Received: from dylan.mindspring.com (dylan.mindspring.com [204.180.128.4]) by ccnet.ccnet.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id QAA27650 for ; Mon, 17 Apr 1995 16:28:42 -0700 Received: from ballen.mindspring.com [168.121.37.86] by dylan.mindspring.com with SMTP id TAA10050; Mon, 17 Apr 1995 19:30:44 -0400 Message-Id: <199504172330.TAA10050@dylan.mindspring.com> X-Sender: ballen@mail.3dartist.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 1.4.4 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 17 Apr 1995 17:32:51 -0500 To: adams@tgax.com, animmaster@aol.com, daniele@netcom.com, pcmike@aol.com, tess@graphics.rent.com, thaifan@aol.com, trinity@tyrell.net, wag@sirius.com From: ballen@3dartist.com (3D Artist magazine) Subject: Tess#508 X-UIDL: 798183920.000 ================================================== THE T E S S E L L A T I O N T I M E S #508 Issue #8 of 1995, for Monday, April 17th ================================================== TESS is Columbine, Inc.'s weekly electronic publication usually posted Monday evenings to supplement 3D ARTIST magazine. See the end of this file for contact information for companies whose products are mentioned here. _______________ Tell it to TESS Send your 3D news tips and forward interesting messages to tess@3dartist.com. Anonymity will be protected if requested. _______________ TESS on the Web http://tgax.com/resource.htm >in the Multimedia Resources area of The Graphics Alternative BBS Web server http://www.lightside.com/~dani/ >in the Literature, Reference section of 3DSite __________________ TESS subscriptions Send an E-mail message to stating simply "subscribe" or "unsubscribe". _______ DETAILS This file may be passed between individuals and can be reposted in any online forum _as_long_as_ the file is not modified in any way (it must be left whole and unchanged). It should be posted as TESS508.TXT (TES508.TXT where only six characters are allowed), or compressed as TESS508 with the appropriate DOS-style extension (ZIP, etc.). Reposting to *mailing lists* is _not_ recommended. TESS's master files are maintained with corrections on our 3dartist.com Internet site (ftp to 3dartist.com and go to /3dartist/ballen/tess). These are the latest corrected copies, and the only TESS files for which we can vouch file integrity. This file's contents are copyrighted and may not be reproduced in or with any other print or digital publication without permission. Any trademarked names mentioned in this file are the property of their respective owners and are used only in editorial fashion without intent of infringement of such trademarks. Columbine, Inc. and its publications are totally independent. No companies or products are endorsed. Published by and (c)Copyright 1995, all rights reserved Columbine, Inc. P.O. Box 4787, Santa Fe, NM 87502 USA 505/982-3532 voice - 505/820-6929 fax 505/820-6929x3 voice mail E-mail: tess@3dartist.com Staff: Alex Kiriako, Editor, TESS & Sysop, 3dartist.com Bill Allen, Publisher & Pres., Columbine, Inc. Sally Beach, Vice Pres., Columbine, Inc. Carol Williamson, Admin. Asst. This issue was assembled primarily by TESS Publisher Bill Allen. ________ CONTENTS 508.00 - Heads Up 508.00.01 - The Fortnight in 3D 508.00.02 - Special Offers 508.01 - Autodesk to Beef up 3rd Party Support 508.02 - Elastic Reality & Avid 508.03 - NAB Report, Part 1 508.04 - News on High 508.05 - Other News 508.06 - What's Up in Santa Fe 508.06.01 - TESS 508.06.02 - 3D ARTIST 508.07 - Continuing Listings 508.07.01 - Special Offers 508.07.02 - Galleries & Exhibits 508.07.03 - Shows & Exhibitions 508.07.04 - Artists' Calls 508.08 - Contacts 508.00 - Heads Up See also "Continuing Listings" (508.07 below). Here's the stuff you need to know the soonest... 