Upfront…
11 messages in this thread
Ooohhh, and you can also get those "Beautiful" Upfront Photorealistic
Renderings between your UAEs…<G> No really, I like Upfront but a little
realism whouldnt hurt it.
Mike Morrison
<< Support our profession, watch TV
>>
Actually, I've only used the Arcitectual version of upfront. It doesn't do
curves or [phong] shading or anything cool like 3ds. I'm not sure if there
is another version or something that is good enough to do walk throughs. I
think there might be another version of UpFront that does this and is a
professional designing program that can do splines and stuff like that.
Still, 3ds kills anything that I've ever seen on a mac. I'm sure release
2.0 will make the upfront look like a Vic 20 <g>.
Aaron
There is (or was) a newer version of Upfront for the Mac that had those
great splines and everything, but Alias just pulled it off the shelf, too
many bugs from what I hear. Eventually it will be ported over to Windows,
but I would'nt hold my breath.
Mike Morrison
<< Support our profession, play Wing Commander! >>
What would be the use of having it in Windows? 3D studio does everything
that it can do (except for the sun) and does it better. Unless you like to
multitask your 3d modelling/rendering programs, I'd stick with 3ds.
Your right, it's not a replacement for 3DS, never will be. I only like it
because if I'm working in Windows and suddenly get a brain storm for a 3D
object/scene…whatever, I can pull up Upfront and try it out. If I like
it, I can save it as a DXF and import and tune it later in 3DS. Not that
this happens all that often… but it could.<g>
-MM
I suppose it could. But that one time when you decide to draft a building
while using windows is hardly worth buying the program.
Aaron
Better than Ray Dream Designer?
DT
I've never heard of Ray Dream Designer. I'm not familiar with it at all.
Is it good? bad? Were you being sarcastic? I honestly have no idea.
Aaron
Ray Dream Designer is a 3d rendering package for the Macintosh (uses ray
tracing). It is not meant for animation. I just saw it demoed at the Media
'92 convention in L.A. at which I was a guest speaker (for 3d Studio). It
seems to have plenty of competition on the Macintosh platform e.g. Electric
Image, InfiniD, Strata 3d , Macromind 3d etc., etc.,…. The Mac platform
seems to be saturated with 3d rendering packages selling under $1000 and
all the contenders seem to be flogging themselves to death to differentiate
themselves from the rest.
Hm.. only 3d rendering package I've seen on the mac is Swivel 3D Pro. It
does Ray Tracing, but it's modelling and animation capabilities are rather
crude. I think it's only like $30 or something like that, so that may be
why. I don't really think of macintoshes as being powerhouse graphics
systems, so I never really looked into anything on that platform.
Aaron
I've heard that the 68040 has much faster floating point capabilities over
the 486. Not taking weitek into account, of course. In that light, the
Mac would make a great rendering machine. For some examples, look at the
control and tactical readouts on the screen in Start Trek:The Next
Generation. All of those were done on a Mac. I think swivel 3D is just a
program for linking objects and defining movement relationships. As a
dedicated animator, it may not be so hot.
Well, the last thing I wanted to do was start some flame war. So I will
conclude by saying the control panels in STTNG are primitive and the
machine that is the best is the one that gets the job don.e
Markus