[rescue] Wooohhhooo XP -> 0 to BSOD in 12min23sec

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 11:32:13PM -0400, James Sharp wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, George W Adkins wrote:
> > > I'm told the king is Maya, but I've never been able to get hands on time
> > > with that either.
> >
> > I recently obtained a big SGI box (Onyx RE2) and want to try my hand at some
> > animation work on it.  I was considering poking around with Blender, but I
> > was told that it will make NO use of the Hardware in the box.
> 
> Nope.  It won't.  Sure, its OpenGL compatible...but it just uses that to
> display once its done all of the CPU-bound rendering.


What the heck are you talking about?  Are you talking about using GL for
what happens when the render button was hit, or doing the real work?  On
Intel Blender definately makes a lot of use of OpenGL, and why would the
SGI version be different, especially since that is the original and main
version?

George, Blender is a small download.  Just install it and try it
out.  The Blender book is also a good idea, at only $50.  If it isn't
unbearably slow, then it is using GL.  And no program that I know
of uses OpenGL for final rendering, except maybe Inferno, and I'm pretty
sure you don't have the cash for that.

By the way, on Intel at least, you really need a decent video card, since
Blender uses GL in everyway possible, including drawing the widgets.  When
I say a decent video card, a lowly Riva 128 counts, but ATI cards can
occasionally be problematic, and Voodoo cards downright suck.  The ATIs
and Voodoos are too slow, but rather they make nasty mistakes doing the
drawing.  For awhile blender was downright unuseable on Voodoos until NAN
was able to figure out a fix that improved but didn't totally fix things.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd