mcn@acl.lanl.gov (Michael Neuman) (07/01/91)
I'm looking at a variety of systems to purchase for a home workstation. I'll be needing it mainly to visualize scientific data as well as for general programming. Thusfar, I've been considering NeXT, SGI, and SUN. One of the most important features (aside from computational power and Unix compatibility) is the systems ability to produce animations. By this, I mean availability of animation & titling software, as well as if it's any good! Taking a look at the NeXT versus the SGI or the SUN, it's easy to say that the NeXT is inferior, but for the price, the NeXT really outperforms the other two (on a $ per MIP basis). Has anyone produced animations on the NeXTstation color/monochrome? If so, did you find the machine easy to use? Were the animations as good as you hoped them to be? Did you find anything that you wished was better? How long does it take to ray trace/phong shade/etc. an image? Thanks! -Mike Neuman mcn@acl.lanl.gov Advanced Computing Laboratory Los Alamos National Labs
gmk@ucsc.edu (Gottfried Mayer-Kress) (07/01/91)
In article <26798@beta.gov> mcn@acl.lanl.gov (Michael Neuman) writes: > I'm looking at a variety of systems to purchase for a home workstation. I'll > be needing it mainly to visualize scientific data as well as for general > programming. Thusfar, I've been considering NeXT, SGI, and SUN. > > One of the most important features (aside from computational power and Unix > compatibility) is the systems ability to produce animations. By this, I mean > availability of animation & titling software, as well as if it's any good! > I am currently display a sequence of .tiff frames from the Los Alamos Global Circulation Model simulation using the animation facility of the IconTool. I record it through the ScreenScape tool. Titling I do in a combination of WriteNow/TopDraw and ScreenScape. I think it works very well. I can only compare it to the SGI and it seems to be much more cumbersome there. The NeXT applications are really nicely integrated. One general problem seems to be memory requirements: I animate 354*298 tiff files and at 300k each these limits me in how many frames I can animate smoothly. For video recording I could also use the gif format and save a factor 15-30 but ViewGif2 does not have a good animation option (the slideshow doesn't do it really). So I was curious if there is a way to animate images in TV quality more efficiently. -- Gottfried Mayer-Kress gmk@goshawk.lanl.gov gmk@sfi.santafe.edu gmk@ucscc.ucsc.edu gmk@pegasos.ucsc.edu (NeXT mail preferred)