Well, I;ve used Maya, Mirai, Houdini and Lightwave. The truth is that all Real World(tm) 3D apps are very hard to master. Master=feel totally comfortable with so that it feels like writing with a pen or pencil. This fluency is essential to any artist. Casual 3D dabblers really haven;t got a clue about the level of 'mastery' proper artists have in their favourite 3D tools.
In my experience Blender simply 'makes sense': use the mouse to select objects and vertices, use a hand on the keyboard to select a feature. R for rotation, B for box select, G for grab and move, S for scale, the list goes on and on. Zooming, panning, view selection, all of it is very compact, and direct. Yes, it takes time to learn, but once you 'get it' it's fantastic.
Even on a older 400Mhz SGI workstation, Blender is responsive enough to be a completely reasonable choice. All in all, Blender has proven to be a capable, incredibly fast, productivity enhancing 3D 'pencil' for me. All I needed to do was learn the program and support it with a couple of euro's as a donation to the Blender Foundation.
As Linus is so fond of saying: like Sex, Software is better when it's free;)
Most 'Experts' I know use a windowmanager of their liking, a good texteditor and a bunch of xterms. One of the most annoying things to happen in Free Software land recently is the growth of 'fat' apps that need GNOME/KDE/Bloat-du-jour to compile from source. And don;t get me started on the 'Modern' GNU/Linux distro's... The whole GNOME/KDE Desktop metaphor UI thing is for non-experts in the first place, as most 'desktops' that offer filesystem navigation and application lists/loaders take up 'headspace' that experts can put to use in other ways.
If Free Software UI developers would take notice of experts' Real World(tm) needs, they would stop hacking on file system navigation tools that are basically MacOS Finder rip-offs, and start thinking real hard about UI's that use InfoViz techniques to make our life in the morass of data that is our working reality a bit more managable.
We don;t need a bloated uber-dependant environment to change desktop settings and find our files. we've got dotfiles, texteditors and the UNIX shell for that. But organising a mulitude of datastreams like on-line docs, off-line docs, project versions, data storage: music, pics, video, RSS feeds, Blogs, e-mail, IM, daemon logs and the root consoles of my servers _that's_ what I want help with.
In otherwords: computer-use for dummies was solved years ago when MacOS 6 or so was released. However, managing todays massive 'InfoGlut' is still very much a major problem.
Why spend money on a PDA when you've got beermats?
In an amazingly cheap package Beermats offer:
- open, multi-language platform - totally flexible UI - multi-person visible display surface - great information exchange function - unlimited battery life - great array of games - OEM-custom skinning - extremly svelte form-factor. - comes free with Beer!
And if all of this isn;t enough, power-users can always step up to Backs of Envelopes.
I never thought I;d see the day when SGI's entry level MIPS-based desktop product - the now several years old Fuel box - would seem an attractive buy compared to anything else on the market.
The Sun blade 1500 surely must be the lamest piece of PeeCee-inspired 'Top Tier' vendor junk ever conceived.
The world being saved by an immaculately conceived son, because he was sacrificed by his ghost of a father as penance for my sins 2000 years on?
Sounds like a comedy of errors to me:)
Oh, and of course I'm being insulting, it's xmas for chrissakes - I've got to vent my frustration over tinsel and green and red and gold and merchandising some place.
If you must be religious at least have the decency to try something semi-rational like Buddhism or classical Judaism. On the other hand the Jews wont let you in to their exclusive club so easy, and the buddhists might be just a little too self-reliant for your taste.
The space elevator wont happen as it is hard to secure from people who what to pressure or embarrass the people that built it.
Consider how easily a cessna or some other flying craft filled with delusional muslims, white power supremacists, 7th day adventists or some other crackpot-du-jour, can be flown into it and cause major embarrassment to the spineless politicians that declared it perfectly safe.
On the other hand the politicians might be able to blame it on the autoprompter, in which case it's all due to underfunding of the space agency that put the Space Elevator up... do I hear anybody mutter 'conspiracy'?;)
A couple of years ago when the X-Box was still in development and the IT-journalist whores were trying to figure out what was going on, I remember seeing an interview with some young gamedesigner at M$. The mag had him posed behind an object really shaped like an X with a glowing green logo in the middle. The feet and arms of the box were indeed cutout, unlike the currently shipping xbox. I remember thinking how cool is that case... could it be the M$ will be shipping something cool?
