From: wave@waits.media.mit.edu (Michael B. Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.software
Subject: Re: 3D app Recommendations ???
Date: 12 Jan 93 05:59:35 GMT
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory

J.B. Nicholson-Owens writes
> andrew@cubetech.com writes
> > I think Stone Design got a _very_ raw deal in the NeXTWorld review.  
> 
> I agree, and if NeXTWorld's photo of 3D Reality is any measure of
> their ability to review this program, they clearly
> demonstrate their lack of ability to lay out a scene correctly. 
> For those of you without this picture handy, it's a very dark
> photo with 6 rendered objects in it, the lower three of which I
> still can not make out due to poor lighting.  Adding some lights
> to this scene would have helped immensely as would some
> illustrations of menu layouts or options that they claim are
> faulty.   
> 
> If it's a rendering package you seek, I'd recommend Stone
> Design's 3D Reality. 

Yea, this reminds of something else.  I've heard (both first hand and second  
hand) from developers that say something to the effect "God, the 3DKit is  
totally unusable.  I sent this image off to prman and it took hours."

Folks, 3D is hard.  It's difficult.  The folks at Pixar that worked on  
RenderMan are some of the finest minds in computer graphics.  It's a great  
renderer.  If you're a developer, and you want to use the 3DKit, rejoice.  NeXT  
has made it possible for you to get your feet wet with the same software the  
big guys (i.e. ILM, Disney, etc.) use to produce motion pictures.  And you get  
that power at a very reasonable price.  I'm talking development, not dollars,  
although those are pretty good too.  Either way, if you want to use RenderMan,  
take a little time and play before you bitch and moan about how slow things  
are.  The first thing you learn in real production is that for every frame you  
put on video or film as the final product, you will render that scene 20 times.   
Your ratio may vary, but everybody finds one, and it's usually not that low.   
So you learn to cheat.  Render something a small section (that's what crop  
windows are for).  Render at a high shading rate.  Build up some intuition.

The greatest thing about Stone Design's 3DReality is that it lets you render  
little bits at a time very easily.  I've had the app for many months, and I  
don't think I've ever used the render button.  I always use the "InstyRender"  
feature.  Just go up to preferences and set the alt-drag and cmd-alt-drag  
values.  I tend to leave them at 50 and .25.  When I want to see the whole  
scene, I use a shading rate of 50.  When I want to see how things will look, I  
select a small part and use .25.  When I want to render the whole thing I use  
25 and read my mail.  The key is experimentation.

Also, I have a lot of very complicated shaders, so it makes sense for me to use  
very low shading rates.  If you're using a simple shader, you probably won't  
see that much difference between 10.0 and 1.0, but the 10.0 one will fly.   
Experiment.  Muck around.  Learn.

The other thing is to get lots, or at least a wide variety, of shaders.  The  
Valis Group has some great ones, very professionally done.  Vol. 6 is still  
rough, but they're (supposedly) working on it.  The real power of RenderMan  
lies in the shading language.  I can take a sphere and render it a bazillion  
different ways just by using different renderers and frobbing the parameters.  

Anyway, I've ranted enough.  I just got steamed when NeXTWorld printed such a  
vapid review of what is turning in to a very useful product.  


--

-->  Michael B. Johnson
-->  MIT Media Lab      --  Computer Graphics & Animation Group
-->  (617) 253-0663     --  wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.software