CompuServe Thread

As a long time user (and early reseller/training center for Autodesk Mutlimedia products as a owner of small corporation about five years ago), I'm extremely impressed with the success of 3D-Studio. Obviously a well written, well marketed and positioned product. As the quest for faster and faster rendering times continues, has there been any thought to a rending engine for the PC? I know that the Weitek coprocessor were supported in older version (and older PCs) to add rending power to PC platforms. You've also added network rendering that adds a lot of rendering power. As a application engineer (and project lead on new software development in our board level products division), I know that a company of our size and capabilities could produce a product for rendering acceleration (NOT a video card accelerator, but true rendering engine). We design and manufactor VME, ISA and PCI based cards to the telemetry market and have extensive experience in embedded processor development. We're also developer program members with Microsoft, National Instruments and soon to be SGI. What are your initial thoughts on a PCI based rendering engine with a fast 64-bit processor (maybe the new MIPS 10000!?), a PCI bus and a couple of frame-buffers? This could be marketed as the "SGI on a board!"!. It would require porting of computational intensive routines to embedded code and having the "hooks" in 3D-Studio. My first guess is that this would not be difficult as you supported "hooks" for the Weitek coprocessor. If any of this sounds of interest, please call me at 703-273-2211. -= Chuck Rinker =- Avtec Systems, Inc. 10530 Rosehaven Street Suite 300 Fairfax, Virginia 22011 (703) 273-2211 (703) 273-1313 Fax