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Take a look at gmax and Milkshape3D

>I'm sure there's other reasons, but I wonder if the CAD vendors and other vendors are going to
>consider DirectX in the future, especially with so many vendors shifting more focus towrads Windows in the last couple of years. What about
>other markets that use OpenGL extensively?

Well not that I really like 3DS but 3D Studio Max 5's press release brags about directX acceleration... So here's one going that way...

from the site 3ds max 5 also has the best Direct 3D workflow available (it's already DirectX 9 enabled), allowing you to easily add custom hardware Shaders that reflect the world you need to simulate in real time

Blender itself was easy enough to use. Don't let the vast array of buttons get you down. It's really not that hard to learn. It will take you an hour. Two tops.
The real problem arose when I started getting serious about my 3d art. Don't get me wrong, Blender is a nice program for beginners. But for anyone who is serious about 3d art or animation, Blender doesn't cut it by a long shot. Even Bryce 5 produces nicer effects.

I really hope the OSS community can do something for the program. Afterall, look at POVray. That was one sweet program, considering that it too was free.
In the end, though. My employers demand the best. So I'm sitting here hammering out models in Maya 4 with the Renderman plugin, or 3d Studio Max with Cebas Final Render.
Check out the girl on the Final Render site, or the Gallery sections and you'll see what I mean.
Blender was a pretty sweet program(And you can't beat the price), but it still has a long way to go before professionals will even begin to take it seriously.

There's currently a discussion on this very topic on MacSlash, but a few /. people may be interested in some Apple ramblings too:

Strategy: Buy Low, Sell High.
How low can the stock values of companies go? Since last fall, many in the tech sector have certainly been trying to find out. This is a great time to buy companies or technologies and lately Apple has been wisely acting when opportunities arise. Even if Emagic GmbH, Spruce Technologies, Nothing Real, and Zayante in the last year had all been privately held, they would have still been sold at a favourable price compared to buying them before the .bomb bubble burst.

Strategy: Niche Market Growth.
It's clear that Apple wants to defend the Macintosh strength as a music & audio creation tool in the long term. Since pro audio software has been lagging on the march to MacOS X, Apple is at least applying heat to developers if not exactly lighting a fire under them. Logic and associated software & hardware on the Mac will mean that Digidesign, Twelve Tone Systems(Cakewalk), MOTU and Steinberg will have to take the market segment more seriously (although MOTU & Digidesign have historically been great friends of the Mac already). The way it's looking is that a larger majority of pro audio will be done on the Mac. Can Steinberg, Twelve Tone et al. risk being caught with their pants around their ankles if this happens?

Strategy: Technology Cross-Pollination.
Now that Apple has a substantial video-production, streaming, compression, audio & other technologies, they may consider adding many good features from one to another and developing truly feature-rich packages. It dosen't take a dreamer to see the possibilities, from unheard-of professional solutions to trickle-down pro capabilities in new iSoftware (eg. look how technologies purchased from Marcromedia were crafted into Final Cut Pro & iMovie). This is one area that users, down the road, can really cash out with if Apple encourages the flow of technologies between it's new divisions.

Strategy: Sorry, Mac-Only.
One thing that is a bit sad about this, ironically enough, is the immediate cancellation of the Windows versions of some software (notably Shake & Logic) with this strategy. While perhaps more upfront than an MS-style purchase and feature-deprivation in non-Windows versions, Apple still isn't making any friends (and perhaps losing potentially loyal customers & money) by doing this. Still, one cannot say that it's not what happened to Mac users through the late 1990s (even now - look at Bungie) but it would be better karma to be more merciful once the shoe is on the other foot. Apple would be smart to mitigate the anger of Windows users by offering discounts on upgrades to the next Mac version.

Next Strategy: More Vertical Markets.
The Macintosh still has a real chance at gaining significant market share if it can be a strong alternative in enough vertical market segments. Apple is rightly building on it's strenghts, but should diversify enough so that the Macintosh is not pegged as only good for those niches (remember what happened to the Amiga? Games machine!)

