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From: shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: 3D Applications
Summary: The Closet of Dr. Caligari
Message-ID: <13153@well.UUCP>
Date: 16 Aug 89 06:36:15 GMT
References: <4288@amiga.UUCP> <13042@well.UUCP> <7601@cbmvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson)
Organization: The Blue Planet
Lines: 38

+-- jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup) writes:
| In article <13042@well.UUCP> shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson) writes:
| >A weekend might be pushing it a bit.  First of all, making models is a time
| >consuming process no matter how you go about it.  Blueprints help, but the
| 
| 	This might be a good place to use Caligari (though it might be a bit
| expensive).  Solid-modeling with shading (if I remember correctly), not
| ray-traced - but for this application ray-tracing isn't very important.  It's
| easy to design objects quickly in Caligari, from what I've seen.

Ah, Caligari.  Someone handed me a demo disk dated December '88 of the
Caligari program.  It looked like a nice idea, poorly executed.  The central
concept, that of using the mouse to fly around the scene you are building,
to move and stretch objects, to change the camera, etc., was quite nice.
The actual program that did this looked pretty badly designed, however.
You would expect the "flying eyepoint" stuff to move at a good frame rate
to get a nice 3D feel, but the authors insisted on using an overscan, hires,
interlace, 16 color screen during the animations.  So much bandwidth gets
used up displaying the colorful pixels that the models have to be simplified
all the way down to rectangular boxes, and even then you only get about two
frames per second.  The controls were unlike anything I've seen anywhere in
the world.  Intuition was nowhere to be found.

It would also have been useless for modeling anything realistic, at least
in the state it was when I saw it.  Everything had to be composed of solid
primatives (block, wedge, ball, cylinder, etc.), and the only Constructive
Solid Geometry operation provided was union.  You could not intersect or
subtract solids.  The models provided with the demo were little more than
toys, possessing none of the subtleties people are used to in the Amiga
rendering world.  The demo had no animation facilities, so I can't comment
on that.

Again, this was all from looking at a demo version of the program from almost
a year ago.  It's bound to have changed some.  If anyone can give more up to
date info on Caligari's capabilities, I'd be interested to hear.
-- 
		Stuart Ferguson		(shf@well.UUCP)
		Action by HAVOC		(ferguson@metaphor.com)