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- leimberger@marbls.ENET.dec.com writes:
-
- > Actually IMAGINE still enjoys some popularity. I upgraded to 4.0 even
- > though I like LW better. As all tools Imagine has a place in my box.
- > If nothing else it is good to render all the Essence textures. I used
-
- I also have Imagine (3.0) installed, although I hardly use it now.
- I found almost anything you can in Imagine, you can do in LW... faster.
-
- For 3.0, Impulse promised a change in the interface. That did not
- happen.
- When people complained, Impulse hinted 4.0 would have that.
- >From the flyers I got from them, it seems that did not happen; so I
- decided not to upgrade.
-
- Imagine is a VERY powerful program, but has a very bad user interface.
- Imagine's bones are better than LW, for example (but are a pain to use).
- Imagine offers good Free Form Deformations (Lattices). Its handling
- of textures and images is much better than LW, it has an interesting
- fog attribute (for creating those realistic clouds people were after) for
- objects, its interface is consistent (although you have 5 different
- modules).
- Textures and Images for an object are infinite. More than 200 textures
- built-in. However, this also makes working with textures a little bit
- daunting, since you never actually LEARN all textures available.
- Most Textures lack fall-off, but every parameter can be keyframed (not
- easily). Render is faster than LW, but textured renderers tend to be
- slower.
-
- Imagine's problems are: lack of good user interface (almost all functions
- are accessed thru pull-down menus. Not many shortkeys), wire-frame redraw
- is a little bit slow (4 windows interface), only works with triangles,
- no function curves (but a bad action editor -similar to LW's Scene
- timeline, but more powerful), all modules are not integrated seamlessly,
- and for animating, you usually have to travel back and forth between the
- action and the stage editor thousands of times.
- For the past couple of years, new features in the program have just
- "Popped" up, sometimes appearing in the strangest places.
-
- Gonzalo Garramuno
- ggarramuno@sicoar1.sicoar.com
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
-
-