🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1jhc9rINN4g6@gap.caltech.edu> woolstar@gumby.cs.caltech.edu (Derek Woolverton) writes:
>The nice part was that the indigo was twice as fast as the network of ten
>motorola cpus.
>    The software to render StrataVision scenes on the Indigo costs
>$2,000 and will be available in march.

The problem with that comparison is that StrataVision is a horrendous PIG
when it comes to render times (as is the case with most of the Mac animation
packages). Whether it runs faster on the Indigo is not truly relevant since
there are too many other variables to consider. What is relevant is that
my renderer of choice on a networked Amiga system does run faster and cheaper
than the SGI solution with one of the high-end packages available there.

A much better counter argument is the one posted by Gavin Bell. It is true
that a single more powerful system provides better feedback for scene
definition. But it is not always true that scene composition/definition
plays a major role in the animation creation. In the case of Babylon 5,
a typical scene might require 1-2 days modeling and object definition, 45
minutes of scene composition, and 4 hours of rendering. This of course
can vary dramatically depending on the animation. To help make scene
composition less of a burden in the networked case, animators frequently
create simplfied versions of their objects for scripting, which can then
be replaced at render time. This works very effectively provided that the
object count in the scene is not too astronomical.
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