carlos@io.UUCP (Carlos Smith) (08/05/87)
Several recent postings have given tantalizing hints of the Amiga presence at Siggraph. For the benefit of those who did not attend, this is an incomplete summary of Amiga-related highlights. First of all, every Amigan should be overjoyed at the continuing Amiga presence at Siggraph (I first saw an Amiga at Siggraph '85). This is THE computer graphics show, and the fact that the Amiga comes off very well says a lot, especially since most of the equipment there is in the 10's of Kbucks range. It becomes clear that the Amiga provides amazing capabilities for its price. Of course, we all know that. But now, commercial animators, production houses, TV and movie effects people, scientific graphics users etc. know that too. This can only expand the Amiga's penetration into all graphics markets. The Amiga really came into it's own this year, with large thanks to NewTek (for their DigiView/DigiPaint combo, and Maxine Headroom (gee, I need Hyper- text here...), Byte-by-Byte with Sculpt-3D, and Aegis with VideoScape 3D (see footnote). So much of Siggraph is focused on animation and rendering capabilities that now that Amiga can do 3D modeling, animation and video effects it HAS to be taken seriously as a useful, cost-effective tool. Amiga had a good medium sized booth, and it was mobbed. Among the people in it were (sorry about those I miss...): CSA - showing turbo-tower (compatible with A2000 boards) and an '020 board for the A500 NewTek - With Digiview, DigiPaint and the greatest demo I've ever seen, "Maxine Headroom". Digitized from videotape with a product under development is a cute NewTek representative of the female gender doing a Max-Headroom type blurb for DigiView, complete with synced sampled sound. This was running forwards, backwards, looping and stuttering, shown on a big monitor visible from quite a distance. Aegis - Running demo videos from VideoScape 3D, and later, in real-time, a demo Leo Schwab slapped together (though it looked as if it must have taken a month) which was amazingly similar to a character appearing in Pixar's movie from the film and video show. This featured a well-modeled unicycle (spokes and seat springs and all) wobbling back and forth juggling balls from its pedals (one of the balls was, of course (Leo did this, remember) the Boing ball), while the scene rotated continuously in front of the camera. Meanwhile, in the background (literally) Sonix was running playing a score. A great demo though it did point up a flaw in the way Showanim double-buffers (when trying to get to the background screen to adjust Sonix, the display flickered horribly between frames from VScape and the Sonix screen). This should be easy to fix, for instance, by double buffering the bitplanes rather than screens, which seems to be what they did. But it still worked, and was very impressive. In fact they had to put up a "This is NOT a video tape" sign. Byte-by-Byte - with Sculpt 3D. A very nice 3D modeler and renderer (NOT animator). It generates very nice ray-traced images, and has some very powerful modeling capabilities. An animator is due "in a few months". Hopefully utilities will appear to allow model interchange with VideoScape. Byte-By-Byte also had their own booth. MicroIllusions - was showing a very early demo from a forthcoming modeling/ animation package they are developing. They also had their own booth. Gary Samad (sorry, I don't remember the name of his company) was demoing MicroFiche Filer, and seemed to be getting a lot of interest. This is a great package BTW, if you're into databases or just great graphic techniques. Also shown were a TV station package, PageSetter, ULowell's image proecessing board, and at least 5 other products/companies I don't remember in detail. Media Magic(?) had their own booth (luckily right next to Amiga's) showing Forms-in-Flight, another very nice 3D modeler that is somewhat different from Sculpt 3D, and is stronger on animation than rendering. (I'm buying both). It will be important to develop utilities to convert formats between these different modelers so that they can work with each other, and with VideoScape, which is very weak in its modeling. The Amiga also had a film in the video show! "Dancing Stumblers" (?) was a nice little piece done with Aegis Animator that was well enough designed and animated (much credit to the artist, when I bring the catalog to work I will post his name) to be shown right up there with the best of Pixar and Disney! A milestone in Amiga history. Amiga Friends (an LA users group?) had a meeting there with large attendance. Much of the above software was demoed, along with others (The Director by ??? is definitely something to watch for - perhaps someone with more info will post a summary of this AMAZING animation playing program. Briefly, it lets you run showanim type animations in various portions of the display.) Also featured was Dale Luck with his infamous Amiga videos... Two Commodore honchos discussed their plans for the future, including a major pre-christmas advertising campaign for the A500 and A2000. They also said that Commodore has already committed to exhibit at Siggraph '88! Apple was at Siggraph for the first time this year. Atari sure wasn't (I don't think they ever have...). For me the highlight of the exhibition happened when I went by the Apple booth. Someone was demoing McMovie or some such, and a guy was asking him (undoubtably after coming from the Amiga booth) "What about sound? Can't it do sound?" The Apple guy replied "Well, its a trade-off. If you want sound, it degrades the video. If you want more sound you have to have less video..." I had to choke myself to keep from giggling. This is getting long (oh, you noticed already huh?) but I wanted to mention that I talked with Aegis representatives about the problems I encountered trying VideoScape 3D. They said that they have heard it doesn't work with the C-Ltd hard disk (why?), but know of no other problems. I had them go through the EXACT sequence of commands I had tried at the store, no problem. Today, I went back to the store to try it again. However, this time they had an ASDG with 8Meg (drool drool) hooked up to the same A1000. Again the EXACT same sequence of commands we had tried earlier WORKED FINE. So something mysterious happened. Maybe it WAS the Starboard memory (quiet, Perry). They are going to hook that back up and try again. I want to add that, perhaps with some flaws, VideoScape 3D is capable of AMAZING results, though they will take some labor to achieve. But the Amiga CAN do impressive 3D animation TODAY, and that is saying a lot. Congrats to Allen Hastings (and thanks for your prompt and very informative response to the previous postings regarding VideoScape). Sorry this is so long, but I hope many of you will find it informative and interesting. -- Carlos Smith uucp:...!harvard!umb!ileaf!carlos Bix: carlosmith
spencer@osu-cgrg.UUCP (Steve Spencer) (08/07/87)
I heard all about Leo's demo from a friend who had the $$$ to attend.
