CompuServe Messages

Hello Everyone, It's Friday afternoon and after doing my best to get around the southbound LA-to-San Diego traffic I have finally made it home and am catching up on forum activity of the last few days. If it's OK with all of you, I'd like to post some impressions of what has got to have been the most impressive, motivating CG show I've *ever* been to. First, thanks to *everyone* who made the AMMEDIA/CIS '95 Siggraph party a huge success! As BobR has mentioned, there had to have been >150 3DSers attending what turned out to be a lounge-commandeering blow-out! By 9:30, David, the club manager (who turns out to be someone I knew of during my R&R days back east) basically turned the club over to us, running our demo reels on every screen in the place! He said: "Alan, tell your people they can have the whole place." I said: "I think they've already taken over!" <g> At any rate, it was great to see so many of you talking and having a good time together. It's times like this when it's completely obvious that the 3DS community is indeed a special one. Next year I think we are going to have to actually rent a room, as we've really seemed to have outgrown small nightclubs. I promise to do my best to retain the intimate, informal atmosphere that I think we have all grown to enjoy. Thanks again! (music swells) Tuesday morning, 10:AM. MartinF and I walk past (thru) a huge, overbearing purple people-trap called the SGI "booth". But guess what – very few people are there. As we approached the Autodesk booth it was obvious why: The place is jam-packed and spilling out into the hallway seven or eight deep straining to see and hear what Gary and Jack are demonstrating — without a doubt the star of Siggraph '95 — Autodesk's 3D Studio MAX for Windows NT! Folks couldn't believe what they were seeing. Absolutely the most seamless modeling, scene creation, and animation system ever shown on ANY platform! 3DS MAX has been evolving since it's conception 3 years ago and it shows it. Users will enjoy extreme environmental navigability, and an underlying infrastructure designed to facilitate core-component ("CoreComps") plug-ins that work _with the native interface and command structure_! Simply said, ANYTHING is possible with the system, and it will NEVER seem out-of place. The User Interface is clean, simple and elegant. Modeling is proprietary and procedural combining every modeling trick in the book into a all-new concept. Viewports update simultaneously with real-time rendered feedback. Animation is a press of the "Animate" button away. Materials are created and applied intuitively in the UI. The complete feature list will be nothing less than staggering. And if you think there will be a steep learning curve, I really doubt it. 3DS has *always* been a very intuitive program to use. Now you can do all you ever did (and much, much more), faster, easier, better, allowing your creativity to be your guide, as you smoothly glide from one command to another. "Driving" MAX has got to be like piloting an F-14 or a fine sports car. Everything's at your fingertips, and you just sit back and steer the thing while easily and intuitively affecting the proper input. There has never been anything like it. By the looks of things, there may shortly be very few *trying* to be like it. Our future has been announced. As the release date draws nearer, I'm sure Gary & Co. will shed more and more light on their wonderful "baby". Until then, as that guy in Jurassic Park said: "Hold on to your butts!" <g> Elsewhere in the very good-looking show, Jamie Carr's all-new In:Sync booth drew raves for the NT-based Speed Razor. Running with DPS's PVR system on Alpha/NT-based systems, Jamie showed us some real editing performance at a fraction of the cost of a high-end NLE system. Ron Scott personally demonstrated his High-Res QFX for WinNT paint program at the Wacom booth. With it's non-MacIntosh oriented approach to painting and image manipulation, It really seems much more oriented to the animator/videographer than, say, PhotoShop. Like many of the original video paint-boxes, you can paint *with* an effect as opposed to selecting an area first and then processing it. And with it's introduction to NT, it will work with any compatible video board instead of the Truevision products it was once tied to. Sorta reminds me of some video-oriented paint systems on the early Amiga. Should be great for texture maps. Very nice stuff. Hardware-wise, the Alpha seems to be coming on strong. Everyone who is developing for NT seems to be supporting it. I can only imagine that Adesk will make an announcement soon concerning MAX's possible compiliation for the DEC chip. The Digimation folks were swamped as usual, with David and LaVina happily showing products like Refraction Mapping and World Builder. 4D Vision (formerly Schreiber Instruments) showed a new, desktop-based compositing system while pledging continuing support of 3DS plug-ins. The writing is on the, er, shirt, I guess… I don't know what will be the bigger, more complicated and hard to complete job: Properly bringing SoftImage to WinNT intact or integrating Wavefront and Alias into a single, seamless program. Both companies (MicroSoft and SGI, respectively) have their jobs cut out for them, and not a whole lot of time to do it in, especially after seeing what Adesk has is the wings. Should be an interesting fall and Winter. I don't think *anyone* spends more on shirt embroidery than these people. I wonder what the Wavefront/Alias name will look like at CES this January? All in all, it was a wonderful, stimulating show. This has gotten way too long, so I'll defer some of the other highlights to other attendees here (there were LOTS of them). It was great seeing and talking to all of you, and I look forward to the next time we all get together! Thanks for listening, -Alan