CompuServe Messages

David, >> I'd say that 3DS's lack of presence in films to date, is due much more (if not exclusively) to antiPC-prejudices in the film industry, rather than to a perceived lack of (rendering) quality. << I think that's just part of it – there are other issues. I know Frank Foster at Sony Imageworks has had a long hard battle against the status quo. I've worked with him on pre-visualisation (2 films) and seen him go from end titles (monochrome – a very embarrassing use of 3ds, IMHO), to actual full screen depictions of VR (the very cool scenes in "Johnny Mnemonic") . Sony's next hurdle is to be allowed to do CGI composites with live film plates. We've had it a lot easier at MetroLight where there's less politics to deal with and actually been allowed to do the aforementioned type of CGI/live composite shot. A lot of the credit for making this happen needs to go to Brett Leonard who seems to be the king of stretching his CGI-dollars. He's a big fan of 3ds. Despite this there's now a perception that 3ds is only good for VR-like sequences in film and for photo-real work you have to use Renderman. This one's a little more difficult to argue since Renderman has that cool shader language and the talent base to use it. There's a couple of other problems which may be helped with the coming of NT/MAX and was partially alleviated with the intro of the 3ds SGI renderer. Film CGI requires a ton of hardware generally and 3ds requires tons of RAM in particular. I'm talking more RAM than you can put on many PC motherboards – let's say 512mb+ would be a good starting point for complex scenes at 2k resolution. For example, having 16 Pentiums with 128mb RAM did us no good when layers of scenes even at D1-rez required 400mb to render without paging – we were saved by the fact we could use the SGI ChallengeXL which shares 1gb RAM between 8 cpu's. With NT and MAX we should be able to get multi-proc render servers which share a large pool of RAM, say 1gb for starters. Furthermore, they should be equal or faster than the SGI multi-proc systems for a fraction of the price. Great for high-end video and film work. The final, and biggest, problem is one I've mentioned before. It's the talent pool situation. There just aren't that many people with the experience and training in 3ds to do the kind of CGI that film audiences expect, whereas on the SGI side there are quite a lot of talented artists with 5+ years experience. Hey, I'm barely keeping my head above water with the challenges that come my way and I've been using 3ds full-time since early r1. It's the artists that drive the industry as much as anything. Encouragingly, I've heard a lot of positive interest in MAX from the SGI artists. Maybe some will defect ….<g>