Roger

Well, in theory, it should be possible to emulate an x86 system on another platform, so I was thinking of emulating a 500mhz pentium and attendant hardware on an android tablet, just to see if I can. If that does not work, then I'd like to try running an older version of AM on a lower-end modern Windows tablet (say some sort of Intel Atom based device).

Which version of AM was the 1999 year version? Was that 8 or 9? I remember 9 as being the buggy version, and the 1999 year version is the most recent one I have that still supported Win 95/98 and NT. I've been planning on experimenting with an older version of AM in a vm on Linux and Android and I thought those versions might be lightweight enough to manage it, but still have a more modern feature set (in terms of having unibody models, hooks, 5 point patches, etc).

Weekdays are generally bad for me. Saturday or Sunday is pretty much it. Unless we did a Friday morning around 10:00 am or 11:00 am cst.

I'm up for this, count me in.

The Sapphire R480 looks to be pretty competitive with the Geforce 1060. Only mark against it is it runs at about 150 watts full tilt compared to 75 for the Nvidia card. Going to be hard waiting for Black Friday / Cyber Monday this year.

Basically this is what I use: AM, Davinci Resolve, Fusion, Krita, Adobe CS I think all those support both but Open CL may be the better option for me. Plus the AMD card in my price range has more memory than the Nividia model.

I know that AM does not directly support either, but we all use other apps besides AM. Which do you figure would be more beneficial in the long run, CUDA support or Open CL? It looks like both Davinci Resolve and Fusion support both, as well as Adobe Creative Suite but Open CL seems to have a bit more 3rd party support. I'm looking at a possible video card upgrade and having a hard time deciding between AMD and Nvidia.

I saw this the other day too, on some tech site or other. I think it will be interesting to see what changes they've made to MS Paint.

I think monthly contests would be tough to do, but what about quarterly contests, where one of those is the mascot contest? (when appropriate, I know we just had a mascot contest, so these would only happen obviously when a new release is out) I do think these help keep the community together but I also realize the amount of time that goes into organizing them is not trivial.

Any updates?

I really shouldn't have waited so long to get started on this one. Looks like I'm going to end up with another "Fumble-bee" class entry.

Yeah SGI was seriously overpriced. Part of that is that you were getting a system at the time that was ten years ahead of everything else (this was true until about the late 90s, with the advent of affordable 3d accelerators for PC and the Pentium II and III processors). Once you could put together a $2000-$3000 PC that could compete with a $20000 workstation, it was game over for them. If they'd had a clue they would have made add-in graphics boards for PCs instead of driving away all their engineering talent to Nvidia and ATI. I remember thinking that my 486-133 wasn't that much worse than an R4000 Indigo once I finally got to use one in college. The only thing my 486 couldn't do was the real-time lighting and shading, but in terms of throwing polys around on the screen it was probably close to a low-end Indigo, maybe the R3000 class. I'd have to look up benchmarks but I remember being not that impressed. **edit** OK strictly speaking I figure an R4400-150 Indigo has a similar MIPS rating as a high end 486, the edge would come in with the graphics board. So the ones I used in college must have been the low end R3000 ones, or they were the lower speed 100mhz R4400 models with entry graphics. I just remember that it felt roughly similar in speed in terms of moving raw polygons around on the screen. A Pentium Pro or PII with a Riva TNT or Geforce 256 would surely have demolished an Indigo and start creeping in on Octane territory.

So I'm getting a very late start on my contest entry, and I got to thinking: I have a laptop sitting on my desk that is probably faster (many times) than an SGI Onyx with Infinite Reality graphics (although I guess I'd be surprised if it wasn't, given 20 years of progress in technology). And even though I don't use AM as much as I should always...whenever I come back to it, I'm able to pick things back up without too much trouble, so that really speaks a lot for its design. And it probably costs about as much as a single Softimage support call would have cost back in the day. Funny how things change.

Was any of that any use? I know I sent you the link to the technical paper during the Live Answer Time. I think there was only one actual tutorial that I was able to find. The vimeo "drawing clothing" tutorial seemed to be the most applicable, but I couldn't find anything about painting on an actual CG model.

Hey, at least now you can redo the last 10 minutes of Logan's Run with your phone.

Rob, Found this stuff online, not sure if this helps you: xhttps://vimeo.com/channels/219173/79500922 xhttp://www.marvelousdesigner.com/community/forum/News/4596?culture=en-US xhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1524070306000622 xhttp://www.textures.com/category/wrinkles/112397 Some are tutorials, others are more general reference.

I might be interested, depending on the price you're asking. What are you looking to get?

So lets say I have a monitor with a vertical resolution of 1440 or 1600 pixels, is using a secondary or 3rd monitor limited to 1080 pixels a problem? I've got a couple older 19" LCDs that I had been planning on setting up to flank my primary display. Although I think the backlight on one is going out

I can think of some things I'd like to see: GPU rendering/acceleration (but I think this has already been noted as being impractical so not going to happen most likely) Support for massively multi-threaded systems (or do we have this already?) Some sort of auto-rigging, at least for humanoid/bipedal characters (probably also a moonshot) How exactly does bullet physics differ from Newton?

Very nice. I could tell that was a fox right away. You've got a very distinctive style, I hope you win.

With commodity hardware that will run these software packages in the range of $500-$1500, I don't see how anyone can still sell a $3500 package in this day and age. Is their support really that much better? I can't imagine that being the case.

I have mixed feelings about Autodesk. 3D Studio 3 was the first actual 3D application I used extensively, and I have some fond memories of that time of my life but AM is going to allow me to finish my film and barring some eventuality where the software was completely unavailable, I'm sticking with it since I'm happy with what I've got. However, Autodesk hasn't lowered their prices in the 20 odd years it has been since I first started fooling with 3D (has it really been that long...yikes) and I don't think they are going to lower their prices, since they've "borged" most of their competition or eliminated them completely. Now that they are the 800 pound gorilla in both the CAD and 3D animation markets, I doubt they will. Who is really left these days? Autodesk (3DS Max, Maya), Lightwave, AM and Cinema 4D? Oh and Blender? I think Softimage got bought out by someone, not sure if that was Autodesk or someone else.

If this ruling wasn't appealed further, it looks like the movie makers won... "Spider-Man" can alter Times Square I think one of the crazier applications of copyright prevents you from photographing a building, as if it were a sculpture that was not in the public domain. That just about make shooting in any modern city nearly impossible without expensive clearances from every property owner. I wonder would this include a virtual copy of a building? Let's say you make a copy of the Empire State building and have a giant hamster climbing it, would that get you in trouble?

Thank you again, haven't had a chance to look at yet, have been running errands/doing chores and job related stuff.

Steve, If you don't mind my asking, what was your electric cost for running your farm?