CompuServe Messages

David, Annoyingly, Photoshop 3.0 still lacks batch file/macro capability, unlike Debabelizer. John Knoll wanted to put it in 2.5 (and then 3.0), and Adobe dragged their feet on it. I've been bugging the Debabelizer guys (including Dave Theurer — sp?) to port it to the PC; it's an incredibly useful tool. It'll be on the SGI soon; no word yet on the PC version. Another great Mac program that needs to be ported to the PC is CoSA Aftereffects, which lets you composite both still images and animations together in layers. We had a half-day demonstration down at Sega a few weeks ago, and it was great. (I rendered a spaceship against a white background [with alpha], with a shadow cast onto a white plane below; we knocked out the white and antialiased the edges of the foreground imagery against a digitized lake and mountain background plate. It looked dynamite.) CoSA does imagery scaling in X, Y and Z across time; you can also arrange as many layers as you want in a Macromedia Director-style spreadsheet/timeline interface. Since Aldus bought CoSA, and Adobe bought Aldus, we'll probably see it on the PC. Now, if Altamira would throw in the ability to work on animated sequences (along with other compositing special effects), they would really get the jump on CoSA. OTOH, I just saw an ad for Elastic Reality's new Windows compositing program, which does morphs, as well. Any of these programs would be amazingly useful with 3DS. — Jon P.S. Your whale was incredible, BTW; I'm looking forward to seeing exactly how you did it. (I contributed some effects to the 3DS Effects book, and am anxiously awaiting getting my copies.)