A Holy Grail almost as worthy as dominating the business market for Apple is the scientific & engineering markets, often with high software margins all around. A purchase or substantial investment in Autodesk à la the MS $150M in Apple would make Apple a huge player in the professional engineering, architecture, and manufacturing industries overnight. Considering Autodesk is not the most expensive stock right now, with a market cap of approximately USD$1.4B, Apple could conceivably purchase the entire operations in cash and still have about $2B in the bank. Autodesk's Design Segment develops AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, Mechanical Desktop, Autodesk Architectural Desktop, Architectural Studio, Autodesk Map, Lightscape, and Autodesk Land Desktop, to name a few (most industry-standard in their fields) and the Discreet Segment develops 3D Studio MAX, Animator Studio, flame, inferno, smoke, combustion, cinestream, plasma, cleaner, MPEG supercharger, Topper, and many others.

With a stable of industry-dominating software products as great as this, such a purchase (or even investment ensuring MacOS X compatibility) would send massive shockwaves across the engineering & architectural markets, and ripples in the scientific & pro graphics markets who are by now used to this. No immediate cancellation of the Windows version would be posible here, rather a years-long strategy to ensure first Mac versions and then Mac feature-parity. A purchase like this too rich for Apple's blood? Try something smaller like privatley-held ESRI (makers of ArcINFO, ArcView, ArcGIS & associated imaging systems), or continue to add strength in the crucial areas of coming scientific importance such as biotech and bioinformatics, in which Macs already have a growing following as you can see.

If you're using Avid Symphony, Avid|DS, Avid|DS HD, or Avid|DS HD Editor, you are most certainly uisng a Windows box as you can't run any of this on any other system. If you are running 3D StudioMAX, once again, you are running Windows because this is all it runs on. Should I go on?

Many companies, including 3D Studio Max

3D Studio MAX is a product, not a company. Discreet is the name of the company currently making MAX, a subsidiary of Autodesk

Though, truth be told, Discreet did recently shut down their entire Combustion development office...

Good software shouldn't need a manual. The manual should be inside in the help pages, in context-sensitive help, and simply in the overall intuitiveness of the user interfaces.

The best piece of application software I've ever seen is Discreet's Inferno. It's complex and opaque, and the book is almost 1000 pages long. The software comes bundled with a full week of one-on-one on-site training from a Discreet trainer. The closest thing to online help it has is the fact that the manual comes with the software both in paper form and as a PDF on the CD.

The software costs about $650,000.

Why is it the best I've ever seen? Because, once an artist gets properly trained on it and gains just a little experience, it's just astounding. If you ever have the fortune of seeing an experienced Inferno artist use his system, pay close attention. It's almost too fast for the eye to follow. And the results are simply the best you'll ever see. Work finished on an Inferno is regularly held up as the standard to which all other effects work is compared.

My point is this: well-designed software does not have to be intuitive or self-explanatory, despite with Henry V .009 seems to think. It is a myth, and a harmful one at that, to think that software must be obvious to the inexperienced user. It's just fine to assume that the user operating the software will be highly trained, especially if the software does something complex.

I'm sorry, how is this insightful? Because it bashes Miscrosoft? Halo hadn't even been released for the Mac (or any other platform). Microsoft didn't kill it, they simply released the X-Box version first to give it some leverage against Nintendo and Sony in the console market.

Of course there will be Windows and Mac versions of Halo. Microsoft likes money too much not to make them (and they have an investment in Windows and Apple too, remember?).

And Shake isn't a game. Large studios depend on it. And most of all they depend on its speed. Even the fastest PowerMac can't compete with a quad Xeon (Dual G4s barely manage to edge out a single-CPU Athlon, and are crushed by the much cheaper Athlon MPs). If Apple kills Shake on the fastest platforms, it kills Shake completely. Studios have deadlines to meet and they certainly aren't going to meet them if they're forced to use Macs for their render nodes. It's not a matter of price or even bang for the buck. It's a matter of bang, period.

I work in animation and post-production and I know what I'm talking about. Half the artists don't even know which OS they are running, and the other half doesn't care. They just want the thing to render as fast as possible. And if you don't believe me (it seems that I'm a troll for not applauding Apple's scorched earth tactics), check out this post.

