janzen@ant.dec.com (Tom 296-5421 LMO2/O23) (07/26/88)
I bought Forms in Flight at Software Shop for $62 including tax. That makes it $120 cheaper than the two leading animation programs. So it doesn't do as much. It is not my impression that it can save IFF files, but maybe it does. I has no varying surfaces; everything looks like back-lit plastic. It has no capability of making good spheres or cylinders. It can make a 2D curve (spline through 3 points) but rotating this around makes a chunky surface, not a smooth one, around the equator. It can extrude and rotate to build 3-D images. You can draw equalateral or freehand polygons, or the spline. It has an alphabet library (simple letters UC and LC, and numbers) and a space shuttle. That's it. That's all the drawing capability. No freehand curves, no real painting. You can color the objects you make; you can look at them wireframe, or you can look at them in red/blue stereo, which is pretty effective, but no glasses are provided (I had some from LTX, a chip tester maker, who had them for a convention exhibit). Only wire frame is available for stereo. I don't remember whether stereo can be animated. It can color the background. It can have chunky shading from ca. 8 positionable light sources. All light sources are white. It does not cast shadows. You can have screens of 2,4,8,16 colors, and 32 for animation. Animation: Objects can be defined in heirarchal trees. They can rotate, roll, turn, move along lines. You can also move the camera. That's it. This is not for animating subtly changing drawings, such as free-hand drawings of a horse galloping: forget it. However, I made a nice rotating sign (like a Shell sign) for local cable tv. That's why it's called Forms in Flight and not Forms Alive. One good point: it does store the calculated images on a disk unnattended, and can play them back. My little sign could spin around pretty fast in real time (40 pictures, about 1/second, but according to the program I was using about 20 frames/second, so I guess that's skipping stuff). I was using 16 colors. I guess it uses the blitter. Playing the animation is done with FastFlight, which can be distributed with your animations so they can be viewed. This program does not seem capable of making the juggling clown by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think it knows about HAM. It's on about the level of that 20-year old Scientific American article on computer graphics. I don't think it'll run out of my DF1:. I don't think the backup will run, but I could try again. The docs didn't say it was protected. I don't know whether to recommend it. Depends on your money/expectations. Tom Janzen Digital Equipment Corp 111 Locke marlboro ma 01752