Architect Puts Clients Into Plans
-- by Lynn Ginsburg
Martin Newton, an American architect working in Berlin, has been using Softimage for five years. The award-winning company he cofounded, Archimation, creates architectural animations and renderings that help architects, builders and real estate investors visualize an architectural project, letting them walk through the rendered space before a single brick is laid.
"When we first started using Softimage five years ago, we were way ahead of our time-we knew of no other architects using it," Newton says. "At the time, Softimage was only available on SGI, so that's what we used."
Newton still remembers when the Softimage community found out in 1994 that Microsoft had bought the software. "We were in shock," Newton remembers. "We thought, 'They're going to run it on the PC; they're going to take it down market.' We were afraid they'd cut the support, and turn it into a Microsoft program for the masses." Newton says that he now regards Microsoft's purchase of Softimage as a blessing. "Last year we went to a trade show and saw Softimage 3.0 for the NT, running on an Intergraph," Newton says. "When we saw that all the commands were exactly the same under NT as on SGI, and that it was very fast, we bought a copy bundled on an Intergraph immediately. For us to have bought a comparable system on SGI at the time would have cost us at least twice as much." Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc.
Windows Magazine, May 1997, page 210.
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Introduction