Discreet, Eyeon and Silicon Grail probably can't belive their luck right now.

RMN
~~~

But I seem to recall hearing from some people who work creating visual effects for movies that Discreet: Combustion is a very good software only solution for working with extremely high resolution images.

It's overkill because of the price, that fact that it is an editing tool, and that it is designed to work with video at higher resolutions than the still pictures you are dealing with, but it would probably work for what you want if you can't find anything else...

Does 10 or 12 bits really make a difference over 8 bits? Of course it does. Most film work these days is rendered in either 12 bits, 10 bits logarithmic, or 16 bits. Think about it: in a dark movie theatre room, 256 levels of grey (for instance) is not a lot. And if that doesn't convince you, think about image manipulation: after a few multiplications and compositions, you'll end up with very little color resolution with 8 bits. And yes, these things are often done in hardware in the color buffer (eg flame).

Readthis
and this

It clearly states the resolution of 1920x1080

I think I've made my point.

With the right tools, a director could modify the digital print to be soft, harsh, or distorted as the story dictates.

Actually, that's not the job of a director. That happens in visual effects, or sometimes in editing.

Discreet's Inferno product costs upwards of US$500,000, and one of its major selling points is its grain management tools. You can pick a particular film stock and apply grain to your footage that looks like it came from that kind of stock.

The idea, of course, is to match the look of digitally created effects shots to the look of the rest of the film. But the same tools can be used to add grain to HD footage to make it look more "filmic."

I'm not too sure about video editing. I think they still use Avids and the G3/G4 for those. (We use Media100 on a G4 here.)

Though, for compositing and effects, they use a bunch of Discreet products.

inferno, flame, flint... a whole bunch of compositing and special effects software. (discreet also has edit--for video editing--but I'm not too sure if that's on sgi machines.)

As for the price. I think inferno goes for a quarter of a million. And it goes down from there.

What do they do? Here's some info. It ranges of what kind of medium its on. (Like film, HD, etc) And the kind of effects it does (like Commotion, able to mask out complex scenes in real time... even plots the 2D image into a 3D enviroment for depth of field.) It keeps on going... but I'm not an ad.

Where do they use this? I visted a bunch of post houses here in Santa Monica and LA. Yeah, I'm pretty damn sure they can afford a bit more than After Effects :)

I think the release of the source code has some very strong potential for the game development community. Because it's so hard to learn 3D game programming, especially creating an engine from scratch, even giving the community a 3 year old base to work from is still better than having to hack it yourself

Someone will probably write a script to export from gmax if they haven't yet, giving even more potential to the GPL game development community. Hell, if anything it can't hurt, only make GPL and the basement game hacker community stronger.

Choices are getting slightly better with some free and/or inexpensive modeling tools.

The top of my list has to be Blender Creator which is a free (as in beer but not speech) and sports a very impressive features list.

OpenGL Renderer
Standard Polygon Primitive modeling (w/lattices etc)
Bez Curves
Nurbs
Multi texturing (up to 16 per object)
Texture UV Mapping
Environment Mapping
Bump Mapping
Spec Mapping
Catmull Clark Surfaces for nicely subdivding meshes
Bones and Armature system for character animation
Particle Effects
Global Illumination with radiosity capabilities
Super fast renderer
Very very low system requirements and compact size
Python Plugin Interface for extending Blender
Large and enthusiastic user base eager to answer questions
...and lots of other stuff I'm forgetting

speed bumps for Blender are as follows:

Absolutely bizarre (but incredibly efficient once you learn it) user interface
Limited import and export capabilities (import/export of DXF and VRML) although I hear that improving this area is their 'top priority' to fix

So if after trying a few of the tutorials you decide you like Blender do yourself a favor and pick up the Official Blender Guide. Chances are your local "mega mart type book store" has a copy and you'll save yourself tons of aggravation and time.

Course if you're just into mods for quake type games etc then you should try Milkshape ($20 last time I checked) but its windows only and I didn't particularly like the interface. One the bright side it can import/export just about any kind of format you can come up with.

Discreet has some freebie as well called Gmax which I've never tried mostly cos I despise 3DS' UI. Its supposedly a character designer / level editor for the mod community to play around with.

