The KVM and Waba Virtual Machine (as well as others i'm sure) let you run java programs on PalmPilots. Both of these products also have CE versions, meaning that you can develop the same app for your CE and Palm devices.
IMHO it's by far the fastest way to prototype any app on the PalmPilot, and while speed of execution doesn't compare to C, you get a good looking application in minimal time.
I used Waba to display a quick n dirty java GUI on a 1MB Pilot Pro - went from knowing nothing about Palm development to done in a couple of hours, and that caused the jaw of the guy who does CE development here to hit the ground real fast.
the Waba VM weighs in at under 80k, and a typical Waba app would take between 5 and 50k.
Thats noticeable on a 1MB Palm unit, barely noticeable on a 2MB Palm unit, insignificant on an 8MB Palm and miniscule for a 32MB CE device.
My current development work is on a GUI-oriented Java project with a servlet backend, intended for desktop computers, but i know that i can easily port it to a Palmtop whenever i like with minimal hassle.
Our customers will flip when i show them the app running over a wireless link from a CE handheld and a PalmPilot using a GSM modem.
Java, despite Suns mishandling, really does have the potential to shake up the entire industry, and make programmers lives a lot easier, especially in the handheld space.
SSL creates an encrypted tunnel between your machine and a web server - a VPN. So youre not allowed to but books from Amazon.com on the @Home network? SETI@Home? Does that constitute a violation - how about FreeNet?
My Cable ISP here in NZ has a similar policy - they say you may only connect the cable to a single computer, presumably they mean they don't want me plugging it into a hub..
I have it plugged into my linux machine running NAT - i have another windows machine i want to have net connected as well. But theres no way i will pay twice to connect both these machines up, considering the lousy bandwidth they provide. Its still just me using one of the machines at a time anyway, and i consider that they have absolutely no right to tell me how i can connect my computers in my own home. They also have no right to tell me what software i can and cannot run - if they decide they want to pull the plug on me if i'm using too much of their resources, thats fine, but these service agreements are basically a violation of my right to use the equipment that i own in any way i choose.
Would you accept a phone connection if the telco said 'you can't connect an answering machine or a fax to this line' or a car that you were forbidden to drive on certain roads?
The definitions of 'computer' and 'network' are now getting so broad as to be pointless - is my intelligent switch a computer or a piece of network equipment? How about my router? it runs an OS, can run various userland programs in addition to routing packets. What about my Palm Pilot - thats a computer isn't it? I can't sync my Pilot with my main computer while attached to the cable network??
Direct3D is Microsofts implementation of a polygon-based 3D graphics API.
OpenGL is SGI's implementation of a polygon-based 3D graphics API
Direct3D is aimed primarily at the gaming market on the windows family of operating systems, while OpenGL is aimed at cross-platform workstation-class hardware. Both are extensively used in both games and other 3D applications.
Both APIs offer the developer and end user access to software and hardware based 3D acceleration, as long as appropriate driver support is available from the manufacturer.
OpenGL is the industry standard in most areas of 3D graphics aside from games, and many games use OpenGL, as well as Direct3D.
Both APIs are now pretty much comparable with each other in terms of feature support - though Direct3D supports some minor eye-candy functionality that OpenGL doesn't support as part of its core API i think.
So the choice between the two comes down to platform support and personal preference.
Direct3D involves total reliance on Windows, while OpenGL apps can conceivably run on any platform there is hardware and drivers for. (i.e. Windows, MacOS, BeOS, Linux,*BSD along with the old-skool workstation-and-server-oriented unix platforms like IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc.
Both OpenGL and Direct3D are somewhat proprietary APIs, although plenty of documentation is available from their respective owners (SGI & Microsoft) There is even a complete reference implementation of OpenGL available from SGI i believe.
Personally, i prefer applications and games that use OpenGL, because of the cross-platform nature of the system.
Also, courtesy of the Perl bindings to OpenGL, i can code 3D apps in Perl with OpenGL which is a big plus:)
That being said, if your target market is Windows-only, I'm sure Microsoft will bend over backwards to try and make OpenGL as unworkable as possible on future versions of Windows, so you may want to use Direct3D.
3D games will sell much better when the distributions support 3D out of the box. And i mean most 3D cards - NVidia, 3dfx, S3 and Matrox to name a few.
Currently you have to install kernel modules, worry about agp support, replace your X server and finally install the actual drivers. 3dfx support uses an entirely different mechanism, and Matrox support is probably also different too.
