CompuServe Messages

Dear Mac and SGI snobs, I run Electric Image on my Mac, and I also run Alias, Prisms and now I am studying Wavefront on SGI. 3D Studio is without a doubt much more powerful per dollar invested than any of these "wonderous" programs. Electric image is very limited to animation and lighting having no modeler. Sure it runs fast on a Mac, and lots of people praise it for rendering speed, but it has very few effects available compared to 3DS, or any of its higher end competition. In Hollywood most people are of the opinion that Electric Image is a borderline professional product, and I don't find it being used in very many bog CGI houses. Alias, too has its problems. It crashes a lot. Its motion capture software is poorly written and its nurbs modeler, while great, is a pain to work with, and goes much slower thanb than 3D Studio does on a complex model. In fact, Alias is the slowest renderer I have used. It requires an Onyx to perform well, and is very slow on a Reality Engine. Softimage is better in almost every way, and Wavefront handles imported files much better, and crashes less. SGI's crash all the time. All the high end software packages have lots of bugs and many of the big companies still use Renderman because Alias and all the others can't do as good a job of rendering. After running a lot of thise "high end" machines, I feel sorry for somebody who has never enjoyed the pleasure of 3DS. Sanford