508.00.01 - The Fortnight in 3D April 19, 7pm, Savannah, Ga.: Savannah Area 3D User Group meeting in Room 333 at the Savannah High School. Contact John Brooks, 912/920-3719, CIS 75551,2037. April 22-25, Santa Clara, Calif.: Computer Game Developers' Conference at the Westin Hotel. Expensive and likely to sell out. Call 415/856-4263. April 23, 3-5pm, Sharon, N.H.: Opening reception for "Out of the Internet" art show at the Sharon Arts Center, 603/924-7256. April 26, Santa Clara, Calif.: Microsoft Win95 Game Development Forum at TechMart next to the Westin Hotel, sorry, no contact. April 26, Los Angeles, Calif.: Seminar on copyright for digital artists, $60, American Film Institute, 213/856-7600. 508.00.02 - Special Offers Macromedia's MacroModel with RenderMan for Mac or Windows is now available for $199 "for a limited time." Presumably owning it will put you on the upgrade path for Macromedia's coming full 3D animation package (code named Daffy) for Mac and Windows. When we recently wanted to do some 3D text work, we again found MacroModel to be the best of several programs on hand here to get the job done quickly the way we needed. This can be a very handy alternative modeler to have in your toolkit. It generates beautiful meshes from its native spline format. See Rob Glidden's article in 3DA#15 for how to work around MacroModel's speed problems, and look up "surface smoothness" in the docs (the default setting may yield unacceptably large DXF files). 508.01 - Autodesk to Beef up 3rd-Party Support ALERT: If you are developing 3D Studio IPAS plug-ins and are not a registered developer, you should contact Kathy Clinton soon by E-mail at clintok@autodesk.com, or call 800/879-4233 or 415/507-5000. A program is in development to better reach 3DS owners about IPAS programs, and assistance is being prepared for moving DOS IPAS programs to Windows NT. Although Autodesk hasn't finished working out the path it will take to better help third party developers, it was clear from what we learned at NAB that the company is getting very serious about playing a larger role in helping 3DS users to learn about and obtain third-party plug-ins. This comes at an important time. Many developers, large and small, have been expressing frustration about difficulty in reaching users and about low sales numbers. From the users' point of view, there is a bewildering array of plug-ins available (reportedly well over 200), but, except for a few well-publicized programs, it is hard to find out what routines exist and what they do. Dealers are not well plugged into sales channels, and there isn't much help for understanding how to mix-and-match routines available from competing suppliers. As a first step in improving the situation, Autodesk announced at NAB on 4/10/95 that it will hold a Multimedia Developers' Conference on 6/22/95 in San Francisco at the Art Teco show. 508.02 - Elastic Reality & Avid In a news release dated 4/3/95 (received 4/14), Elastic Reality announced shipment of Volume 1 of TransJammer transitional effects for Mac, PowerMac, and Windows at $149.95. It includes 100 effects, such as "rocketing space shuttles and falling cows," that work with Adobe Premiere, Avid VideoShop, and In:sync Razor Pro. We heard the news earlier but received official word today 4/17/95 by fax: Avid Technology, Inc. has acquired Elastic Reality, Inc. as a wholely owned subsidiary. Avid also announced that it had acquired The Parallax Software Group, an English developer of "paint and compositing technology." Avid, of course, helped launch the digital, nonlinear revolution a couple years ago with its Mac-based video editing stations. A few days before NAB, they announced Media Suite Pro 4.0 for PowerMac "expected" to ship in May at $7,995, a $2,000 price drop. 508.03 - NAB Report, Part 1 By Bill Allen, TESS Publisher This was our first NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show. It was begun years ago for radio and TV broadcasters. Today it is undergoing wrenching changes as the field moves to digital video production and grows with the influx of a horde of new suppliers and video/multimedia producers quite unlike what oldtimers are used to. Perhaps the main image that remains in my