Personally, i just don't have the time to piss around with this stuff.
I bought Civ:CTP for Linux and it works great. I will continue to support gaming on Linux, but i won't buy a game that doesn't work without spending hours configuring my machine to run it.
If port scanning is illegal, then if i put a web server up on my machine, and someone accesses it without my express permission, should they be guilty of a crime?
Come on, if you're OS and software provide crap security out of the box, take it up with the manufacturer. If you can't figure out how to deploy a secure server, don't run one.
If you leave the door open while you go on vacation, are you really surprised when you return and fine your TV gone and some bum camping in your living room.
The internet is a hostile place, in a global context.. Neither you, nor the US government can criminalise the act of requesting information from your computer any more than you can criminalise shark attacks.
'I didn't give that shark permission to bite my ass, lets drain the oceans just to be sure it doesn't happen again.'
If you don't want requests being made to your IP address, unplug your machine from the internet. You're computer is constantly pinged and polled by your ISP to make sure youre still connected. Is that illegal? When you type a URL into your browser, should you be required to ensure you have the permission of the site you are trying to access first??
Give me a friggin break.
'Tabbed palettes' which you can rip off and create new palettes with sounds awfully like the menus in WindowMaker You can tear them off and stick them anywhere on the screen - did NextSTEP have these, because, if so, thats clear prior art for such a system.
When did the tabbed palettes arrive in Photoshop - i don't remember, The earliest version of Photoshop i used was 3.something in the mid 90s i think. I don't recall it having tabbed palettes, so presumably they were introduced with 4.
I think the Kodak format you refer to is FlashPix, an implementation of the 'IIP' or Internet Imaging Protocol.
Basically, a large, high-res image is split up into 'tiles' - recursively subdivided, if you like. The tiles are also rendered at various resolutions, and all packed into the same file for storage (this tiling/resampling can of course be done on the fly)
This means a client with a fixed-sized viewport can request a rectangular region of the image, and a server (or file loader) can return the appropriate set of tiles.
Basically the idea is that you should never have to send more information across the wire (either internet, the PCI bus, whatever) than the clients viewport can display - i.e. if youure viewing a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel image with a 400 x 300 window, its pretty pointless to send the entire image down the wire, since its going to consume enormous bandwidth and memory on the client.
Instead, you give the client zoom and pan controls, and stream down the appropriate tiles as the client requests them.
This works really well, and there was a product from LivePicture (the LivepPicture image server) - i think LivePicture have gone out of business since, but it was a sound technology.
Wavelet compression on photographs does work - i belive JPEG-2000 uses wavelet compression or something similar to it to achieve better quality at the same size reduction as JPEG.
IT doesn't offer, in the general case, an enormous improvemnt over existing techniques, but in some instances, wavelets offer dramatic advantages. Motion Video codecs are starting to use wavelets, and i think this is where they will really shine.
Seriously, if your cards are being broken, theres no way your hard drives will survive in the same environment.
I would suggest a super-fancy-ass pro digital camera that dumps 80MB TGA files directly over SCSI, but if youre shooting from a helicopter, the exposure times etc. and fiddliness of these cameras are probably too long to get any decent quality.
Why not use a film-based SLR? Theyre pretty robust, and you can get a hell of a lot of photographs developed for the price of a shock-proofed RAID array.
As another poster suggested, IBMS 340MB Microdrive would be a good option, as well as Iomega's Clik drive (40 MB each, with a drive the size of a PCMCIA card for downloading to a laptop or whatever)
But again, if youre breaking PCMCIA cards/CF cards, youre doing something very, very wrong.
Come on, you can't make a texture map and youre crapping on about how great Rhino is.. Have you even used any of the features of any of these programs past putting a chrome sphere on a checkerboard??
Of course Max is hard to use without documentation.
So is Maya, SoftImage, Lightwave, Hashs Animation Master. With flexibility and power comes complexity.
Thats why documentation is in the box when you buy these programs. Pretty much every general purpose 3D program is hard to use without documentation, since they encompass such a wide range of functionality.
You can pirate the software, and bang your head against the wall for a few weeks or months while you figure it out, or you can do the smart thing and buy the package, which will usually come with a manual that makes things a lot easier.
I would also say that 80% of the people who i run across looking for high-end 3D software haven't got a hope in hell of actually doing anything with it.
Ideally, you shouldn't even start modelling till youve storyboarded your project..
