From: justin@mik.uky.edu (justin sullivan)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.animation
Subject: Re: Computer of choice?
Date: 6 Oct 92 00:12:13 GMT
    <1aism1INN5db@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> <1992Oct4.023622.22566@bert.eecs.uic.edu> 
    <1anmanINNd34@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> <2031@celia.UUCP>
Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences

In <2031@celia.UUCP> neil@celia.UUCP (Neil Richmond) writes:

>Have  you ever priced an SGI? The most reasonable system, one with a decent
>sized disk and memory, 24 bits graphics and a geometry engine to drive
>the graphics speed up to a responsive level is about $18,000 and you would
>have to add another drive and a backup system that SGI will gladly sell you
>for another 7-10,000 dollars. Add to this, some type a animation system like
>Wavefront, TDI, SoftImage etc for about $50,000 and I think we have passed
>most budgets. So, the natural thing is to look for more reasonably priced
>systems for lower budgets like Macs, PCs, or Amigas.

Well, you can get an Elan-equipped (certainly a LOT more then just 
'responsive') R4000 Indigo for about $28K with a gig of disk and 32MB RAM.
That's a lot of money, yes, but it's also about 75 MIPS and very impressive
graphics. Backup system? Sure, but not for 7K-10K. About $3K for a 5GB 8mm
internal tape backup (large primary drive included in above price). Also
note that all you'd want is the Wavefront Advanced Visualizer which is what?
About $15K? The whole enchilada (Advanced Visualizer, Video System, Data 
Visualizer, etc.) is about $60K. On second thought, make that about $25K or
so for your software. I believe Wavefront to be superior to TDI and SoftImage,
but if anyone has other thoughts, I'd love to hear them (through E-mail, of
course). 

>There are some great packages on these platforms. Not up to the level of the
>aforementioned packages, but good enough to do a lot of work. I work pro-
>fessionally on SGI machines, but I have an Amiga of my own. I prefer the Amiga
>because there was and currently better facilities for testing my animation
>in semi-realtime than the other platforms. This may be changing, in that there
>are some faster boards available to the Mac than what was available when I
>bought my first Amiga. I have stuck with my platform, because I am satisfied
>with the progress of the machine. There are many devices for the Amiga that
>will allow it to generate high quality images such as the Toaster, DCTV, 
>Opalvision, DMI Vivid24 (which claims incredible speeds for rendering), Harle-
>quin, etc. There is also good animation and rendering software like Imagine,
>Real3D, Playmation, Caligari and Aladdin-4D to mention a few. Also there is
>good paint/image-processing software like Opalvision, DCPaint, Art Department
>Pro, Imagemaster, etc.

And Wavefront has a very nice Advanced Paint module.. Of course, your typical
Indigo-Elan is a few orders of magnitude more then any stuffed Amiga.
True, true.. If you have the $$$, you can do anything. The new Alias Sketch
(1.5) on the Mac is very nice, and a loaded Quadra 950 will cost less then 
$10K (remember I said LOADED), but with a much more powerful Indigo costing
only $12,500, I'm not so sure (though that is a BASIC Indigo R4000). A nice
486/50 makes a good investment. Probably a better investment (price/performance
wise, of course) then any other lower-priced (read: non-workstation) system.
And there's nothing at all wrong with AutoCad Release 12 for modeling and
AutoShade makes a nice, general rendering system, although I'm not very
familiar with what's available on the PC side..
For those that aren't prepared to spend much money, I'll let you in on a 
little secret. I use a SPARCstation 1+ and RayShade 4.0.6 (free) for very
nice rendering and IRIT (currently, but I'll probably switch when I can use
BRL-CAD, also free) for modeling. It works quite well, really. This is all
free stuff and it produces some nice still results. But no animation.. :(


>I hope that for all platforms, that the software gets more professional. Right
>now, it is still not at the level that the SGI software is at. I was once told 
>by a represenative of a 3D software company, that if I wanted more, I should
>buy an SGI. I hope his attitude does not represent the company's attitude or 

Well, he's right.. Even if the software on other (lesser) platoforms comes
up to the level of SGI stuff, it will still carry an equivelent price tag.
Honestly, I think that for $50K worth of software, you get (with Wavefront at
least) $50K worth of features and refinement. 
I would recommend that, if you're nota professional, a Mac, Amiga or PC with
some typical ~$300 software package that you can buy mail-order will make
you a very happy camper..
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.animation