Well we all know now... the boring square black blob is so cool it inspired someone to stick it into a plexiglass babycoffin...
It has an extremely powerful Drag 'n Drop 'droppocket' feature. So you can drag items in and out of it to your desktop. It has an entry box with filename autocomplete that is linked to the file list above. It remembers the name of the last file you used and it has funky buttons on top of the directory path parts so you can jump to a higher level dir _real_ quick.
As with most things in computerland that are 9 years old, it can be improved with some of todays ideas, but it's still a _very_ good design.
Actually my z7 sony mobile is the single besterest designed mobile ever, barring the nokia 3120 'truncheon' model. Small, square, no protruding airial, light, great UI. Excellent all round.
well wrt not noticing. Many major systems are off-line so often for 'maintenance' of crap software, that the fact that the file servers were offline would have been ignored by any number of brucies searing: 'sheila! the f*cking system is off-line again.'.
Offline systems are very much the modern day version of 'crying wolf'.
Besides, Austrailians should stick to cricket and leave computing to the WOGs.
I live in holland and the quality of TV here is _way_ below the programming of the BBC. Too much moronic dutch drama that feels like the 'school play' and and an increasing amount of US produced touch feely My-kids-got-kidnapped-by-aliens TV-movie drivel is what we get here. It so bad that the best dutch 'home' productions are the TV summaries of the matches Ajax plays.
Having said that, I suspect that people in italy who have to live with RAI Uno would consider dutch TV the best thing since sliced bread. As thedy have to watch those god-aweful Berlusconi sponsored soft-porn game shows. TV of the BBC's caliber must seem totally beyond any possible realm of reality to them iti's.
There's a lesson you could all learn: Doing something for the PUBLIC GOOD! GOOD for YOU and ME and the little MAN in the street. Not just for the F*CKING shareholders and the top directors.
I knew it all along, the fact that people have to pay for watching reruns of Starsky and Hutch, Loveboat and the A-Team is what has made the US the single most dispised country in the world!
Take that you uber greedy american corporate swine!
Folks, that's NOT a "workstation". A dual Xeon cHomPaq is a workstation.
If you're going to nitpick... I;d say that a SGI Tezro or a Sun Blade 2000 is a 'workstation'. They have 64bit non-Intel CPU's with massive L1/L2 caches, they have overengineered cases, they have system architectures designed for huge bandwidth, and their listprices are prohibitive to the point of extortion.
A dual Xeon or a single P4, be it from compaq/hp or boxx, is still only a boring PeeCee.
As whether it still makes sense to buy a true workstation or a boring PeeCee for tasks that used to be called 'high-end', well that's another discussion entirely.
Well well well a pro-israeli post in public. You're either a money grabbing Jew or a right-wing christian loony.
After all, anybody that doesn;t condem the evil israeli opressor and support the heroic palastinian freedom fighter can;t be a well adjusted member of western urban society.
Or so the ever objective news media and the bleeding-heart left-wing humanist intelligentsia would have us believe.
As a professional webdesigner I have used the GIMP on GNU/Linux for over 4 years. I wil agree that the GIMP is in no way in Photoshops league when it comes to print pre-press work. Although I _have_ used GIMP for print work and GIMP has performed much above expectation, but it;s not anywhere as powerful as photoshop for pre-press.
the UI issues with GIMP mentioned by some I think are personal. I happen to prefer the GIMP;s UI over Photoshops.
Reasonable smart text editing has been available in GIMP 1.2.x for a long time now via the dynamic text option. And 1.3.x developer has totally rewritten text funtionality. The main problem actually has been in the quality of the rendered glyohs. The 1,2,x Dynamic Text plugin uses a gross hack to get AA fonts, but the new 1.3.x CVS version of GIMP uses Freetype and has _excellent_ glyph AA quality.
export to PDF is a matter of knowing how to use your GNU/Linux or Unix system. Ghostscript is very very cool.
I love the GIMPs real scriptability, and I love the fact that it;s Free Software.
My single greatest annoyance with GIMP is that is still doesn;t support layer groupings. But that is on its way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I;ve used Maya, Mirai, Houdini and Lightwave. The truth is that all Real World(tm) 3D apps are very hard to master. Master=feel totally comfortable with so that it feels like writing with a pen or pencil. This fluency is essential to any artist. Casual 3D dabblers really haven;t got a clue about the level of 'mastery' proper artists have in their favourite 3D tools.
