[geeks] This Litle Green Monster...

[Kevin]

Tell them to start with POV-Ray on a 386 with 4 megs of RAM and they
will learn better than most animators/modelers i see today :)

BTW: i was animating a particle system made up of individual green
chili peppers coming from an exploding hot sauce bottle with the
peppers reacting to dynamics.  It could have been done with 2D mapped
particles but the dynamics thing would have been shot.  Hell, i only
had ~45-55 particles in the whole system and the pepper objects were
cut down about as far as i could get them poly wise.  Max was a
resource hog back then (and may still be, i wouldn't know these
days), but there were some things that it could do at that time that
nothing in it's price range could even hope for.  Wavefront could
have handled those particles in a much more elegant manner, but that
was an SGI and mutli-grand software away from me at the time.

/KRM

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 12:54:33 -0500
Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:

> 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._______________________________________________ GEEKS: 
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks


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