#scanner recommendations
Dear Greg,
Its true that that the high-end stuff will always be better. That follows the
premise of the last 20% of performance requires 80% of the effort and money.
Thats true of animation, cars, aircraft (which is how I make my main living)
and technology in general.
Plus I feel like you. If I had the money, I would go the SGI/Alias with an Onyx
renderer and drum scanners and high-end dye-sub printers and on and on. But I
can't afford that. I do 3D Studio because the price/performance breakpoint is
where I can afford it. I have a PAR board and a full Fast Machine because thats
what I can afford. I work in Beta and SVHS because thats what I can afford.
But most importantly, I position my work for my audience. Those people have TVs
and, at most, hi-fi VCRs. Whats the point of outputting to D1 if the tapes will
be viewed under poor lighting conditions on a TV from WalMart? I'm a mass
marketer, not a boutique producer.
The color depth of my scanner is adequate for 100% percent of my needs at 5% of
the high-end drum scanner price. I suspect its OK for 90% of everyone elses
needs too. My clients feel that way too. I can quote much lower rates than SGI
people.
I applaud your effort for 3DS and MAX and will convert to MAX as soon as it
comes out. But this field is becoming more mainstream and the days of elite
people doing it with one-off specialized equipment are leaving. I can put
together a 8-plex clone DEC Alpha render engine for the price of a dual P100
box from Intergraph. The clones are a'comin up here in this rarefied air too.
If I were SGI I would be shakin' in my boots.
We saw this in the late 70's/early 80's with mainstream data processing and we
will see it with this stuff too. I learned on dinosaur Univacs punching cards
doing Fortran and wasn't sorry to see the cards go when we got time-share. I
jumped to Novell 1.0 and PC's in '84 as soon as possible. Why use a mainframe
when I could do my engineering calcs on a PC with Basic? I also do Powerbuilder
consulting. Everyday the high-end stuff leaves and is replaced with PCs on a
network running Powerbuilder applications talking to a legacy database.
It will be the same with graphics and animation.
Later!
Mark