eric@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Eric Lavitsky[hmm]) (05/22/88)
At the JAUG meeting this past Friday night, we were all given a special treat. Roman Ormandy of Octree Software premiered to our group Caligari, a real-time 3D editing, rendering and animation system. The presentation really wowed the audience. Caligari truly rivals software found on $50K graphics workstations in the beauty, power and simplicity of it's user interface. The user can build a heirarchy of objects manipulate their positions with immediate response. It is trivial in Caligari to change coordinates and perspective in 3-space all in real-time with simple and intuitive mouse movements. The object editor and renderer are currently contained in one module with the animation previewer seperate. They plan an update in 6 months that will integrate the animation previewer (wire frame) and animation module (to high-end frame-at-a-time recorders) into the editor/renderer package. Thw ability to control these high end video recorders means that videos of unlimited lengths can be created (create several seperate complex animations and chain them together when recording to tape). The package is aimed at the professional video market and carries a price tag of $2000 which may seem high to most Amiga owners, but it is pennies compared to other systems on the market. Electronic Arts will be marketing a consumer version which will be a subset of the high-end package at a much lower cost. Octree is marketing Caligari directly and it will be shipping in 3 weeks (I can believe that from the robustness of the package that was demosntrated to us the other night). I am not affiliated in any way with Octree Software or Caligari. I am providing this information as a service to the Amiga community and those seriously interested in such a system. Octree can be contacted at 212-262-3116 and please tell them where you heard about it. The system was nearly three years in the making (yes, you did think it sounded familiar didn't you?) and I think it was well worth the wait. Cheers, Eric Lavitsky JAUG