mind's eye a week later is of a literally grizzled veteran watching someone try to demonstrate how to edit video on a little TV screen using a mouse. I don't know, but I imagined him to be one of those people not quite finished with a long career in analog video, used to working with a room full of rack-mounted hardware, and now suddenly having to learn everything all over again. Another image the first day was finding myself in a sea of suits and thinking, "Wait a minute! Where are all the artists?" When I put on a coat and tie for a graphics show, I expect to be overdressed. Not for this crowd. But this was in the large main South Hall, or maybe the North Hall, which we came to think of together as a desert maze separating the areas where the "real" stuff was: MultiMedia World in the Las Vegas Hilton, a far corner of the South hall where NewTek, MS Softimage, and Autodesk were located, and the easily overlooked new S6 hall. More than twice the attendance of Siggraph is claimed, and the room is certainly there for it, though many attendees have little interest in computer graphics. In fact, the whole show was notable for a lack of interest in content, only in delivery channels and creation tools for content. The loud and sexual content often used onsite to catch attendees' attention was definitely aimed at a mostly-male audience. (3DA Associate Editor Sally Beach said one of the best things about NAB was that there were no lines in the women's restrooms, notable in a show noted for lots of long lines.) In four days, almost the only expression of concern about what all these tools and delivery systems will be used to deliver came when we ran into attendee Peter Rosen . He told us about his work to set up the Creativity Cafe in the San Francisco Bay Area, to be a smoke-free multimedia nightclub and artists' networking salon "to use art and technology for a better world." Here's a first report on what we saw. The order of this report is not meant to reflect importance. It's almost TESS upload time late on Monday afternoon, so we're just getting out to you. There'll be another installment next week. DPS announced the Perception Video Recorder (PVR) as the follow-on product to its revolutionary PAR board at the same price, $1,995, promised for June 1995. The new product uses Windows NT 3.5+, PCI bus, and SCSI-2 to allow owners to record on up to seven SCSI hard drives. There will be some limited support for Windows 3.1 use as well, and sequential image file streams can be used from DOS-based programs. The Perception supports CCIR 601 4:2:2 processing, 10-bit oversampled video encoding, a live video capture (with optional daughter board), and output to component, composite, and S-video. "During live video recording, a sophisticated entropy prediction circuit is used to automatically determine the optimum amount of compression required on a field-by-field basis." When asked about an upgrade path from the PAR to the Perception, DPS's Brad Nogar said they really couldn't give one because DPS is holding the new product's price down. However, he promised continued support for the PAR and pointed out that it should be easy to sell a used PAR (and for more money than an upgrade program could credit). As part of that continued PAR support, DPS announced version 1.5 of their DOS software (including dual drive support, definable hot keys, an improved file requester, and better RAM conservation), and new Windows NT PAR 1.0 software compiled for Alpha, Intel, and MIPS CPUs. Both can be downloaded free from the DPS BBS at 416/754-8368. Following its arrival on PCs with the recent introduction of its Pennello plug-in for 3D Studio, the previously SGI- and Mac-based Xaos Tools announced at NAB (4/10) that NewTek will bundle Pennello with LightWave 3D. The other side of this development is that Xaos Tools has become the worldwide distributor for the SGI version of LightWave at $1,995 ($995 until 5/31/95). NewTek will continue to distribute the PC and Amiga