CompuServe Thread

Great assessment, George. /* I suspect that there are a lot of presentations done with Animator, maybe even its main professional use. I know that's becoming more true in my case, */ Same here. Having done my share of Powerpuff's, there's just no comparison to the reaction you get with "animated slides". The impact is so strong that the presenter winds up competing for attention with even the simplest of animations. In the courses I teach on ANI, we focus on how little of the screen it takes for actual animation to make an impact too. There's a supplied FLC file which shows a station with a water fountain infront of it, water gushing away… very typical of the percentage of screen needed to get the point across emotionally. Using 3DS in sync with ANI to make these animated slides has been even more impressionable. We had the last audience hooked with the water-map (loaded here as H2OBMP.ZIP) for general ocean, lake and pool scenes… took all of about 15 minutes to create, very quick in 3DS to render, and damn realistic for our water needs. Dynamic slides make for dynamic presentations. /* When we got Animator Pro, we also discovered POCO inside of Animator, which for us offered huge possibilities, so it became more than just a supplemental tool in its own right. But then we were generating even more */ Absolutely, same here. In fact, POCO is so powerful that we've created Windowsy interfaces with it to view flics and stills… where the cursor actually impresses buttons and so forth. Entire map-guide systems have been created for convention halls and so forth, and no one even knows ANI is the engine behind it! 🙂 /* only type material than I would have imagined. To make a long story short, the tail is now wagging the dog, and 3D Studio has actually become for us, a supplement to Animator. */ I'd say about 33% of our work is similar… 3DS supplements ANI. But the power we gain from both working together is awesome. For 3DS, ANI is incredible at generating animated maps (not just for textures, but for any of the map types… Opacity, Shininess, etc.)… and ANI really brings out the power of 3DS by cutting back rendering time. We created an elaborate checkboard.. I mean ELABORATE… gold trimmings on squares, two types of wood inset, varying degrees of shininess, and if you saw the geometry, it's a single box! The rest is about 7 maps (bump, etc.). Rendering time was blazing. Obviously for ANI, 3DS makes 3D presentations a snap. But we really focus on rendering reductions. For example, we had a situation where an object needed to horizontally cross infront of a marble wall and cast shadow as it did. Rather than create a marble wall in 3DS and render shadows, we rendered only the object, rendered the wall on frame, then brought both into ANI and using DARK ink pasted the shadow in 1% of the time. Tremendous power depending on the task. Doesn't pump us, it pumps the capabilities of hybrid usage. /* you. My own feeling is that it took me about 6 mos. to truly get up to speed with each of the program's I mentioned. There aren't many business situations which will knowingly allow several months of charging overhead to get somebody "up to speed" with a new tool. */ But then again, look at what you're achieving. We're not talking spreadsheets here. 🙂 It would be insane for management to think that generating an elaborate animation would take the same amount of mindshare as, say, writing a letter in a word processor. I've always (since CADD days) had to educate management into realistic time/money/effort needs. /* Animator has an additional handicap because it's not intuitively obivious what its intrinsic worth/purpose really is. What I mean here is that it's not doing something that you're already doing, only faster and better, rather it does something that you don't realize you want done. Perhaps with all the multi-media hype floating around, that will change. */ I agree. 3DS and AutoCAD (as examples) make their effective usage far easierto understand in less time than a product like Animator. But a lot of this depends on how the product is presented. When I train on 3DS, ANI sits beside it from day one. When we hit the Materials Editor, 50% of the training is on map generation in ANI. Only then do the map slider bars come alive in 3DS. Granted 3DS has capacity to generate maps, but nowhere near as fast. And we find that most maps are 2D anyway, and unencumbered by any lighting consideration, ANI fakes lighting effects much faster for most map crsations. It also alerts the user to the vast amount of non-3DS resources which can be applied as maps to 3DS. (extreme example: even Paintbrush in standard Windows can make great maps). But for animated maps… lava, rain, water, smoke, fire… it's hard to beat. -dave

Dave, << There was no way for me to delete an earlier file while uploading the new one.. >> If you own the earlier file *you* can delete it yourself from the libs.