CompuServe Messages

Yup, it's out now. Last tuesday night at the NYC Amuse meeting the author, Roman Ormandy from Octree, demoed Caligari. Old timers will remember his impressive demo tape almost two years ago of a 3-D rendering/animation package. Well, time moved on and Caligari never appeared. The tape, though amazing in its day, is nothing any of the other packages available today couldn't do. When I heard Caligari was finally being released I figured, too little, too late. And at $2000 list – too much! Based on the demo Tuesday I can report that this is something new, different, and better ($2000 better, I'm not sure). The user interface and rendering speed of this package puts it above the current crop. "Construction" and alteration of scenes with stock or user defined wireframe primitives takes place in real time. Grab with the mouse and move 'em around. Rotate, expand, extrude, whatever. Define attachment points for articulation. Dolly around the plane that is "the world" at will. Plus all the other stuff you'd expect: Render solids with multiple light sources of varying intensity. No ray tracing but "radiosity" (see next msg.) is "coming." Full overscan. Frame buffer support "coming." Text file animation scripts. Point and click scripts "coming." I'm no expert at this stuff but Caligari did appear uniquely intuitive. This is not an endorsement. I have no connection to this program.