Another area where SGI hardware is the industry standard is movie/broadcast post production. With the necessary cards, SGI's hardware (Onyx and Octane) are the only boxen that'll give you realtime HD (1920x1080) video editing. Coupled with Discreet's software and ultra-fast HIPPI networking, the post production houses of the world can get their customers in and out quick. Post production houses make an obsene amount of money, charging approximately $1500USD per hour for an Inferno suite, so I guess they can afford the high prices of SGI's hardware.

----------------------------

Another area where SGI hardware is the industry standard is movie/broadcast post production. With the necessary cards, SGI's hardware (Onyx and Octane) are the only boxen that'll give you realtime HD (1920x1080) video editing. Coupled with Discreet's software and ultra-fast HIPPI networking, the post production houses of the world can get their customers in and out quick. Post production houses make an obsene amount of money, charging approximately $1500USD per hour for an Inferno suite, so I guess they can afford the high prices of SGI's hardware.

----------------------------

Haven't seen a stone case yet either. Discreet make a fibre-channel disk array that is called Stone, but it's case is made of steel. Ho-hum.

----------------------------

Haven't seen a stone case yet either. Discreet make a fibre-channel disk array that is called Stone, but it's case is made of steel. Ho-hum.

----------------------------

correct Discreet link here: http://www.discreet.com

----------------------------

I visited NATPE and talked to some people about HDTV and it looks like its starting to happen. Some channels are already broadcasting in japan.

But even though the HDTV consortium contains 19 formats it looks like there is an emerging universal mastering format 1080/24P 1980*1080 pixels 12 bits per channel (48 bits per pixel) 24 frames per second. (you can most likely find this resolution in your display settings). The bandwidth needed for this format is about 220 megs per second. we would need a fire wire cable capable of more then 1760 Mbit to be able to hare real-time transfer (the current fire wire is capable of 400 Mbits). The point is that HDTV is not that far away. I mean this is uncompressed!

My computer is ready for it, and so is my display, but so far there are no consumer cams out there and renting a sony HDTV cam will cost you about 1700$ a day! even though many digital still cams can take substantially higher resolution images (i guess its the bandwidth....) it is going to be interesting to see who will be first whit a consumer HDTV cam... sony? canon?

But the thing that i am waiting the most for is 12bits per pixel, its not HDRI (High Dynamic Range Images) but its a lot better then 8 bits.

Now let me rant a bit about resolution :
It has taken about 15 years to get to this point (this tells you a bit about how serious tv people are about formats). And the really silly part is that a mpeg image does not have a set resolution. the resolution is just a part of the header as a "please un compress this data to this resolution" statement. So since all DTV(digital tv) will be mpeg there is no need for a fix resolution. you could in fact just broadcast the data an let the receiving tv set, unpack in in any resolution! This would also make it possible for different programs to be broadcaster in different aspects. every one seams happy whit the fact that "wide screen" is 16:9, but nothing is filmed in 16:9, most films are made in 1.85:1, 2:1, 2.1:1 or even 2.34:1 so we will still get borders on our tv sets, borders that will be broadcasted and take up bandwidth! why cant i buy a TV set whit the aspect and resolution i want and then just de-code the tv signal the way I want?

Eskil

Innovation 3D. Looks just like 3D Studio MAX, only open sourced and for Linux. Let's hope it will get just as many features and plugins as 3D Studio - if that happens, then this thing is going to rock!

They took it down temporarily because of traffic...
Does OpenFX have OpenGL or Direct3D support for the viewports? What file formats does it support? Hopefully it has a better ASCII exporter than MAX...
BTW, 3ds gMAX isn't exactly going to be the independent developers' holy grail. There is still going to be license issues and it is decidely NOT 100% open source. Also you'll only be able to use it with 'kits' released by the various game developers that want you to buy their game. At least it'll help mod makers and quake modelers though. Check it out gMax info here.
Funk_dat

In addition to archiving the video on the drives to the tape as regular video, it encodes your timeline, edit bins, preferences etc. as data in the video area of the digital signal. It ends up looking like snow - random white blocks signifying data bits. Only with digital betacam, since it's lossless and noiseless, it can be done at a much higher data rate than using, say, VHS, without tape noise and much less fear of degredation or tape hits. (as long as the heads on the deck are clean)