versions of LightWave at $995 list. Digimation showed a new Russian terrain generation program to be available soon for $895 that goes well beyond any such program we've seen so far. It runs standalone but creates 3D Studio files that show very realistic complexity from fields of grass to leafed-out trees and distant mountains. We were unable to get a polygon count on the scenes we saw, but presume much of the detail is handled by mapping tricks to allow so much detail in a file of manageable size. Autodesk officially announced 4/10/95 that 3D Studio will move to Windows NT. Pricing, availability date, and even the product name (will it be simply "3D Studio release 5"?) still remain unannounced. Besides giving all the usual reasons for moving to a sophisticated, CPU-independent, 32-bit operating system, the announcement cited "support for hardware acceleration of the 3D graphics pipeline" as another motive. (See TESS#501.03.01 and #503.06 for our reports weeks ago about this move.) In:sync Corp. has moved from sharing booths to having a large display of its own for Razor Pro. That program now includes support for Truevision's Targa 2000, as well as for direct support for the DPS PAR. 508.04 - News on High Wavefront (in a 4/5/95 news release received 4/12) has announced ArcVision, a $10,000 architectural visualization program for SGI (Indy and up) machines. The software, which includes a modeler and DXF file import/export, is aimed at architects for rendering and animation (it can be upgraded into a full animation system). Rendering allows interactive tuning of lighting, materials, and textures, and the program comes with libraries of materials and props (furniture, trees, etc.). Options include Amap for generating trees and plants. 508.05 - Other News Summagraphics in a 3/29/95 news release received 4/10/95 announced the SummaFlex and Summa Expression cordless, pressure-sensitive graphics tablets. Both are said to be embellished with "stunning 3D graphics" in place of traditionally plain key and function menus. The $849 SummaFlex is described as a 18x24" desktop blotter-like device that can be rolled up when not in use, or can be turned off entirely or partially to use as a normal, non-tablet working surface. It comes with a three-switch stylus. The $389 lightweight Expression is only 6x8" in size, and has options for three-button pen or stylus, or two- or four-button mini-cursor. Software for both is available for Mac, PowerMac, DOS, Windows 3 and 95, and coming for SGI, Sun, and Windows NT (May 1995). *LightSmith* as described in a fax received 4/12/95 is "a new magazine for learning and exploring the world of 3D graphics in LightWave...covering everything from initial conception [to] completed project." Yearly subscription is 50 Canadian dollars (Cdn$50), 90 Fairway Dr., Edmonton, AB T6J 2C5, Canada; 403/437-9765; hardin@eigen.ee.ualberta.ca. 508.06 - What's Up in Santa Fe 508.06.01 - TESS Deadline for TESS#509 will be 1pm MDT (3pm New York time) Mon., 4/24/95. 508.06.02 - 3D ARTIST We're still hearing from U.S. subscribers who haven't received 3DA#18. There are always a few errors in a mailing, but, if you haven't received yours, please give it another week-plus (especially if you live in the mid-Atlantic region, which seems to take longest). For overseas subscribers, we have had enough problems with KLM delivery that we will go back to regular postal service beginning with 3DA#19. 3DA#19 went to press at 40 pages on 4/10/95, eight weeks following 3DA#18 (2/14/95). Editorial and space deadline for 3DA#20 is this Tues., 4/18/95. However, we will be flexible for another week. The issue focus will be hardware for 3D graphics, stereo viewing, probably a lot of 3DS IPAS stuff, texture libraries, and the radiosity articles originally planned for 3DA#19. 3DA#21 will have a special focus 3D medical illustration, and we're looking for related how-to's. Looks like we may do a focus on courtroom presentation in this or the following issue. 