A lot of people i know can't even fathom the idea that sketching out your project just might be a good way to start.. They just fire up the program, expecting to have a big red button marked 'TURN MY DREAMS INTO CG-PSEUDO-REALITY' sitting there waiting for them to press it.
Somebody should whack these warez-kids upside the head and make them realise that you can have the most powerful tools in the world, but they won't do you any good until you have developed the mental focus required to sculpt and animate in 3D.
These skills aren't picked up from inside a box of froot-loops, you have to be prepared to sit in front of that computer for years and work really, really hard at it. It helps to have traditional art skills too.
Youre so much better off starting with a less powerful package, and getting to the point where you have exceeded it's limits and need something with more power and flexibility, than getting your hands on the latest whizz-bang 3D mega-app and expecting to produce the next Jar Jar binks in the time between your diablo2 games.
Theres plenty of very capable apps that can be had for the price of a magazine (Amapi 4.1 and Truespace 3 are two i have from magazine cover disks) or free in the case of blender.
To draw a motorcycling analogy, you can't expect to jump onto Mick Doohan's NSR500 and win GP races when you haven't even learnt to get the most out of a scooter...
Bwahaha.. what about the 'atrocities' committed by your country?
It doesn't matter which country you're from, they've all been resposible for 'atrocities' at some point.
I imagine in a few decades they'll look back on the current state of the internet and call that an 'atrocity' too.
'People could post *whatever they wanted* on *evil sites* like Slashdot.org.. It lead to the moral corruption of millions of young people and sparked the most bloody civil war in the history of the world - The great Linux wars of 2004, when Richard Stallman led a bloody jihad against the Microsoft-owned Government of the USA.'
You don't really think that millions of people round the world actually have to starve in the desert, do you? And what are you doing about it? It's obviously not enough. Its a fucking atrocity man! And you just waste your time tapping away on a keybord.. people like you make me sick!
Within six months, a significant percentage of 3D work will shift to the Linux platform.
Why would you choose anything else for your render-farm?
With the interactive apps becoming available, this will drive demand for real hardware OpenGL on Linux, which will benefit the casual linux user because games will run well.
For someone like me, who is already doing all his 3D work in Linux with Blender and Corel PhotoPaint, this news comes as no surprise.
It really is a better platform for 3D work.
After suffering through the frequent crashes and general wierdness of Windows, my apps run rock-stable on linux, perform better and i couldn't be happier that its cost me nothing (well, if you count a couple of years slaving away figuring all this stuff out 'nothing')
Where are you, Hash's Animation Master?? I want to run your software on Linux too!!
Oh man, this is the kind of box that will change the industry forever...
Sure it's difficult to program, but with that much CPU power, theres no way this baby isn't going to get supported.
This will be used initally to generate virtual sets, and probably in the sports-titling field.
It will also find immediate application in the film industry - George Lucas will be able to interact with a guy playing jar jar binks and see him as jar jar binks in realtime... I doubt it will make Star Wars 5 a better movie after the absymal 4, but hey.
Those IMAX movie presentations will immediately be converted to use this as rendering horsepower, and i can think of a whole lot of other applications.
I honestly can't believe people are looking at this machine and saying 'it sucks cos it doesn't have enough colour depth' or 'it sucks because it only does 16-bit audio'...
Not enough colour depth? then write your own 128-bit graphics pipeline, implement it in software, and resample to 32-bits only when you come to the final rasterisation stage. You can't tell me that 32-bit colour isn't enough for final render.
no professional musician or audio engineer is going to use this box as a digital recorder, though it might very well make an awesomely powered DSP engine and synth.. but you'd dump that data over a serial interface to a D/A converter.. if youre spending the money to develop the software to do it, then that extra little step is a drop in the ocean.
This machine is about making mindblowing 3D graphics applications available at a price point that was unthinkable last year.
As if MTV, softporn music videos, gun-toting chain-smoking ultraviolent 'hero' movies and an endless string of television series featuring clueless, wealthy, angst-ridden, anorexic women didn't signify that 'culture' in the US has long since passed the point of 'atrophy'...
Maybe cos as at this moment, MacOS X is still *vapour*. There was a story about this on Slashdot a while back anyway, if i recall correctly. At least i can buy and install RedHat 6.2 on my computer today. Plus the knowledge that the port of Houdini to Linux from IRIX took 5 developers about 3 weeks. Maya could be available on Linux, at least within the industry under NDA, in that kind of time-frame... I doubt we'll be seeing Maya on MacOS X at least till MacOS X ships, which, given Apples track record for releasing new OSes, could be anytime within the next decade.
