waynekn@techbook.com (Wayne Knapp) (03/19/91)
About 10 or 12 days ago there was a posting or two about a very reasonably
priced 486 system. I had just got my Unix account and wasn't use to the
tools, and didn't save those articles. If someone would E-mail them or
repost them I would be thankful.
Serious Animation on the PC
---------------------------
Over the last four years I've worked with Martin Hash, of Hash Enterprises.
We and others have produced a line of animation tools for the Commodore
Amiga line of computers. Great stuff, but not too useful for PC's.
Anyway, last year I started using a PC with Windows 3.0. I was really
impressed with how much the PC had improved! (I really hadn't use MS-DOS
based machines since 1983.) The up-shot is that we are porting our best
tools to the PC and Mac lines. (We are using the XVT tools to aid in
this.)
Now there are some very good 3D animation systems for IBM PC already, but
they are very expensive. One of the great things about MS-DOS machines is
the value for your money. (One of the reasons I'm looking for a good source
of cheap 486 machines, is we want to use them as rendering engines.)
Hence, we are planning to sell our system for $1000, about 1/3 of our
nearest competitor. Anyway, I'm wondering if many people are interested in
using PC's for 3D animation. We are planning on keeping our tools
interchangable across Amigas, Macs, and PC's line. So one could say design
a character on a Mac, choreograph a scene on a Mac and render it on a PC if
he wanted. The idea is to let people use whatever machine they want.
I personally think, when people see how much power they get for the $, a
lot will choose to use our MS-Windows based version of our tools. However,
we won't force anyone to use one kind of a computer or another. Anyway,
I hope no one is offened by this posting, I'm just poking around to see
what people think about what we are doing.
Thank you,
Wayne Knapp waynekn@techbooks.COM
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