#Upgrades.
4 messages in this thread
I took the plunge and bought Playmation…
Ok, ok, it's a really cool program, and yes I am hooked already, and yes I
would like to know what it costs to upgrade from Windows version 2 to Animaster
for Windows? In that vein, what enhancements are planned for a Windows NT
version or Chicago, and since I have access to both, should I wait for one of
those versions?
Question 2: What products are available out there to take advantage of the
shadow buffering features. I think I can get away without too much interaction
between the characters and their immediate surroundings if I just manage to
have them cast shadows. This would seem to speed rendering up a lot. I
watched the tutorial fish thing go through its paces, and it took over two
hours on my 486/66. One thing I noticed is that the fish didn't take very long
to render, it was the background image that ate up the time. Yet I couldn't
see where the background was affected too much by the fish going by. Also, the
bottom half of the fish looked chopped off, did I make some typical neophyte
mistake?
Question 3: What hardware did you guys use to get the animations from that
wonderful demo tape onto video. I thought that was really well done, and the
quality was accepatable for the kinds of things I am interested in doing.
Thanks for a great program, AD
First question answered: it will cost 400.00 smackers to upgrade to A:M…
Second question answered: We have definite plans to optimize for Windows
4.0…. as for Intel NT, hmmm…. right now we are doing a DEC Alpha NT port
and a Raptor NT port but quite frankly we think Intel NT is too unstable for us
to do a port without a WHOLE bunch of bugs/crashes…. let's wait and see what
Chicago brings…
Third question answered: We use a hardware system called a PAR board, it's made
by Digital Processing Systems in Canada, to move our animations to video…
it's a really great system!
Steve, Hash Inc.
BTW glad to hear you like the program 🙂
Oops! see you confused my little mind and I didn't answer one of your
questions…. The shadow and depth buffers are features that we added to use
with our own post module which should be coming out before Christmas… our
alpha channels don't work well with any other program at this time… AND as
for your rendering problem…. up your memory in the file prefs.hsh to be 4
megs less than your system memory…. that's all I can think of now… we're
you doing anything elsewhile you were rendering? Did you have any TSRs active?
This would slow the renderer down too….
Steve
Steve, thanks for getting back to me. I figured out the rendering problem, and
it was memory. I just made my swap file bigger, and it speeded things up
immensly (I have 8 megs of ram).
Also, Thank you for the info re: Chicago. If you want me to beta test it let
me know. Our shop is a Solutions provider for MS and we are testing Chicago and
Daytona for them now (along with several thousand others of course <g>).
Love the program, it is really a joy to work with, but… $400.00 to upgrade?
Wow that seems steep, but I suppose you can't make it cheaper than buying
AniMaster all by its lonesome. I want decals and kinematics (and materials of
course), but that is more than my original investment! Now I really want to
beta test for you <G>.
Any timelines on newer versions, patches, upgrades, etc? Where are things
going for Hash? Thanks, AD