Why doesn't Miguel de Icaza pack up his shit and go code VB apps then? Christ, UNIX's power and flexibility come from it's non-structured approach.
Personally, i believe that trying to shoehorn linux into existing desktop configurations is pointless and stupid.
Why are we playing 'catch-up' with MS when these days you can get a java-based office suite online (www.thinkfree.com) which does more than the equivalent GNOME apps do, and pretty much everything that Word/Excel do?
If you want code re-use, etc. etc. then there are a number of options on the Linux platform - Java is a notable one. '
All that will be acheived by imposing 'standards' on linux is what happened to SCO, and what will happen to MS in a few years.
We need to look forward, not back. Make sure that games are supported better on linux than anything else, that it plays, serves and manipulates media better than anything else. When all the kids are using linux, thats the the time that MS will start to really fill its pants.
Linux is a 'Cambrian Explosion' in the OS world.. people (like myself) have come to view it as a tool to empower the single user.. I want to know the hows and whys of how my computer works, i don't want to be a corporate drone bashing away on some shitty word processor all day, without an inkling of the inner workings of it.
I don't want to see Linux turned into another stilted Desktop metaphor like Windows is.
No code reuse? look at Perl!! Theres not many perl programs written, especially in CGI-land that don't use modules. Python is getting there too - its C and C++ that are the dinosaurs, not UNIX.
If theres no community in the C/C++ world, don't make it everyones problem. If C/C++ doesn't have a standard GUI API like Win32, that makes UNIX suck? Theres Motif isn't there?
'Oh, we don't like Motif, so we made a new, different API along with a bunch of other people and now we want to whine cos its too much work to support all this fragmentation.'
so lets just blame the decisions we made on the general crapness of UNIX, shall we?.
Well, thats a load of shit. If you made the wrong choice of language/platform when you started developing your code, thats your problem, not UNIX's.
The OS does not need to be the browser. If GNOME is a good platform, then people will use it. And that will be a standard platform. But don't take away my choice to use KDE if i want to, and don't take away my choice to have 6 different window managers if it suits my purposes.
Of course meshes aren't ideal for manufacturing complex curved surfaces.
Polygons are just that - polygons. Theyre a bad approximation of any object, just like pixels won't support arbitary scaling up of an object with no quality loss. They are simply the easiest form of geometry to render.
Perhaps you should take a look at products like GeoMagic Wrap, which can semi-automatically create spline models from point-clouds of triangulated meshes. You will, of course, pay big bucks for this (though if youve already shelled out for MD and 3DS Max, you can obviously afford it.
A set of discrete points, joined up with straight lines, unless the points are closer together than the size of the smallest possible feature on your model, (probably in the order of a few molecules wide) or the smallest detail your cutting head can make, will never give you an accurate 'copy' of a physical object. The amount of data generated is formidable anyway.
Even in Hollywood, you generally can't just scan in a model, throw some bones in it and call it jar jar binks. Polygons don't make for good animation fodder, mainly because of the sheer amount of data to manipulate.
I have seen some interesting papers on creating subdivision surfaces to fit point-cloud or dense-mesh data, but the results weren't all that impressive to me.
You would be best to use your mesh scans for reference, and create models probably using NURBS for manufacturability.
This is what open source is about. Find the bugs in the Linux product (it runs too slowly with multiple CPUs under heavy load), so we can fix them.
We've seen from the SPEC benchmark and RH's TUX server what kind of results you can get when you concentrate on solving the problem.
When this kind of thing gets folded into the mainstream linux distros, then Microsoft will really have something to worry about (like it doesn't already)
So keep the benchmarks showing that Linux is too slow coming..
These specs are open, why not build a native SWF renderer into Mozilla instead of dicking around doing things with XUL that would almost certainly work better implemented in Java/Shockwave/Flash?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, i think it would be really cool to watch friends or star trek with the script translated into jive on the fly.
The KVM and Waba Virtual Machine (as well as others i'm sure) let you run java programs on PalmPilots. Both of these products also have CE versions, meaning that you can develop the same app for your CE and Palm devices.
IMHO it's by far the fastest way to prototype any app on the PalmPilot, and while speed of execution doesn't compare to C, you get a good looking application in minimal time.
