CompuServe Messages

>>Autodesk and the Yost group are listening to the world community. Gary's team is working hard on R5 which is driven by the needs and wishes of the users as well as Gary thinking about your needs a few years from now.<< I'm glad. I would hope, however, that software development is not simply a matter of asking which buttons people want added and then holding a vote to see which ones make it in. I would rather see it as the development of tools. We tell you what we do, you clever people come up with the screwdrivers and hammers that we can use. In return, we send you money. Which brings me to r4 <g>. Like a lot of people on this forum, I was a little worried when the patch modeller was dropped so late in the game. Not because I was desperate for a patch modeller, but because Autodesk has the well known reputation of never saying a word about anything until it's ready to be released. To have them go back and revise announced features was disturbing, especially dropping features I had just seemed demoed by Glenn Wilson of Autodesk Canada a week before! I work for an architectural firm and we just got our copy of r4 last week. This, at least for me, is not a worthy upgrade. Yes, I can imagine that those who are using the package for character animation will find IK a godsend and I'll probably have fun using the scripting module in my own fred time but in terms of what we actually use 3DS for, it doesn't really have anything for us. We do mostly still images and when we do do animations… well, frankly, we don't build many 60 story office buildings with knee joints so IK isn't of any real use. Our models are complex so that even on a Pentium 90, the fast preview is not usable. This may not be everyone's experience but I think I can make a blanket statement: The R4 upgrade is not nearly as good as the R3 one was. As I said, I'm glad to here the Yost group is working hard on r5. But because of R4, we will look hard at the features list when it comes out, we will wait until it actually comes out before we order it (we sent our disk in before the patch-modeller was dropped) and it is no longer automatic that we will upgrade. As others have said in this thread, there are many other packages out there. Please understand that I'm not out to roast anyone, I'm just trying to give constructive feedback from one kind of user. Bruce Meikle WZMH Architects