Light ROM 3/Light ROM 3 - Disc 2.iso/tess/tess503.txt

Text File | 1995-03-14 | 20KB | 399 lines

From [e-mail] Tue Mar 14 13:52:55 1995
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 17:05:01 -0600
From: 3D Artist magazine <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: TESS#503

==================================================
 THE   T E S S E L L A T I O N   T I M E S   #503
     Issue #3 of 1995, for Monday, March 13th
==================================================

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.
_______
DETAILS
This file may be passed between individuals electronically or in print, 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
TESS503.TXT (TES503.TXT where only six characters are allowed), or
compressed as TESS503 with the appropriate DOS-style extension (ZIP, etc.).
  The TESS master file copies are maintained with corrections in the /tess
subdirectory on our 3dartist.com Internet site (ftp to 3dartist.com, go to a
directory named either "3dartist" or "ballen", then to /tess). These are the
only TESS copies 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. (Automatic
permission is granted to non-profit 3D user groups to appropriately excerpt
from *The Tessellation Times* in group newsletters if credit and contact
info is given for TESS and 3D ARTIST.)
  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: [e-mail]

Staff:
Alex Kiriako, Editor, TESS & Sysop, 3dartist.com <[e-mail]>
Bill Allen, Publisher & Pres., Columbine, Inc. <[e-mail]>
Sally Beach, Vice Pres., Columbine, Inc. <[e-mail]>
Carol Williamson, Admin. Asst. <[e-mail]>

This issue was assembled primarily by TESS Publisher Bill Allen.
________
CONTENTS
503.00 - Heads Up
503.00.01 - Price Cuts & Special Offers
503.00.02 - The Week in 3D
503.00.03 - Artists' Call Deadlines
503.00.04 - Multimedia Law
503.01 - [story pulled]
503.02 - What's Up in Santa Fe
503.02.01 - TESS
503.02.02 - Working on the Internet
503.02.03 - 3D ARTIST #18
503.02.04 - 3D ARTIST Coming Issues
503.03 - 3D Online
503.03.01 - TESS on the World Wide Web
503.03.02 - Walking the Web
503.03.03 - The ACM Siggraph Online Bibliography Project by Eric Haines
503.03.04 - CorelNET
503.04 - On High
503.04.01 - Wavefront Prices Cut 50%
503.04.02 - Autodesk Ships SGI Renderer
503.04.03 - Sony 16:9 28" Monitor
503.05 - More News
503.05.01 - Simply Scenes for 3DS
503.05.02 - WalkAbout for AutoCAD
503.06 - Follow-Ups: More about O.J. & 3DSr5 + corrections
503.07 - Contacts: Where to get more info

503.00 - Heads Up
Here's the stuff you need to know the soonest...

503.00.01 - Price Cuts & Special Offers
See TESS#502.01.01 about Byte by Byte's 50% cut in Sculpt 3D v4 prices for
Mac. And see TESS#501.01.01 about their competitive upgrade offer available
through April 15th for SoftF/X for Windows 3.1/95/NT.

503.00.02 - The Week in 3D
On 3dartist.com, see calendar.txt for a long-range list of 3D-related
events, and /3dartist/dt3dsigs.txt for routine 3D user group meetings.

> March 15, New Media Expo, Convention Ctr., Los Angeles, Calif.
> March 17, 5-7pm, reception for New Mexico computer artists/Rio Grande
Siggraph fine art exhibit, Kimo Theatre, 423 Central Ave., Albuquerque, N.M.
Show runs through March 31, Mon.-Fri. 9-5. Contact: [e-mail]
> AutoCAD r13 On the Road tour, 3/21/95 in Houston, Texas and 3/23/95 in
Orlando, Fla. $99 one-day class held by the AutoCAD Helpline. Call
800/373-3284 or fax [phone]. Reportedly "bypasses the glossy brochures
and boring slide shows," and tells "what's fixed and what's not." Also in
Cleveland 3/29, Denver 4/4, and Los Angeles 4/6.

503.00.03 - Artists' Call Deadlines

March 24 for 1995 Caddie Awards, with categories for still images, still
image series, and animations created with software from Autodesk and
Autodesk developers. Call 503/343-1200 for rules and instructions. 3D ARTIST
magazine is a co-sponsor.

April 13th for New Mexico-based artists for the "Binary Vision" juried
exhibit for 2D and 3D computer art. Contact The Printmaker, 1807 - 2nd St.
#40, Santa Fe, NM 87501; 505/425-9456.

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 [e-mail].

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 [e-mail].

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 [e-mail].

503.00.04 - Multimedia Law
We haven't seen it, but, according to an announcement received 3/8/95, this
may be something you or your lawyer should have: "Multimedia Law: Forms &
analysis" by Richard Raysman, Peter Brown & Jeffrey D. Neuburger. The 46
forms and additional explanations get into pre-project checklists, an
overview of applicable patent law, "identifying characteristics subject to
protection," celebrity licensing, "chain of title to copyright," and a lot
more. The small print doesn't include an ISBN but says the 800-page book was
published looseleaf in 1994 with update service. List price $85, on special
$68, or $59.50 for payment with order.
  Neuburger is Editor-in-Chief of Leader Publications' *Multimedia
Strategist*, which apparently reports about handling negotiations going into
a multimedia project. It is monthly at $155, special offer of $95 with free
first trial issue.
  Let's give the contact info right here with the codes that may help get
the special prices: Law Journal Seminars-Press, 345 Park Ave. S., New York,
NY 10010; 800/888-8300 x6000, 212/545-6000, "ask for Barbara Lamm," or fax
212/481-8110.

