Opinions
I agree, it is hard to imagine that people would buy Amigas to get a
AutoShade-like rendering system, but there are a number of things that could
make it appealing. The NTSC video-out on the Amiga means you can lay these
animations to video tape without extra hardware, and you can do excellent,
TV-quality video presentation graphics with the Amiga. What are some of the
limitations of AutoShade? How fast does it render a particular object – I
could benchmark it. What limits does it in output colors? How many frames
are in a given animation, and how big is the file? Is there an ARC in the DLs
with a DXF object and the resulting animation that I could use to compare
things?
I think I'll shoot for "the people who own Amigas but use AutoCAD or DXF", as
my first market. I'm not looking forward to marketing in the PC market,
seeing as I'd end up selling Amigas as well as my own product. I'm planning
on going to the AutoDesk expo in Chicago. Perhaps I should render some 3D
objects on the Amiga, and then post them as GIF files. GIF only supports 256
colors, right? We'd lose a few, coming from 4096, but it might look OK. Any
particular 3DFACE-type objects you'd like to see ray-traced? I'd love to get
more 3DFACE objects for rendering, do you know of a good source? Anyone out
there willing to send me a disk or two? I've grabbed a few from the
libraries already.