I used Waba to display a quick n dirty java GUI on a 1MB Pilot Pro - went from knowing nothing about Palm development to done in a couple of hours, and that caused the jaw of the guy who does CE development here to hit the ground real fast.
the Waba VM weighs in at under 80k, and a typical Waba app would take between 5 and 50k.
Thats noticeable on a 1MB Palm unit, barely noticeable on a 2MB Palm unit, insignificant on an 8MB Palm and miniscule for a 32MB CE device.
My current development work is on a GUI-oriented Java project with a servlet backend, intended for desktop computers, but i know that i can easily port it to a Palmtop whenever i like with minimal hassle.
Our customers will flip when i show them the app running over a wireless link from a CE handheld and a PalmPilot using a GSM modem.
Java, despite Suns mishandling, really does have the potential to shake up the entire industry, and make programmers lives a lot easier, especially in the handheld space.
SSL creates an encrypted tunnel between your machine and a web server - a VPN. So youre not allowed to but books from Amazon.com on the @Home network? SETI@Home? Does that constitute a violation - how about FreeNet?
My Cable ISP here in NZ has a similar policy - they say you may only connect the cable to a single computer, presumably they mean they don't want me plugging it into a hub..
I have it plugged into my linux machine running NAT - i have another windows machine i want to have net connected as well. But theres no way i will pay twice to connect both these machines up, considering the lousy bandwidth they provide. Its still just me using one of the machines at a time anyway, and i consider that they have absolutely no right to tell me how i can connect my computers in my own home. They also have no right to tell me what software i can and cannot run - if they decide they want to pull the plug on me if i'm using too much of their resources, thats fine, but these service agreements are basically a violation of my right to use the equipment that i own in any way i choose.
Would you accept a phone connection if the telco said 'you can't connect an answering machine or a fax to this line' or a car that you were forbidden to drive on certain roads?
The definitions of 'computer' and 'network' are now getting so broad as to be pointless - is my intelligent switch a computer or a piece of network equipment? How about my router? it runs an OS, can run various userland programs in addition to routing packets. What about my Palm Pilot - thats a computer isn't it? I can't sync my Pilot with my main computer while attached to the cable network??
Direct3D is Microsofts implementation of a polygon-based 3D graphics API.
:)
OpenGL is SGI's implementation of a polygon-based 3D graphics API
Direct3D is aimed primarily at the gaming market on the windows family of operating systems, while OpenGL is aimed at cross-platform workstation-class hardware. Both are extensively used in both games and other 3D applications.
Both APIs offer the developer and end user access to software and hardware based 3D acceleration, as long as appropriate driver support is available from the manufacturer.
OpenGL is the industry standard in most areas of 3D graphics aside from games, and many games use OpenGL, as well as Direct3D.
Both APIs are now pretty much comparable with each other in terms of feature support - though Direct3D supports some minor eye-candy functionality that OpenGL doesn't support as part of its core API i think.
So the choice between the two comes down to platform support and personal preference.
Direct3D involves total reliance on Windows, while OpenGL apps can conceivably run on any platform there is hardware and drivers for. (i.e. Windows, MacOS, BeOS, Linux,*BSD along with the old-skool workstation-and-server-oriented unix platforms like IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc.
Both OpenGL and Direct3D are somewhat proprietary APIs, although plenty of documentation is available from their respective owners (SGI & Microsoft) There is even a complete reference implementation of OpenGL available from SGI i believe.
Personally, i prefer applications and games that use OpenGL, because of the cross-platform nature of the system.
Also, courtesy of the Perl bindings to OpenGL, i can code 3D apps in Perl with OpenGL which is a big plus
That being said, if your target market is Windows-only, I'm sure Microsoft will bend over backwards to try and make OpenGL as unworkable as possible on future versions of Windows, so you may want to use Direct3D.
3D games will sell much better when the distributions support 3D out of the box. And i mean most 3D cards - NVidia, 3dfx, S3 and Matrox to name a few.
Currently you have to install kernel modules, worry about agp support, replace your X server and finally install the actual drivers. 3dfx support uses an entirely different mechanism, and Matrox support is probably also different too.
Personally, i just don't have the time to piss around with this stuff.
I bought Civ:CTP for Linux and it works great. I will continue to support gaming on Linux, but i won't buy a game that doesn't work without spending hours configuring my machine to run it.