;)
In my experience Blender simply 'makes sense': use the mouse to select objects and vertices, use a hand on the keyboard to select a feature. R for rotation, B for box select, G for grab and move, S for scale, the list goes on and on. Zooming, panning, view selection, all of it is very compact, and direct. Yes, it takes time to learn, but once you 'get it' it's fantastic.
Even on a older 400Mhz SGI workstation, Blender is responsive enough to be a completely reasonable choice. All in all, Blender has proven to be a capable, incredibly fast, productivity enhancing 3D 'pencil' for me. All I needed to do was learn the program and support it with a couple of euro's as a donation to the Blender Foundation.
As Linus is so fond of saying: like Sex, Software is better when it's free
'Expert Mode' sheesh...
Most 'Experts' I know use a windowmanager of their liking, a good texteditor and a bunch of xterms. One of the most annoying things to happen in Free Software land recently is the growth of 'fat' apps that need GNOME/KDE/Bloat-du-jour to compile from source. And don;t get me started on the 'Modern' GNU/Linux distro's... The whole GNOME/KDE Desktop metaphor UI thing is for non-experts in the first place, as most 'desktops' that offer filesystem navigation and application lists/loaders take up 'headspace' that experts can put to use in other ways.
If Free Software UI developers would take notice of experts' Real World(tm) needs, they would stop hacking on file system navigation tools that are basically MacOS Finder rip-offs, and start thinking real hard about UI's that use InfoViz techniques to make our life in the morass of data that is our working reality a bit more managable.
We don;t need a bloated uber-dependant environment to change desktop settings and find our files. we've got dotfiles, texteditors and the UNIX shell for that. But organising a mulitude of datastreams like on-line docs, off-line docs, project versions, data storage: music, pics, video, RSS feeds, Blogs, e-mail, IM, daemon logs and the root consoles of my servers _that's_ what I want help with.
In otherwords: computer-use for dummies was solved years ago when MacOS 6 or so was released. However, managing todays massive 'InfoGlut' is still very much a major problem.
You mean we wont be seeing another horrible white PVC contraption with gimmicky chrome screenhinge running that icky winegum OS for a while?
I say Mr Jobs, you've made my day!
Why spend money on a PDA when you've got beermats?
In an amazingly cheap package Beermats offer:
- open, multi-language platform
- totally flexible UI
- multi-person visible display surface
- great information exchange function
- unlimited battery life
- great array of games
- OEM-custom skinning
- extremly svelte form-factor.
- comes free with Beer!
And if all of this isn;t enough, power-users can always step up to Backs of Envelopes.
I never thought I;d see the day when SGI's entry level MIPS-based desktop product - the now several years old Fuel box - would seem an attractive buy compared to anything else on the market.
The Sun blade 1500 surely must be the lamest piece of PeeCee-inspired 'Top Tier' vendor junk ever conceived.
Go SGI go!
Christians are hilarious.
:)
The world being saved by an immaculately conceived son, because he was sacrificed by his ghost of a father as penance for my sins 2000 years on?
Sounds like a comedy of errors to me
Oh, and of course I'm being insulting, it's xmas for chrissakes - I've got to vent my frustration over tinsel and green and red and gold and merchandising some place.
If you must be religious at least have the decency to try something semi-rational like Buddhism or classical Judaism. On the other hand the Jews wont let you in to their exclusive club so easy, and the buddhists might be just a little too self-reliant for your taste.
The space elevator wont happen as it is hard to secure from people who what to pressure or embarrass the people that built it.
;)
Consider how easily a cessna or some other flying craft filled with delusional muslims, white power supremacists, 7th day adventists or some other crackpot-du-jour, can be flown into it and cause major embarrassment to the spineless politicians that declared it perfectly safe.
On the other hand the politicians might be able to blame it on the autoprompter, in which case it's all due to underfunding of the space agency that put the Space Elevator up... do I hear anybody mutter 'conspiracy'?
A couple of years ago when the X-Box was still in development and the IT-journalist whores were trying to figure out what was going on, I remember seeing an interview with some young gamedesigner at M$. The mag had him posed behind an object really shaped like an X with a glowing green logo in the middle. The feet and arms of the box were indeed cutout, unlike the currently shipping xbox. I remember thinking how cool is that case... could it be the M$ will be shipping something cool?
