CompuServe Messages

Joe, I have played with Infiniti-3d only for about 10 minutes on a friend's Mac (I am a PC guy) and from what I can tell Animation:Master is really a diferent type of animal altogether… The special effects (wind, rain, snow, fire, particles, explosions and so on) don't exist at all as of now. Inverse kinematics (as askeletal manipulation tool), plus muscle and spine manipulation tools make this program unbeatable for character animation… It even has a "skin" feature that will "glue" all the joints together an you will never see gaps or objects rotating within each other when you manipulate the "body parts". The program is 100% courves and you never have to worry about triangle count and resolution. (As such you also have fewer control points to obscure your screen). Your animation path is not only there and you don't have to worry about moving your models around, but it is additionaly controled (as many other features) by a unique "channel" controls, which with a simple "graphs" let you control the smoothness of your changes from one frame through the other. On the frustrating side of the program, you have to worry about connecting your control points with splines just the right way wchich is a very time consuming process… No real font or type imports as of now (you can bring in DXF shapes of your fonts and glue and conect them just the right way yourself)… Applying materials and colors (except for DECAL module) is also a shoot and miss process — no immediate feed back. Another problem is that you really have to understand the way the program works before you get anything out of it — it has its own logic, although simple and ingenius, pretty unique… (It is easier to understand if you watch the tutorial video tape that comes with the ptogram)… I use 2 other 3D programs to fill in where Animation:Master fails, but of the three it is my main program… Pawel