If port scanning is illegal, then if i put a web server up on my machine, and someone accesses it without my express permission, should they be guilty of a crime? Come on, if you're OS and software provide crap security out of the box, take it up with the manufacturer. If you can't figure out how to deploy a secure server, don't run one. If you leave the door open while you go on vacation, are you really surprised when you return and fine your TV gone and some bum camping in your living room. The internet is a hostile place, in a global context.. Neither you, nor the US government can criminalise the act of requesting information from your computer any more than you can criminalise shark attacks. 'I didn't give that shark permission to bite my ass, lets drain the oceans just to be sure it doesn't happen again.' If you don't want requests being made to your IP address, unplug your machine from the internet. You're computer is constantly pinged and polled by your ISP to make sure youre still connected. Is that illegal? When you type a URL into your browser, should you be required to ensure you have the permission of the site you are trying to access first?? Give me a friggin break.
'Tabbed palettes' which you can rip off and create new palettes with sounds awfully like the menus in WindowMaker You can tear them off and stick them anywhere on the screen - did NextSTEP have these, because, if so, thats clear prior art for such a system.
When did the tabbed palettes arrive in Photoshop - i don't remember, The earliest version of Photoshop i used was 3.something in the mid 90s i think. I don't recall it having tabbed palettes, so presumably they were introduced with 4.
I think the Kodak format you refer to is FlashPix, an implementation of the 'IIP' or Internet Imaging Protocol.
Basically, a large, high-res image is split up into 'tiles' - recursively subdivided, if you like. The tiles are also rendered at various resolutions, and all packed into the same file for storage (this tiling/resampling can of course be done on the fly)
This means a client with a fixed-sized viewport can request a rectangular region of the image, and a server (or file loader) can return the appropriate set of tiles.
Basically the idea is that you should never have to send more information across the wire (either internet, the PCI bus, whatever) than the clients viewport can display - i.e. if youure viewing a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel image with a 400 x 300 window, its pretty pointless to send the entire image down the wire, since its going to consume enormous bandwidth and memory on the client.
Instead, you give the client zoom and pan controls, and stream down the appropriate tiles as the client requests them.
This works really well, and there was a product from LivePicture (the LivepPicture image server) - i think LivePicture have gone out of business since, but it was a sound technology.
Wavelet compression on photographs does work - i belive JPEG-2000 uses wavelet compression or something similar to it to achieve better quality at the same size reduction as JPEG.
IT doesn't offer, in the general case, an enormous improvemnt over existing techniques, but in some instances, wavelets offer dramatic advantages. Motion Video codecs are starting to use wavelets, and i think this is where they will really shine.
What the hell are you doing with them??
Seriously, if your cards are being broken, theres no way your hard drives will survive in the same environment.
I would suggest a super-fancy-ass pro digital camera that dumps 80MB TGA files directly over SCSI, but if youre shooting from a helicopter, the exposure times etc. and fiddliness of these cameras are probably too long to get any decent quality.
Why not use a film-based SLR? Theyre pretty robust, and you can get a hell of a lot of photographs developed for the price of a shock-proofed RAID array.
As another poster suggested, IBMS 340MB Microdrive would be a good option, as well as Iomega's Clik drive (40 MB each, with a drive the size of a PCMCIA card for downloading to a laptop or whatever)
But again, if youre breaking PCMCIA cards/CF cards, youre doing something very, very wrong.
Come on, you can't make a texture map and youre crapping on about how great Rhino is.. Have you even used any of the features of any of these programs past putting a chrome sphere on a checkerboard??
Of course Max is hard to use without documentation.
So is Maya, SoftImage, Lightwave, Hashs Animation Master. With flexibility and power comes complexity.
Thats why documentation is in the box when you buy these programs. Pretty much every general purpose 3D program is hard to use without documentation, since they encompass such a wide range of functionality.
You can pirate the software, and bang your head against the wall for a few weeks or months while you figure it out, or you can do the smart thing and buy the package, which will usually come with a manual that makes things a lot easier.
I would also say that 80% of the people who i run across looking for high-end 3D software haven't got a hope in hell of actually doing anything with it.
Ideally, you shouldn't even start modelling till youve storyboarded your project..
A lot of people i know can't even fathom the idea that sketching out your project just might be a good way to start.. They just fire up the program, expecting to have a big red button marked 'TURN MY DREAMS INTO CG-PSEUDO-REALITY' sitting there waiting for them to press it.
Somebody should whack these warez-kids upside the head and make them realise that you can have the most powerful tools in the world, but they won't do you any good until you have developed the mental focus required to sculpt and animate in 3D.
These skills aren't picked up from inside a box of froot-loops, you have to be prepared to sit in front of that computer for years and work really, really hard at it. It helps to have traditional art skills too.