508.07 - Continuing Listings See 508.00 above for new items of immediate interest. 508.07.01 - Special Offers Through 4/30/95: Avalon site archive on CD-ROM for $30 postpaid instead of $49.95 + S&H, from Syndesis. Contains 1,200 models in 20+ file formats, file conversion utilities, textures, and more. Through 5/30/95: Schreiber Instruments' IPAS six-pack: Lightning, Explode Volume, Particle Cloud, Rings, Comet, Starburst, all for $150. 508.07.02 - Galleries & Exhibits Through 5/28/95, Sharon Art Ctr., Sharon, N.H.: "Out of the Internet," held by the Center and *Digital Video* magazine. Works by artists from 17 states. Open Mon.-Sat. 10-5pm, Sun. 12-5pm, four miles south of Peterborough on Rt. 123, admission free, 603/924-7256. 508.07.03 - Shows & Exhibitions VR World 5/22-25, Convention Ctr., San Jose, Calif., sponsored by *VR World* and *CyberEdge Journal*, held by Mecklermedia, 800/632-5537; 203/226-6967, -6979 fax; vrconf@mecklermedia.com. 508.07.04 - Artists' Calls April 24th for the Electronic Cinema at the Int'l. Symposium on Electronic Art, Sept. 17-24, Montreal, Que., Canada. Call 514/990-0229, fax 514/842-7459, E-mail isea95@er.uqam.ca. April 26th for the Computer Animation Festival/Electronic Theatre at Siggraph 95 (Aug. 6-11, Los Angeles, Calif.) Contact: Frank Foster, 310/280-7603, or E-mail caf_et.s95@siggraph.org. May 1 for 3rd annual New York Digital Salon, hosted by the School of Visual Arts. Contact Dr. Timothy Binkley at the school, 209 E. 23rd St., New York, NY 10010; 212/592-2535, -2509 fax; E-mail binkley@sva.edu. June 1 for Autodesk's Siggraph '95 Demo Reel. Send Betacam SP tape(s) to the Autodesk Multimedia unit at 111 McInnis Pkwy., San Rafael, CA 94903, attention "Siggraph 95 Video." See TESS#506.00.05 for more info. Fax inquiries to 415/507-5150. June 16, 1995 for CD-ROM Showcase, a CD of software demos with a "Digital Portfolio" section for artists' work, to debut at Siggraph '95. Contact Oregon Data Products, 1730 S.W. Skyline Blvd. #208, Portland, OR 97221; 503/292-5119, -5146 fax. June 30, 1995 for "3-D Coolness '95" animation contest. See TESS#507.00.04 for more info. Contact World Fusion Software, 5942 Edinger, #113-718, Huntington Beach, CA 92649; 714/894-4094; worldfusion.com. 508.08 - Contacts The following companies have products mentioned in this issue of *The Tessellation Times*. When you contact companies, please BE SURE to say you heard about them from TESS. > Autodesk, Inc.; 111 McInnis Pkwy., San Rafael, CA 94903; 800/879-4233; 415/507-5000, 491-8311 fax; autodesk.com > Avid Technology, Inc.; 1 Park W., Tewksbury, MA 01876; 508/460-1600, 481-8620 fax > DPS - Digital Processing Systems; 11 Spiral Dr., Florence, KY 41042; 606/371-5533, -3729 fax > Digimation; 1000 Riverbend Blvd. #L, St. Rose, LA 70087; 800/854-4496, 504/468-7898, -5494 fax > Elastic Reality, Inc.; 925 Stewart St., Madison, WI 53713; 608/273-6585 > In:sync Corp.; 6106 MacArthur Blvd., Bethesda, MD 20816; 301/320-0220, -0335 fax, -0338 BBS > Macromedia; 600 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94103; 800/326-2128; 415/252-2000, 626-0554 fax > NewTek, Inc.; 1200 S.W. Executive Dr., Topka, KS 66615; 913/228-8000, -8001 fax > Schreiber Instruments, Inc.; 4800 Happy Canyon Rd. #250, Denver, CO 80237; 800/252-1024; 303/759-1024, -0928 fax, -3598 BBS; corp@schreiber.com > Syndesis Corp.; 235 S. Main St., Jefferson, WI 53549; (414) 674-5200, -6363 fax; syndesis@beta.inc.net > Summagraphics Corp.; 8500 Cameron Rd., Austin, TX 78754; 512/873-1576 > Wavefront Technologies, Inc.; 530 E. Montecito St., Santa Barbara, CA 93103; 805/962-8117, -0410 fax > Xaos Tools, Inc.; 600 Townsend St. #270E, San Francisco, CA 94103; 415/487-7000, 558-9886 fax __________________ 3D ARTIST magazine If you haven't seen 3D ARTIST and can't find it on a newsstand or through your local user group, E-mail your snail mail address to t3.info@3dartist.com for a sample issue in North America. Elsewhere, we send an info kit including sample pages. [end]