#Ray Traced Pictures
6 messages in this thread
I've been playing with Turbo Silver at my local neighborhood computer
dealer to evaluate it before I dish out the money to purchase it. Through
my hours of playing, and rendering, I have to admit the time required to
render an object is considerably faster than Sculpt-3D. With Sculpt-3D,
rendering of our logo took aprox. 12 hours to render – whereas the same
logo and background took aprox. 45 minutes on TSilver.
Though, I have to admit, I perfer the output of Sculpt-3D – perhaps due to
the fact I'm more familiar with S3D and know it's usage. I have a feeling
I'm over-exposing the objects in TSilver thus resulting in a washed out
looking picture. I find the color routines in TSilver to be a bit difficult
to operate (I seem to have problems creating an object then choosing a
particular color for it.. I alter it's color, but then when rendering it,
it remains in it's default color), and I can't seem to load in the *.silver
files on the diskette..
(Though this is probably duto my not reading the entire manual — which I
choose to put as my last, and final attempt at trying to get something to
work… (Typical of us hardware engineers). Anyhow, I'm anxious to see the
new version of Tsilver, and would wonder if there are more improvments in
it. Would it be feasable for me to wait for the new TSilver to be released
before I buy Tsilver 2.0?? Is there a price markup for the TSilver 3.0??
Joe – The washed out results definitely sound like either the light is too
bright or too close to the object. Given the same setup I'm very confident
that you would find the colors in the rendered image noticebly better in
TSilver.
As for your problems with the color requester, It is not a bug, but rather
a design error on my part, in the way that object coloring in implemented.
It has been changed in version 3.0. In fact, most of the menus have been
replaced by what we call "Super Requesters", letting you to affect changes
in transformation or properties on an object or group of objects, from a
single requester. There is no increase in price from version 2.0 to 3.0,
though it will probably take a couple of weeks longer for the product to
filter into the dealer network, than those already owning TSilver wanting
the upgrade. We hope to begin shipping by this coming Friday.
Thanks for the information. Since I already own Sculpt-3D, I will probably
wait till I see Silver 3.0 on the shelves before I buy.. though I WILL buy
Silver. From playing with it at the stores, I find it more powerful than
S3D, a few extra features, and most importantly faster rendering time!!
Thanks Joe we do appreciate it. Remember to have your dealer keep a good
stock of Interchange and the Turbo Silver module around, so you can use the
objects you created in SC3D and not have to re-build them. I think with
the release of 3.0 we will start seeing a whole lot of convert to our
program.
Stan, the letter that came with the Silver 1.1 upgrade some time ago said
future upgrades would probably be $25 or so. Have you changed your policy?
(Personally, I don't mind at all paying a reasonable amount for upgrades that
add features, but I'm probably in the minority :-). ) I'm a registered owner
of TurboSilver and am wondering if you'll be sending out just notification of
the upgrade, or sending out the new version itself? Will the new manual be a
complete replacement for the original manual, the 1.1 addendum, and the Turbo
addendum, so that I can discard all 3 of them and just refer to the new manual?
-Joel
Joe – The upgrade from Silver 1.1 to Turbo Silver was $30. The only real
reason for the charge was that Turbo Silver is a major re-write of the original
package, and we felt the $30 was justified, given the added features and
enhancements it offers. Turbo version 3.0 is more like the finish of Turbo
silver hence, only the $5.00 to cover postage and packaging. With the 3.0
program disk you will be getting a version that supports 68020/030 881/882
cards at no extra cost, and an entire new manual. The manual look very good,
and you will be able to throw all of thoe old docs and addendums in the trash.
You should be getting a letter explianing the upgrade method sometime within
the next week or so.
Stan Kalisher (Impulse)