CompuServe Messages

Chad, Please feel free to butt in any time. The following are my personal views as an A.M.beginner. The Hash people will probably have something to say and they're usually proved right in the long run. I'm sure spline modellers are potentially much better than polygon-based tools, once you get the hang of them. For instance, you can get a reasonable-looking human figure in a 30K file, the equivalent DXF would be 100's of K and would still look faceted in most modellers. Undoing bad modelling can be tricky with splines though. It's a bit like unpicking that thing in the middle of a golf ball. Watch out for flying rubber bands! So if you're into modelling your own stuff, go for splines. A.M. and P.M. are the only products at the affordable end of the market which uses them as far as I know. (I think Wavefront has a spline option if you've got $20K or whatever to spare.) But if you want to get going quickly as an animation director there isn't much ready-made spline stuff around but hopefully there will be soon. Richard