CompuServe Messages

Hi Mike, <<A friend of mine got Imagine 3.0 (for the PC) and swears that it is better in nearly every way than my favorite program of all (3DS, natch). He says it renders much faster (according to him, 7 or 8 seconds per 800×600 true color scene>> I own Imagine and have used it from its first Beta release on the Amiga and the P.C and find his rendering times to be smoke. <<has all the built-in features I pay extra for (I was telling him about Bones from Digimation when this all came up — his response: "Been there, done that.") and is easier to use, to boot.>> This opens up some questions about the Ipaz direction we are in now. Imagine has a bone coed but I don't think it is better that Digamation just for the reason that it lacks a good GUI "although I have not looked at Digamation's bones" but Impulse continues to improve it's coed and it will get better and it is done in house. As far as my <<current>> Ipas are concerned they are not inproving and will likely never be upgraded. I as user can no longer stand for buying software this way and only want to support software that has a upgrade path like H.S.C ,Visart and companys that reassure me that they are in it for the long hall with upgrade paths. We have only have to look at lens flare from the Yost group and then look at lens flare in lightwave. One is a old and outdated and one contuies to mutate into a very nice effect. Don't get me wrong about this, I love the ipazs from our Yost group but feel a littel out dated. I know this is a matter of manpower vs new tools. We all love I.K. it is a very nice work, will it mutate? yes it must., but only Gary knows for sure. I know I will be disapointed if it does not. << For example: Let's say it produced images that were 20% less "professional" than 3DS. Since I don't make money from my animations, it might be better for me to use a program that rendered 10-20x faster and tradeoff image quality. >> The Image quality from Imagine is good if you know how to use it . If you want to Raytrace glass and refection it is better. "only because of raytracing" but it is not faster. I feel that 3DS is a much better program to render, animate set up materials and colors in. Imagine has lots of silly things that they will not fix like importing IBM TGA's Gif's and cells why? who knows. Imagine modeler is very good. you can model in just one screen with a fast preview window. no jumping around to Ipaz to Ipaz. I use Imagine for a lot of my models and import DXF to 3DS to finish up the animation. I have found this combo to be a winner. -Brandon