[geeks] This Litle Green Monster...

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 11:57:34AM -0500, Kevin wrote:
> Max came out early summer of 1996.  I first used 3DSMax under NT 3.51
> with 64megs of RAM.  The base app was usable but it became very
> difficult to deal with stuff like particle animation where each
> particle was an instance for an actual object instead of being just a
> sphere or a four or eight face object (we used the Digimation Sand
> Blaster plugin at the time to do this.)  Even when i bumped the RAM
> up to 128, it was slow going for large particle renders.

Yes, but Max was generally a hog compared to a lot of the stuff out
there at the time.  It even seemed worse than Softimage 3D, to me at
least. 

There are certainly tasks where you need full instancing of complex 3D
models for each particle, but quite often that isn't needed, and good
animators show know how those sorts of tricks, and a good program should
help make them easy.  If nothing else, it should be able to offer
reasonable speed proxies.

And, how many of the people who want to "get into animation" really mean
doing anything more complicated particle wise than dust or smoke,
initially at least?  Except for the people who want to do explosions, of
course.   Except there, I would usually expect the particles could
usually be divided into the ones that could be done using sprites, and
in the ones that require 3d models, but there is a very low particle count.

Anyway, you already said you were doing this professionally, where time
is very much money.  Someone doing it as a hobby should be encouraged to
do what will get them actually doing things, and then they can upgrade
when they can afford to.  I think a lot of people put it off because of
cost (and relatedly confusion about what app to use) and the idea that
they need a several thousand dollar computer to do anything.