonable time to market on the thing, it could be very good
for the amiga community. It probably won't be cheap, and I know they are
looking at some pretty expensive peripherals for the really fast
performance (i860 coprocessing boards are a good bet), but hopefully the
software itself won't be as expensive as the Mac market, but unfortionately
I know very little about thier pricing at the moment.
As for Impulse and Imagine supporting Renderman, I think it's a great idea.
(Hopefully, in a later rev. so we don't have to wait on the code.) I think
that along with the compatability "tag" bonuses, there's a market for video
service bureaus that except DTV renderman output. If enough DTV systems
become available to allow such a thing. And of course all Video houses that
do 3D could use front-end modeling and scene design stations that don't
cost as much as the high end video workstations used for final rendering.