CompuServe Messages

Hi James, That's really interesting. That's the first viewpoint I've heard coming from the other direction. It sounds like Mr. Rosebush is one of those rare people with the capacity for the combination of both art and computers. I've seen animation programmed from raw code by other computer scientists and it is, artistically speaking, junk. With the advent of powerful computer graphics software, 3DS included, of course, an artist has much less to learn to do computer animation. An artist entering the field no longer has to learn to "mathematically construct a function based polygonal landscape", just how to tell the program to do what is wanted in simple terms. Part of the greatness of animation software, I think, is in how transparently it can be used. It's primarily a tool for artists, not a toy for computer scientists. I'm definitely not saying that being able to get into the guts of the system is bad. That would put me in the postion of defending the Macintosh operating system (heaven forbid <G>). It's just that words like "function-based" need not ever be used to do something that, underneath, is "function-based". Aaron