Youre so much better off starting with a less powerful package, and getting to the point where you have exceeded it's limits and need something with more power and flexibility, than getting your hands on the latest whizz-bang 3D mega-app and expecting to produce the next Jar Jar binks in the time between your diablo2 games.
Theres plenty of very capable apps that can be had for the price of a magazine (Amapi 4.1 and Truespace 3 are two i have from magazine cover disks) or free in the case of blender.
To draw a motorcycling analogy, you can't expect to jump onto Mick Doohan's NSR500 and win GP races when you haven't even learnt to get the most out of a scooter...
Bwahaha.. what about the 'atrocities' committed by your country?
It doesn't matter which country you're from, they've all been resposible for 'atrocities' at some point.
I imagine in a few decades they'll look back on the current state of the internet and call that an 'atrocity' too.
'People could post *whatever they wanted* on *evil sites* like Slashdot.org.. It lead to the moral corruption of millions of young people and sparked the most bloody civil war in the history of the world - The great Linux wars of 2004, when Richard Stallman led a bloody jihad against the Microsoft-owned Government of the USA.'
You don't really think that millions of people round the world actually have to starve in the desert, do you? And what are you doing about it? It's obviously not enough. Its a fucking atrocity man! And you just waste your time tapping away on a keybord.. people like you make me sick!
Oh the guilt!
I didn't see any mention of a linux port..
Come on, Apple has a better case against Cobalt than Cobalt has against Apple..
the NeXT cube, while it was called a 'workstation', had comparable hardware and a comparable OS to the server-platforms of the day.
and what about the 'Rocket City' black magnesium cube case for standard x86 PCs..
I hape Cobalt loses this one bigtime. I'm no big fan of Apple's but this is just pathetic of Cobalt.
and who can blame them?
Within six months, a significant percentage of 3D work will shift to the Linux platform.
Why would you choose anything else for your render-farm?
With the interactive apps becoming available, this will drive demand for real hardware OpenGL on Linux, which will benefit the casual linux user because games will run well.
For someone like me, who is already doing all his 3D work in Linux with Blender and Corel PhotoPaint, this news comes as no surprise.
It really is a better platform for 3D work.
After suffering through the frequent crashes and general wierdness of Windows, my apps run rock-stable on linux, perform better and i couldn't be happier that its cost me nothing (well, if you count a couple of years slaving away figuring all this stuff out 'nothing')
Where are you, Hash's Animation Master?? I want to run your software on Linux too!!
Oh man, this is the kind of box that will change the industry forever...
Sure it's difficult to program, but with that much CPU power, theres no way this baby isn't going to get supported.
This will be used initally to generate virtual sets, and probably in the sports-titling field.
It will also find immediate application in the film industry - George Lucas will be able to interact with a guy playing jar jar binks and see him as jar jar binks in realtime... I doubt it will make Star Wars 5 a better movie after the absymal 4, but hey.
Those IMAX movie presentations will immediately be converted to use this as rendering horsepower, and i can think of a whole lot of other applications.
I honestly can't believe people are looking at this machine and saying 'it sucks cos it doesn't have enough colour depth' or 'it sucks because it only does 16-bit audio'...
Not enough colour depth? then write your own 128-bit graphics pipeline, implement it in software, and resample to 32-bits only when you come to the final rasterisation stage. You can't tell me that 32-bit colour isn't enough for final render.
no professional musician or audio engineer is going to use this box as a digital recorder, though it might very well make an awesomely powered DSP engine and synth.. but you'd dump that data over a serial interface to a D/A converter.. if youre spending the money to develop the software to do it, then that extra little step is a drop in the ocean.
This machine is about making mindblowing 3D graphics applications available at a price point that was unthinkable last year.
And you have to respect that.
As if MTV, softporn music videos, gun-toting chain-smoking ultraviolent 'hero' movies and an endless string of television series featuring clueless, wealthy, angst-ridden, anorexic women didn't signify that 'culture' in the US has long since passed the point of 'atrophy'...
Maybe cos as at this moment, MacOS X is still *vapour*. There was a story about this on Slashdot a while back anyway, if i recall correctly. At least i can buy and install RedHat 6.2 on my computer today. Plus the knowledge that the port of Houdini to Linux from IRIX took 5 developers about 3 weeks. Maya could be available on Linux, at least within the industry under NDA, in that kind of time-frame... I doubt we'll be seeing Maya on MacOS X at least till MacOS X ships, which, given Apples track record for releasing new OSes, could be anytime within the next decade.
