CompuServe Messages

John, We use 3D Studio because it is an extremely powerful tool that easily holds it's own against the other packages. 3D Studio has a phenomenal renderer that offers a large number of speed advantages. The thought that everybody needs to raytrace every image is ridiculous. There are alot of projects that 3D Studio handles better, faster, and cheaper than it's SGI based competitors. All one has to do is to look at the actual quality of the renderings of some of the SGI based packages and compare them to 3D Studio, and it will immediately become apparent why alot of animation companies running SGI equipment, run 3D Studio too. There are alot of projects where the only way to get a desired result is to use 3DS. Two projects that we are currently working on were both won using 3DS and competing against other demo sequences from companies using SGI based tools. Paul P.S. – Regarding the output of the Reality Engine, it's not that the output is lacking or that the quality is substandard. The reason you still have to render to disk is because the Reality Engine can be likened to an extremely fast video card with lots of ram. It puts great pictures on the screen, but it doesn't output a NTSC signal that can be recorded to a VCR. It's more like a really nice video card, not a framebuffer. It is a visualization tool for VR and technical applications primarily. It's major use in the animation market lies in it's ability to show "previews" and greatly speed up production. For instance if you're adjusting lighting in a scene, you can instantaneously spin the scene around 360 degrees and look at a smooth shaded scene. It alleviates the need to spend hours doing test rendering. Before someone else jumps in here, there are obviously alot of other advantages, but these are being used to illustrate why one still needs to render to disk one frame at a time.