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From: mp@pixar.UUCP (Mike Paquette)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Amiga Rendering/Animation Software
Message-ID: <992@pixar.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Aug-87 10:54:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: pixar.992
Posted: Thu Aug 13 10:54:58 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Aug-87 09:22:54 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: Pixar -- Marin County, California
Lines: 32
Keywords: models, aliasing

Does any of the current crop of Amiga animation and modeling
software support some form of machine-independent model 
representation?  I'm looking for some form of scene description
language [1] and geometric primitive support, such as patches,
meshes, or polygons.  

This would let an animator whip up models and animation sequences
on the Amiga, and then take the resulting model and scene information
and feed it through a very high quality production rendering system
once the animation 'proofed' on the Amiga looks good.

Also, has anyone writing rendering and ray tracing code looked
into antialiasing?  "The Dream Comes Alive", 'Perpetrated by 
Leo L. Schwab', suffered badly from aliasing artifacts. Granted,
antialiasing can be expensive in terms of computation time,
but it sure makes the end result look better.  After sweating 
days or weeks over an animation sequence, its not worth saving
a few minutes a frame only to have your masterpiece stuffed
chock full of jaggies and banding.

An antialiasing option (so it could be switched off for quick
proofs) would be a big win.

					Mike Paquette
					{ucbvax,sun}!pixar!mp

[1] Not necessarily SDL (Registered Trademark of Alias Research, Inc.)
    but any sort of description of a scene.

[The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not necessarily
 reflect the opinions of my employer, wife, or pets. In fact, this
 whole article is an artifact of line noise....]