Why doesn't Miguel de Icaza pack up his shit and go code VB apps then? Christ, UNIX's power and flexibility come from it's non-structured approach.
Personally, i believe that trying to shoehorn linux into existing desktop configurations is pointless and stupid.
Why are we playing 'catch-up' with MS when these days you can get a java-based office suite online (www.thinkfree.com) which does more than the equivalent GNOME apps do, and pretty much everything that Word/Excel do?
If you want code re-use, etc. etc. then there are a number of options on the Linux platform - Java is a notable one. '
All that will be acheived by imposing 'standards' on linux is what happened to SCO, and what will happen to MS in a few years.
We need to look forward, not back. Make sure that games are supported better on linux than anything else, that it plays, serves and manipulates media better than anything else. When all the kids are using linux, thats the the time that MS will start to really fill its pants.
Linux is a 'Cambrian Explosion' in the OS world.. people (like myself) have come to view it as a tool to empower the single user.. I want to know the hows and whys of how my computer works, i don't want to be a corporate drone bashing away on some shitty word processor all day, without an inkling of the inner workings of it.
I don't want to see Linux turned into another stilted Desktop metaphor like Windows is.
No code reuse? look at Perl!! Theres not many perl programs written, especially in CGI-land that don't use modules. Python is getting there too - its C and C++ that are the dinosaurs, not UNIX.
If theres no community in the C/C++ world, don't make it everyones problem. If C/C++ doesn't have a standard GUI API like Win32, that makes UNIX suck? Theres Motif isn't there?
'Oh, we don't like Motif, so we made a new, different API along with a bunch of other people and now we want to whine cos its too much work to support all this fragmentation.'
so lets just blame the decisions we made on the general crapness of UNIX, shall we?.
Well, thats a load of shit. If you made the wrong choice of language/platform when you started developing your code, thats your problem, not UNIX's.
The OS does not need to be the browser. If GNOME is a good platform, then people will use it. And that will be a standard platform. But don't take away my choice to use KDE if i want to, and don't take away my choice to have 6 different window managers if it suits my purposes.
My 2c
Now that was a cool computer. Fuck transparent plastic, i want cold, black steel on my desk.
You change your preferences so you don't see any jonkatz posts and you still get his inane babblings cluttering up the page.
do i have to make it so i don't see your posts either timothy?
Of course meshes aren't ideal for manufacturing complex curved surfaces.
Polygons are just that - polygons. Theyre a bad approximation of any object, just like pixels won't support arbitary scaling up of an object with no quality loss. They are simply the easiest form of geometry to render.
Perhaps you should take a look at products like GeoMagic Wrap, which can semi-automatically create spline models from point-clouds of triangulated meshes. You will, of course, pay big bucks for this (though if youve already shelled out for MD and 3DS Max, you can obviously afford it.
A set of discrete points, joined up with straight lines, unless the points are closer together than the size of the smallest possible feature on your model, (probably in the order of a few molecules wide) or the smallest detail your cutting head can make, will never give you an accurate 'copy' of a physical object. The amount of data generated is formidable anyway.
Even in Hollywood, you generally can't just scan in a model, throw some bones in it and call it jar jar binks. Polygons don't make for good animation fodder, mainly because of the sheer amount of data to manipulate.
I have seen some interesting papers on creating subdivision surfaces to fit point-cloud or dense-mesh data, but the results weren't all that impressive to me.
You would be best to use your mesh scans for reference, and create models probably using NURBS for manufacturability.
This is what open source is about. Find the bugs in the Linux product (it runs too slowly with multiple CPUs under heavy load), so we can fix them.
We've seen from the SPEC benchmark and RH's TUX server what kind of results you can get when you concentrate on solving the problem.
When this kind of thing gets folded into the mainstream linux distros, then Microsoft will really have something to worry about (like it doesn't already)
So keep the benchmarks showing that Linux is too slow coming..
These specs are open, why not build a native SWF renderer into Mozilla instead of dicking around doing things with XUL that would almost certainly work better implemented in Java/Shockwave/Flash?
Well, better hope Apple doesn't try to patent their buttonless mouse, cos this is clearly prior art :)
I've taken to writing my own music..
m l
and yall can have it for free.
http://hammer.prohosting.com/~ikekrull/noise.ht
If you like it, or if you think its crap.. let me know.