I think this is probably the most advanced example to date of backing up data inside of a video signal. (in this case the video signal is all digital and uncompressed from end-to-end, so it's really just a data stream...but still, you can watch it on a monitor!)

Before you run out and get a deck and an D1 encoder...the deck costs $40,000 alone! :)

--Mike

Mike Massee

In addition to archiving the video on the drives to the tape as regular video, it encodes your timeline, edit bins, preferences etc. as data in the video area of the digital signal. It ends up looking like snow - random white blocks signifying data bits. Only with digital betacam, since it's lossless and noiseless, it can be done at a much higher data rate than using, say, VHS, without tape noise and much less fear of degredation or tape hits. (as long as the heads on the deck are clean)

I think this is probably the most advanced example to date of backing up data inside of a video signal. (in this case the video signal is all digital and uncompressed from end-to-end, so it's really just a data stream...but still, you can watch it on a monitor!)

Before you run out and get a deck and an D1 encoder...the deck costs $40,000 alone! :)

--Mike

Mike Massee

Anyone wanna hire me, I'm very bored at my present job. The Linux Pimp

But if you can do all these great things you speak of, why haven't you?

I think that unlike novels, a lot of people don't have a good game inside them, but a derivative re-hash. I have a little list of games I'd like to written in my copious spare time, and they're mainly conversion/rewrite/revamps - networked, shiny Paradroid 90 for example, and the obligatory Elite-done-right. That said, I like Paradroid, so for me that'd be a good game. It'd probably piss off a lot of 'modern game' fans though.

Actually competing with the big boys at the technical biggest-fastest-prettiest-FPS-engine game is hard work, but coming up with an interesting game concept isn't easy either. Ones the perspiration and the other the inspiration that, err, that guy talked about (edison?).

And another thing...3DStudio Max? Did you buy that or did you steal it? Last I checked it was around $4000.

Doesn't appear to be out yet, but 3d Studio gMAX will be a free, game-design-oriented version of Max, aimed at the modding communities. Even without that, I believe an educational Max license is considerably less that $4000.

Here is the press release from Discreet (the division of Autodesk responsible for gMax). This was the July 26 press release from siggraph.

It won't be the full 3DS Max, but we'll have to wait to find out exactly what features are included in the release. However, since gMAX will be open-source, it's likely that the initial feature set won't be the final one.

Seems to me, they're saying that you have to prove yourself worthy in order to get one of these licenses, plus pay a whole lot of money. So, even though they seem to say that they're open sourcing it, they're really just loosening the reigns a little on a still closed source program.

Actually, the only difference between the "stripped-down" version and the regular version is a small variable set in the 3dmaxcon.cfg.

"Not only will gMAX be free for download, it's also going to be Open Source"

Full press relase here

So what software is available for it? This is going to be about useless unless there is some useful software ported to it. I doubt that we are going to see Maya, SoftImage, or any Discreet Logic tools on it anytime soon. Granted, big companies like Digital Domain and ILM can dedicate some programmers to porting in house tools, but why would they want to? For the same amount that it would cost them to pay for the developers time, they can buy a couple more SGIs. I'll be curious to see what the future brings for this product.

We use discreet edit 5 here at my work . You're supposed to buy some bespoke Coompaq or IBM solution but we use a frankenstein monster and it works great. We used to use Avid MCXpress but edit came over better. discreet say they won't support you unless you have this hardware but so far they've been great.
We're running it on NT workstation 4 (sorry) OS and the HWare spec is dual P400's with 256 RAM and 60 gig of scsi disk space. Overall including the edit sware I guess it cost approx $20k. We use after effects too - but edit also expands into paint and effect. Effect is a DV compositing tool that rocks.
There are issues with the M$oft ODBC and running anything other than just edit. In short once you got edit installed and running you gotta use it standalone cos most apps (especially Outlook) will blow it to hell. Which kinda sux if you want a hybrid editing/everything else PC. Edit has lotsa functionality and is IMHO a top notch solution. But it's not a cheap one.