CompuServe Messages

Thanks for such a prompt reply At the moment I'm in London, though I'm not sure why. I used to work for Fosters here and more recently for a smaller firm called Valode et Pistre in Paris. Fosters like a lot of the larger firms here use Microstation so I've used this a fair bit but mainly for 2D work. At V&P they use Autocad but on Sun Spark Stations- so no 3Dstudio. In fact when I started there, they were using R11 without AME and so I used the secretaries Mac LC and Modelshop to try and squeeze out some simple 3d images. Sorry If I'm boring you- What I'm leading up to is the fact that the bigger practices tend to have lots of hardware, which is often a mandatory requirement for larger jobs such as airports, without enough rendering/animation software or more importantly people with enough time to invest in really getting to grips with it. In the U.K. there is only one outfit I know of who are producing renderings of the required artistic merit and people like Richard Rogers are hiving out all of their stuff to them. They use Macs with Electric Image as a renderer/animator and Form Z or Modelshop as a modeller. When I spoke to someone there recently he said they wished they had been using 3ds (It's half the price) but were looking forward to Electric Image being ported to Silicon Graphics machines. The only thing thats keeping me from going to Germany at the moment has been the idea of trying to start something up privately doing 3d graphics. Its only been recently that I've had the cash to think about setting up a system myself and it seems that something based around 3ds is going to be the best value. There are plenty of sceptics in this country too, and its not just a generation thing. I only finished my postgraduate a year ago and both my colleages and tutors were very snobish about the artistic possibilities of computer graphics. Its a real shame because architecture is the perfect vehicle, not just for graphics but all sorts of buzzwords multimedia, penbased systems, video conferencing etc. Before I sign off Idon't no much about the subject but it seems that there are some interesting new video products appearing. Apple are pushing "Audio-Visual" with two new machines one which has built in PAL/NTSC output for around 2000 dollars if this is anything to go by perhaps there will be some PC equivalents which will be as cheap. The new Matrox graphics cards will have a video output option which will be available in the UK in the autumn. Keep in touch D.G.