CompuServe Thread

I can't say anything about Imagine. It hasn't been released yet and I haven't even seen the demos. The screen shots in the Impulse library on Amigavendor look great though. I also have never used Caligari. I have seen that demoed very often, and it just doesn't interest me. I do use the other three packages, though, so here goes: Turbo give you wonderful control of your objects' appearance. You can wrap IFF brushes on objects, you have fantastic control of texture, very complete control of lighting — in short, you can make it look the way you want. IF you are able to stand the interface, which is very widely criticized. Personally, I find it very frustrating. Not only is it quite tough to manipulate objects in a complicated scene (and, unfortunately, my scenes tend to be fairly complicated), but the program sometimes does things you don't expect. My pet peeve is that what you see in Wire Frame does not truly represent what the camera will see in your rendering. Still, this is the one I would probably grit my teeth and recommend to a professional if you are buying only one of the packages out now. Sculpt has the best object editing available now — although Imagine looks like it will equal or beat it. You have MUCH less control of other aspects of your image, like texture, however, than you have in Turbo. Unless you plan to use it just as your object editor, I would hesitate to recommend Sculpt, since Byte by Byte's support for the Amiga is pretty shaky. 3DPro is absolutely glorious for scene construction and editing. This package has a very sweet interface and allows you — once your objects are created -to quickly put them together into a scene and manipulate them till they look the way you want. This is no small feat. Try putting 10 medium to very complicated objects into a room (my current project) in Turbo and figure out what the heck is what! The down side of 3DPro is that it currently does not support full ray tracing (that's coming this fall, they say) and, oddly, once you have created your object you can't go back and edit it — at least I haven't found a way. Dynamite package, though. If they improve their editing capability and add full ray trace they will give Imagine a run for it. Better than any one package would be a combination, using Interchange to move between them, although if your are just moving INTO 3DPro you won't need interchange, since 3dPro has direct import from other formats. I almost always do my object creation and editing in Sculpt, and bring the objects over into 3DPro for rendering. I love the control you get in Turbo, and Turbo gives you great results, but 3DPro's interface allows me to get much more work done in a given amount of time. Since I don't do single frame recording, I'll let someone else answer that one. If you want more detail on any of the three packages I use, just scream.