3-D Picture Is Clear for Blur
-- by Lynn Ginsburg
Tim Miller, an animator and owner of Blur Studios, has used 3D Studio since its DOS days. With co-owners Cat Chapman and David Stinnett, Miller founded Blur two years ago and standardized on the PC platform with Max for his 22 employees. Miller says he always preferred the PC to high-end workstations like SGI. He has experience working on an SGI system running Alias (another high-end 3-D package now owned by SGI), but says, "I wasn't that impressed. Alias was so difficult to use. Then I had the chance to transfer to a department working solely on PCs to do a feature film called Johnny Mnemonic, and we proved that you could create 3-D special effects every bit as impressive on the PC as on an SGI, and at a much cheaper cost."
Miller has since used 3D Studio MAX for such high-profile animation projects as the Hanna-Barbera series Jonny Quest, and commercials for Tonka and Buick, among others. Miller says. "We looked at both Lightwave and SoftImage, and we saw things we liked about both, but nothing overall to make us switch." His company uses quad-processor 200MHz Pentium Intergraph systems, and finds that the Intergraph RealiZMZ13-T16 card's hardware-accelerated rendering provides a 30 percent to 70 percent speed improvement over conventional boards.
Ex-Toaster App Cooks for Game Maker
Windows Magazine, May 1997, page 206.
[ Go to Cover Story Online Front Page ]
[ Go to May 1997 Table of Contents ]
|
