CompuServe Thread

Diane: I am currently in the process of doing the same thing at my firm. I am also an architect and have most recently formed a new department called The Image Lab of which I am the director. I have ordered a new DEC pentium with 72mb of RAM (for animation with shadows, reflectances and decent texture maps it has been suggested here that 32mb RAM will not keep you from swapping to disk). I did cheese out on the video card for now by taking the standard PCI Viper card which I may swap out for the Matrox MGA II if the drivers for 3DS ever get written to take advantage of its advanced 3D capabilities. For going to tape with animations I just purchased the highly recommended DPS Personal Animation Recorder which allows one to record in real time to any video tape recorder thus foregoing the traditional frame accurate method. You can get the PAR for $2000 yet you will need to pick up a dedicated hard drive (The Micropolis is approved and you can get 500mb, 1gb and I think 1.7gb drives). This will add $600 – $1500 +/- to the PAR depending on the drive you need. There has been a lot of chatter about the PAR and you may find an archived thread with pertinent info in the ASOFT library. The PAR can be outfitted with a TBC board for real time video capture. You could get the whole PAR package for approx. $4000. Best of luck with your decisions and please let us know about your final decisions. Bob