CompuServe Messages

At Siggraph this year, as I stood below the giant glass revolving pyramid of the relatively immense Viewpoint booth, talking with the head of that company, he remarked that he wished he had some real competition in the 3D dataset market. It would help legitimize it, he said. At Siggraph, the leading computer graphics conference, his closest competition (in his view) was in a little 10 x 10 booth. As I said, there are lots of companies selling models as part of their PR, marketing, upgrade or bundle. We don't make any models here at Syndesis, we don't take them on consignment, we spend our dollars to promote and advertise the efforts of the upstanding companies like Viewpoint who are doing a great job of making professional- quality models. I'm happy to have found a good way to do that. My customers are customers of commercial modeling companies, too. It's good for Syndesis to promote the modeling companies, even if it means making a low-cost disc of models. It's also good for Syndesis to make sure that the modeling companies have as many freebie copies of InterChange that they need… recommendations work wonders. Not all models are created equal… but I think you have the mistaken impression that all "models" must be the same sort of commodity. The models on the 3D-ROMs vary widely in quality. But even using the word "quality" introduces the notion of suitability of purpose, which expands the spectrum of models even further. Some people are looking for minimal-vertice humanoids. Others want perfectly accurate hands with morphable muscles and pre-programmed restricted ranges of motion, and hair on the knuckles if they can get it. As you said, if you get very very general, anyone with a 3D program "competes" with Viewpoint. But that's a silly generalization. It ignores talent, it ignores professionalism, it denies there might be any middle ground between what someone's selling for thousands of dollars versus what some hobbyist is giving away because it gives them pleasure…