I have a question, though, that he wasn't able to answer: was the demo
running on a vanilla Amiga or was there a Turbo tower backing this amazing
piece of animation up? My friend said that there were wires going all over
the exhibit behind the machines and so he couldn't tell.
Looking forward to next year already...
--
...I'm growing older but not up... - Jimmy Buffett
Stephen Spencer, Graduate Student
The Computer Graphics Research Group
The Ohio State University
1501 Neil Avenue, Columbus OH 43210
{decvax,ucbvax}!cbosg!osu-cgrg!spencer (uucp)ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) (08/09/87)
In article <877@osu-cgrg.UUCP> spencer@osu-cgrg.UUCP (Steve Spencer) writes: > >I heard all about Leo's demo from a friend who had the $$$ to attend. >I have a question, though, that he wasn't able to answer: was the demo >running on a vanilla Amiga or was there a Turbo tower backing this amazing >piece of animation up? [ ... ] Nope, it was a normal Amiga 2000. The only extrordinary thing was that it had 2 megs of RAM (I think). The anim file is 700K all by itself. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape ihnp4!ptsfa -\ \_ -_ Bike shrunk by popular demand, dual ---> !{well,unicom}!ewhac O----^o But it's still the only way to fly. hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack") "Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctor
baer@percival.UUCP (Ken Baer) (08/09/87)
In article <877@osu-cgrg.UUCP> spencer@osu-cgrg.UUCP (Steve Spencer) writes: > >was the demo [The VideoScape 3D Juggling Unicycle] >running on a vanilla Amiga or was there a Turbo tower backing this amazing >piece of animation up? To my knowledge, it was a vanilla Amiga 2000, maybe with some extra memory. The Aegis guys said that they were trying to compress the thing down to run on 512k. They also had Sonix playing music at the same time. Boy I love Multitasking! Though he may have inadvertently treaded on a few toes, it was great to finally see some Demo other than Infinite Loop (as much as I like it). -- -Ken Baer. I'm a graduate now, so please hire me! USENET - ...tektronix!reed!percival!baer OR baer@percival.pdx.com "The Few, The Proud, The Criminally Insane - Oberlin Computer Science" - me.
ross@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu (Ross Miller) (08/11/87)
There was a very very small Atari presence at Siggraph, I am not even sure it was Atari. On Friday night, I think, there was a party at the Hilton for exhibitors, there was 8 Atari 1040's, I thought the high end was the mega ST, running a game. The neat thing was they were all playing in the same world, midi interfaces were used for data transfer. It consisted of each person being a smiley face running around shooting other smiley faces. Quite fun. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Notice the above contained facts, real facts, not opinions, flames or other noise. The above was in response to whether or not Atari was at Siggraph. Lastly the beach party, even without the ST's, was much more fun. Ross -- csnet: ross@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu uucp: ross@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu || ...wanginst!ulowell!ross Trust the computer. The computer is your friend.
jdow@gryphon.CTS.COM (Joanne Dow) (08/12/87)
In article <877@osu-cgrg.UUCP> spencer@osu-cgrg.UUCP (Steve Spencer) writes: > >I heard all about Leo's demo from a friend who had the $$$ to attend. >I have a question, though, that he wasn't able to answer: was the demo >running on a vanilla Amiga or was there a Turbo tower backing this amazing >piece of animation up? My friend said that there were wires going all over >the exhibit behind the machines and so he couldn't tell. > > Aw right some history: at the show the demo was a 96 frame circular animation meaning it could loop indefinately and seamlessly. It showed a black background with a yellow (slightly the worse for aliasing) circus ring. The ring had a red star in it. Inside the star you had a unicycle oscillating back and forth as the three balls were juggled by the seat and the two pedals. This was played with a more recent version of showanim. As I caught the events Leo arrives (in his cape as usual) and hands a disk to Bill Volk probably saying something like, "play this." Bill ran it up. Bill liked it. er Bill *L*I*K*E*D* it. (So did the rest of us kibbitzers.) Then Bill gets the clever idea of running SONIX as well to provide sound backup. (Do THAT on yer Mac fellas!) In otherwords that demo at the Aegis table of the C= booth at SIGGRAPH 87 was running on an A2000, all of it - visual, sound, and fury. <@_@>
richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (08/13/87)
In article <1614@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu> ross@swan.cs.ulowell.edu (Ross Miller) writes: >There was a very very small Atari presence at Siggraph, I am not even >sure it was Atari. On Friday night, there was a party at the MUST have been good. It was on thursday..... -- Richard Sexton INTERNET: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM UUCP: {akgua, hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, ihnp4, nosc}!crash!gryphon!richard "It's too dark to put the key in my ignition..."
whorfin@pixar.UUCP (Rick Sayre) (08/14/87)
In article <1614@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu> ross@swan.cs.ulowell.edu (Ross Miller) writes:
->[summary of Hilton party]
-> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
->Notice the above contained facts, real facts, not opinions, flames
->or other noise. The above was in response to whether or not Atari
->was at Siggraph.
And we appreciate that.
->Lastly the [PIXAR/PDI] beach party, even without the ST's, was much more fun.
->
-> Ross
But how can that be? We _all_ know that "There's no fun at Pixar". :-)
--
Rick Sayre "Use more honey;
{sun|ucbvax}!pixar!whorfin find out what she knows"