Well we all know now... the boring square black blob is so cool it inspired someone to stick it into a plexiglass babycoffin...
Actually it doesn't.
It has an extremely powerful Drag 'n Drop 'droppocket' feature. So you can drag items in and out of it to your desktop. It has an entry box with filename autocomplete that is linked to the file list above. It remembers the name of the last file you used and it has funky buttons on top of the directory path parts so you can jump to a higher level dir _real_ quick.
As with most things in computerland that are 9 years old, it can be improved with some of todays ideas, but it's still a _very_ good design.
Actually my z7 sony mobile is the single besterest designed mobile ever, barring the nokia 3120 'truncheon' model. Small, square, no protruding airial, light, great UI. Excellent all round.
Actually in some of the places where I used to work, you would not get a job interview if you submitted a 'formatted' CV.
well wrt not noticing. Many major systems are off-line so often for 'maintenance' of crap software, that the fact that the file servers were offline would have been ignored by any number of brucies searing: 'sheila! the f*cking system is off-line again.'.
Offline systems are very much the modern day version of 'crying wolf'.
Besides, Austrailians should stick to cricket and leave computing to the WOGs.
You are totally insane. The Beeb rocks!
I live in holland and the quality of TV here is _way_ below the programming of the BBC. Too much moronic dutch drama that feels like the 'school play' and and an increasing amount of US produced touch feely My-kids-got-kidnapped-by-aliens TV-movie drivel is what we get here. It so bad that the best dutch 'home' productions are the TV summaries of the matches Ajax plays.
Having said that, I suspect that people in italy who have to live with RAI Uno would consider dutch TV the best thing since sliced bread. As thedy have to watch those god-aweful Berlusconi sponsored soft-porn game shows. TV of the BBC's caliber must seem totally beyond any possible realm of reality to them iti's.
There's a lesson you could all learn: Doing something for the PUBLIC GOOD! GOOD for YOU and ME and the little MAN in the street. Not just for the F*CKING shareholders and the top directors.
I knew it all along, the fact that people have to pay for watching reruns of Starsky and Hutch, Loveboat and the A-Team is what has made the US the single most dispised country in the world!
Take that you uber greedy american corporate swine!
Folks, that's NOT a "workstation". A dual Xeon cHomPaq is a workstation.
If you're going to nitpick... I;d say that a SGI Tezro or a Sun Blade 2000 is a 'workstation'. They have 64bit non-Intel CPU's with massive L1/L2 caches, they have overengineered cases, they have system architectures designed for huge bandwidth, and their listprices are prohibitive to the point of extortion.
A dual Xeon or a single P4, be it from compaq/hp or boxx, is still only a boring PeeCee.
As whether it still makes sense to buy a true workstation or a boring PeeCee for tasks that used to be called 'high-end', well that's another discussion entirely.
Well well well a pro-israeli post in public. You're either a money grabbing Jew or a right-wing christian loony.
After all, anybody that doesn;t condem the evil israeli opressor and support the heroic palastinian freedom fighter can;t be a well adjusted member of western urban society.
Or so the ever objective news media and the bleeding-heart left-wing humanist intelligentsia would have us believe.
----
As a professional webdesigner I have used the GIMP on GNU/Linux for over 4 years. I wil agree that the GIMP is in no way in Photoshops league when it comes to print pre-press work. Although I _have_ used GIMP for print work and GIMP has performed much above expectation, but it;s not anywhere as powerful as photoshop for pre-press.
the UI issues with GIMP mentioned by some I think are personal. I happen to prefer the GIMP;s UI over Photoshops.
Reasonable smart text editing has been available in GIMP 1.2.x for a long time now via the dynamic text option. And 1.3.x developer has totally rewritten text funtionality. The main problem actually has been in the quality of the rendered glyohs. The 1,2,x Dynamic Text plugin uses a gross hack to get AA fonts, but the new 1.3.x CVS version of GIMP uses Freetype and has _excellent_ glyph AA quality.
export to PDF is a matter of knowing how to use your GNU/Linux or Unix system. Ghostscript is very very cool.
I love the GIMPs real scriptability, and I love the fact that it;s Free Software.
My single greatest annoyance with GIMP is that is still doesn;t support layer groupings. But that is on its way.
grts,
avi