Playmation
Mike: Playmation, and it's big brother Animation:Master are
available from Hash, Inc. They have a distrubition company that
handles some shipping, but I call them direct. They can sell you
anything you need, and are happy to answer your questions. I just
called today, and he was happy as usual to try to answer my most
picky and detailed questions. He didn't know all the answers, but
isn't really the tech support type guy. The tel # is (206) 750-0042.
Playmation 2.0 is just out, and is much improved over my current
version, but if you are looking to do serious animation,
Animation:Master is the one to look at. It's strengths (both,
really) is character animation. It's not well suited for a quick and
dirty flying logo. (or even a sophisticated one) I've done a flying
logo with it, but it took a long time to render, and I had to
improvise. There is no direct font support, but there are a few fonts
(as objects) available for about $30 total..
About speed, it's the raytracing that takes the time, not Windows. I
have both a Windows renderer and a dos, command line one. The
windows one works in the background, and the other hogs all the
resources for itself. And, being a Windows program, I can multitask
between my paint program, the modeler, the directing module,
Compuserve stuff, a word processor, and do a background render all at
the same time. It also takes advantage of my Viper video card, and
doesn't require special drivers for it.
As far as real world use, I don't have enough experience using it to
really say if it's worth it in a production environment. I'm a
college student, and only really do things that I want to, and
they're not that deadline oriented. I do wish the renderer were
faster, but other than that, I like it. It's different than 3DS, but
good.
Like I said before though, I would recommend Animation:Master for any
serious work. For around $800, the feature set is better, and more
powerful than playmation's. Also, pretty soon, there will be an NT
version of A:M for only about a hundred dollar upgrade. Rendering
there should be much better, and hopefully quicker.
I think that Bryce Whiteside has used Playmation for some business
projects, mabe he'll pop in to give a real world perspective.
Give Hash a call, they can send you some info.. Also see the other
Animation:Master thread. There's a list of some of the things it can
do, and my comparison of it to 3DS. (I suggest having both.)