Pie-Rat!
18 messages in this thread
Scott, We are still hoping for about 2 weeks. The major hang up at this
point is the documentation. As Soooo many folks ragged on our first manual
we are having the new Turbo manual written in california by folks who do
that sort of thing for a living. We have received about 90% of the
finished manual and it looks excellent. We have set a date of September
10th for our absolute drop dead date. I'm sure you will think it was well
worth the wait. In addition to several new and more powerful features in
the program. We have added a new scripting control language to the
animation portion of the program which will now allow you to play multiple
loops within the same animation, and hold certian loops playing for
specific amounts of time.
Hey, I just got the Caligari Demo today. I LOVE the object/scene creation
stuff in that thing. Geez. Jack up Caligari, slide the Turbo Silver ray
trace engine under the hood! Have you seen their scene stuff? Great.
Their object interface is VERY NICE! But keep in mind, that Caligari is
working only with primitives. When you have a set of preselected objects
it's alot easier to keep the point list in memory at all times. When you
have a dynamic object editor and still want to program to operate in 1MEG
memory, it gets alot messier.
The sheet I got at Siggraph says Caligari costs $2000. THREE zeros on the
end there. Can somebody tell me why all this discussion of it in with Silvers
(two of 'em), which is every bit as nice for not nearly as much money?
I thought Caligari's user interface was fantastic, but not $2000 worth. Not
even $1000 worth. Not even $795…
Jay, Actually before Silver came into being, We talked to the folks at
OCTREE about publishing the product. That was almost 2 years ago. At that
time the price seemed almost feasable, but the program was so far from
completion, we took a shot at Eric Graham, He also had not at that time
decided what form his final program would take, and he was about to see
both EA and Byte by Byte.
This is after I had almost gotten agreements from Tom Hudson to port Cad-3D
from the Atari ST. We finally just got frustrated enough to Hire a
programmer and design our own program, and voila Silver! I honestly think
OCTREE is off base now trying to sell their product for 2000, considering
it's competition (Mainly Videoscape 3D 2.0).
Caligari does not offer enough of the object coloring or shading properties
as VideoScape much less the lack of arbitrary shaped object creation. The
User interface I agree is wonderful, but the rendering engine ain't in my
opinion up to snuff. There are other PolyGon type renderers coming from
Micro Illusions, and I hear Progressive, and even one or two from Europe.
These are all due RSN and I'm afraid Octree attemp to recoup their
investment by introducing Caligari without major enhancements might no go
so good. It's become a "rendering jungle out there". With Silver and SC3D
being the only Ray-Tracers currently available, we are in a slightly
different market. Of course version 3.0 of TSilver will offer a Scan Line
Mode which should offer most of the benefits of the PolyGon packages with
the advantage of our Front end.
Just a little Reality Check in here for good measure. Since we talked
at Siggraph, I have now been appointed Managing Editor (how quickly they
learn to CAPITALIZE their titles!) of A.X. Magazine. Now WHAT was that
about a demo??? Hmmmmm?????
Do you know if somebody is working on CAD-3D? I loved the user interface
on that program, and played with it for a good while on the ST. It's
quite friendly, and quite fast.. Or Easy 3D from the Mac. Either way.
Antic has gone back and forth on it… I don't think the programmer, Tom
Hudson, is hot on porting it to the Amiga, which means it's a long way off,
even if they decide to port it tomorrow. Secondly, with a dozen-odd 3D
programs on the Amiga, haven't you got enough? Antic would have to do a
lot of work to make CAD-3D competitive on the Amiga. Like ANIM support,
overscan, possibly ray-tracing or smoothing, HAM, etc. The good news is,
Antic is porting the Design Disks to the Amiga. My company did the port of
the Human Design Disk, which includes a full articulated human skeleton,
down to every bone, the Architectural Design disk, which is a series of
house parts like stairs and roofs and walls, the Future Design Disk, which
is spaceships and robot parts, including several pre-made robots and
androids that look great in Sculpt and VideoScape, the two formats they'll
be available in. The Microbot Design Disk, another disk of robots, should
be coming soon. So some of the best parts of CAD-3D – the great data
objects – are ported to the Amiga, available in a month or so.
John, That is great news about the Human Design Disk. Where did the
original data come from – Ohio State? Also , any eye balls and skulls on
it?
The original data for the Human disk was created by Richard Berry on the
ST, using CAD-3D. It was a lot of work! You may recognize Berry as the
artist who did the computer images on the William Gibson cyberpunk novels.
(He did them with a PC and an ST. Oh well.) The skull doesn't have
eyeballs. You mentioned Ohio State. Do you have a lead on some interesting
3D data?
John, Ohio State has an extensive data library of anatomical objects.
Apparently there is a way of converting them to Sculpt3D format. They are
under the lock and key of Professor Csuri . I wrote them a letter asking
for acsess to the data but never received a response ( that was 18 months
ago). Actually about 6 months ago I downloaded a animation of a rotating
pelvis done in sculpt 3D which you uploaded. I assumed you had gotten the
data from Ohio State. Was it from the ST program?
Ah, almost forgot. The Future Design and Archite#Ural Design disks were done
by Darr1JG_vrson.
Would you believe that OSU in addition to their own object creation
software on the Cray, uses objects that have been created with Sculpt 3D.
They have about 15+ Amigas in the Art Ed departement. With 3 or 4 courses
on basic computer graphics taught with the Amiga. Quite ironic using an
Amiga to create objects for a Cray!!!
I happen to know that a major manufacturer of MAINFRAME,
graphics-dedicated, raytracing animation computers uses a bank of AMIGAS to
generate the nice clouds, bricks, and other backgrounds they ship with
their computer. I'm sworn to secrecy on the actual name of the company,
but my information came from the man who MANS the Amigas they use.
We Tried to port CAD 3D a while ago, but Tom Hudson wasn't a whole lot
interested. I have heard he has become very anti Amiga.
How to get Caligari Demo?
Send them $18 and they'll send you a demo version. The demo version is
actually the FULL package, but without the Save.