#why 3ds
13 messages in this thread
I'm looking into purchasing the 3d studio and have recieved differing advice
from friends… maybe someone here could take the time to answer a few
questions?
1) Is it true that Infini-D give better rendering results at a third of the
price or this mac chauvinism?
2) Would I be better off purchasing an amiga and Real 3d for the same price.
3) Is Autodesk going to lower the price in the upcoming year to compete with
new packages like the rebuilt Playmation and Read 3d for the PC?
It's strange that I heard nothing but good things about 3ds until I thought I
might invest in it, then everyone started telling me how it is becoming old
technology so..
4) What makes 3ds special, what can't be done without it at any price?
Thanks greatly
Robert Weldon
Man… all you'll get from anyone who's invested a fair amount of $$$
in a software package is biased, partisan gibberrish, so here's mine:
From what I've seen of it, Infini-D sucks. 3DS's renderer is the
nicest I've seen outside Pixar's full blown Renderman and a couple
other SGI based software packages'. I doubt 3DS' price will come
down, because it is not outdated technology (that's an easy slag –
get them to prove it), and it is the most powerful software for the
price. I don't see how you can compare Playmation to 3DS –
playmation is a toy. Promation is supposed to be a lot better, but
until I see solid proof (animations done by end users) I couldn't
say. The PC version of Real 3D (sounds like great vaporware, though)
is still in Beta, I believe, and I wouldn't buy an Amiga if you stuck
a gun to my head. The Screamer is a different story, but it's also
over $10K. One thing, though: if the PC Real 3D comes out as a
stable platform with spline based modeller and inverse kinematics and
a useable user interface, I'll seriously consider it as an addition
to my animation software library.
Ask your local Adesk multimedia dealer for a demo reel and a test
drive, then compare it to other packages (at similar prices).
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
Well done. <g>
–John
John,
Well thanks. I did not really believe that infini-D was a better
program but was told it was so by someone who insisted that they
knew, THEN when I asked a 3ds guy if it was true he said something
about how it could be true for some people for some projects , that
he loved 3ds BUT that it was no longer so far in front of the pack
as it once was. Playmation is really not comparable, but, again, I've
heard tell of a very soon upcoming release that will (maybe) be much
more powerful.
One of the big arguments in favor of diving into 3ds is the compuserve
forum here is constantly buzzing indicating the critical level of
interest from creative talents… I don't really know if there is
anything analogous for any other platform.
I've seen demo reels for 3ds that look real hot, but the difficulty is
in finding real specific info from the nay sayers – my friend who
likes infini-D for example claims it is "obvious" from looking at
renders that it is better, but I don't see it. Does anyone know how
infini-D does it's rendering, whether or not it is using different
techniques from 3ds or whether it is 6 against half a dozen?
FWIW, My place of employ uses Infini-D on Mac Quadra 950's with 128
MB of RAM, 24-bit full-page monitors and massive disk storage (to the
tune of about $15,000 per workstation). It ray traces *very* slowly
(as all ray tracing is) and when the time came for me to buy a
computer to satisfy my _need_ to animate graphics, I bought a PC and
3DS and I am still glad I did that instead of the other. I also own
Playmation (not the new, wonderful, it'll-even-slice-bread version)
and have not opened that program for 4 months.
Would you know how the tracing speed of Infini-D compares with the
speed of POV-RAY. I realise that Infini-D has more feature and
primitives BUT it seems that POV-RAY can do shiny text flybys and
spheres and many of the things that ray tracing is good at so I'd be
interested in the comparison.
Does anyone use 3ds+POV-RAY to produce animations? Seems like you
could render in 3ds, then use POV_RAY to add objects with specular
reflections. Of course (?) you'd have to import the 3ds stuff into
POV-RAY as flat bitmaps which might not work well for any but the
simples designs. Anyone ever do this?\
Robert – I don't know which is faster, POV or Infini-D, but POV is
shareware and can be downloaded from CIS. There is a Mac version as
well as a DOS version and some other platform (Amiga?). There are
3DS2POV utilities, as well. They *may* be at the point of using maps
and textures from the 3DS file, though the last time I checked they
had not gotten that capability yet. They were working on it though.
The learning curve on POV is pretty steep. In DOSland it's entirely
text based, so you need to get a pretty good idea of what you're
about before you can generate purty pitchers. <g>
Yes I know about the POV learning curve. I spent an hour trying to
render a torus and couldn't do it – just got a black scene. Turned
out I had forgotten to turn the lights on… but in the process I was
forced to learn about textures and object and half a dozen other
things so no regrets.
You picked a bad time to be asking questions, because the Man (Gary
Yost, great God of 3D who wrote the program and hates me talking
about his immortal status) is on vacation until December. He could
provide you with some definitive reasons and analysis, but perhaps
he'll forgive me for quoting a previous message from him on the
subject of 3DS3 and other renderers:
"Actually, if you're talking final output quality, Lightwave and 3DSr2
were very similar. They both computed color in 24-bit space and they
both used adaptive super-sampling for antialiasing.
However, the 3DSr3 renderer is so much better than Lightwave that it's
in a completely different league. If output quality is what you're
comparing, there IS NO COMPARISON. You just can't get the edge
quality with super-sampling that you can with an analytical
A-buffered renderer. Plus, you'll have color posterization
(quantization) problems in dark areas with Lightwave… especially
if you attempt to do gamma correction.
To be perfectly honest, we have objective proof that the 3DSr3
renderer is even better than the ALIAS renderer, which also uses
adaptive super-sampling. Gene Bodio currently has both systems in
his studio and he's sending the ALIAS system back because it's so
slow and the quality is so bad.
Edge and color quality is something we made sure in 3DSr3 was as good
as Renderman. Nobody else except for Wavefront (and Pixar, of
course) in the commercial rendering business can honestly make that
statement.
IMHO, I think you can get superb results from some of the ray-traced
programs out there, but you pay the penalty of waiting for hours for
a frame (not to mention a whole animation). With 3DS you get both
superb results as well as the ability to finish an animation within
your lifetime. At my age, time is important (you kids have more time
than I do, I suppose). If I were only doing single frames then
perhaps I would have considered a ray-traced program (well, not!).
Well that is interesting info, thanks. I have this Watt & Watt book
which explains about "analytical a-buffers" so I guess I have some
reading to do…
Do you or others ever have problems with 3ds not being a ray tracer?
Artists friends of mine never regester alot of pleasure with the
shiny highlights in ray traced art but it is showing up more on tv.
On the other hand some of the packages available seem to be producing
more subtle images then a few years back ( last time I was interested
in this stuff was in grad school in the middle 80s).
Assuming this thread is about comparing 3DS to its competitors…
Has anyone used Caligary Corp.'s ray tracers? I think their Windows version is
called trueSpace.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Aaron
Shiny highlights are not a problem for 3DS R3. The only real
advantage to raytracing is refraction. You don't get that in the
algorithms used in 3DS. But you do get raytraced shadows – very
nice!
Robert,
PMJI, but in about 98% of all the thing's you'll ever render with 3DS you won't
be able to tell that it wasn't ray traced. The other 2% are easy to simulate.
Dave Mennenoh