503.01 -
[This news item got pulled at 10 minutes to upload time. Hopefully we'll
have it here next week!]

503.02 - What's Up in Santa Fe
Due to the mild winter we've been having in the high desert here by the
southern tip of the Rocky Mountains, pollen allergy season has already
started. But we're pleased to see our columbines leafing out. Maybe this
will be the year that we finally model their complex blooms.

503.02.01 - TESS
We still don't have a mailing list server available, but are making do
manually. We're broadcasting in multiple batches of about 50 to 60 E-mail
addresses Monday evening.
  That broadcast follows sometime after the first posting into the /tess
directory on our site. Here's our record so far: TESS#501 at 5:08pm MST
2/27, and #502 on 3/6 at 5:35pm (after a half hour of trying to get and hold
a connection to our Internet service!).
  For TESS subscriptions, send an E-mail message stating "subscribe" or
"unsubscribe" to [e-mail].
  Deadline for TESS#504 is 1pm Mountain Time (3pm New York time), Monday,
3/20/95.

503.02.02 - Working on the Internet
We assumed wrongly that you could ftp to 3dartist.com as though we had our
own slip connection. In fact, when you ftp to 3dartist.com, you actually
arrive at mindspring.com, our Internet service provider. Until that gets
straightened out, look for and go to a MindSpring directory named either
"3dartist" or "ballen", which puts you into the 3dartist.com main directory
with its /3dartist and /tess subdirectories.

503.02.03 - 3D ARTIST #18
Subscribers' copies of 3D ARTIST magazine issue #18 this afternoon were
still waiting their turn for mailing from the printer's in Tulsa, possibly
3/15 or 3/16/95. We expect to hear any time that someone has seen 3DA#18 on
a newsstand. Our distribution to Barnes & Noble and some other chain stores
is scheduled to hit 3/20-21/95.
  If you haven't seen 3D ARTIST and can't find it locally, E-mail your snail
mail address to [e-mail] for a sample (North America) or sample
pages (elsewhere). ["Or just subscribe!", as one of the proof readers
commented while we were making last-minute changes.]

503.02.04 - 3D ARTIST Coming Issues

We're still taking SIG and calendar listings, and classified ads through
next Tuesday, 3/21/95 (also the day display ad materials must be in Santa Fe).

Editorial and space deadline for 3DA#20 is 4/18/95. We're looking for Form-Z
how-to, and more Mac reporting in general. We also need news for the "Shop
Talk" section about freelance assignments completed. Got some 3DSr4
Keyscript code to share?

3DA#21 will have as its focus 3D medical illustration.

Ftp to 3dartist.com (see 503.01.02 above) and grab /3dartist/guidline.txt
with our contributor guidelines, or ask to have them sent to you.

503.03 - 3D Online

In the 3dartist.com root directory is a file called 3donline.txt with BBSs,
online forums, Internet sites, and Web sites. We've only made a small start
at this task and welcome your input. And let us know if you have a home page
gallery showing your art using 3D techniques.

503.03.01 - TESS on the World Wide Web
Sysop Adam Shiffman sent this message 3/7/95:
TESS is now available online on the TGA Web server in the Multimedia
Resources area:
http://tgax.com/resource.htm
I'll be posting it weekly on the Web server--just another resource for folks
who would like to view it online.

503.03.02 - Walking the Web

It happens here in Santa Fe every Friday around 5 to 7:30pm. A dozen or so
galleries on Canyon Road put out flags signifying participation in the "Art
Walk." An hour to the south of us, in Albuquerque, they call it the
"Artscrawl," and they hold it one Friday a month, around 5 to 9pm. People
move among art galleries, which stay open later than usual, and often hold
receptions and other events to coincide.
  On the World Wide Web, however, you can move any time you want among
virtual galleries. We're collecting such sites put up by artists who use 3D
tools. The most recent came in 3/6/95 from 3D ARTIST reader Eric Scroger
<[e-mail]>:

"I thought you might be interested in my hip 3D rendered online comic home
page, Virtually Reality, at the following URL:
http://www.onramp.net/~scroger/vreality.html
My comic is kind of like Gary Larson's Far Side, but I use Autodesk 3D
Studio for rendering and animation instead of the traditional pen and paper."

BTW, if you're in Albuquerque for the next Artscrawl, which will be 3/17/95,
stop by the Kimo Theatre downtown on old Route 66 (Central Ave.) between 5
and 7 pm. The New Mexico computer artists SIG and Rio Grande Siggraph are
holding an exhibit there. It's mostly Photoshop work and not much 3D, but
TESS Editor Alex Kiriako has an image in the show, the larger scene from
which he wrote an Alias Sketch how-to article in 3DA#18.--B.A.

503.03.03 - The ACM Siggraph Online Bibliography Project
By Eric Haines <[e-mail]>

The Online Bibliography Project is a database of over 15,000 unique computer
graphics and computational geometry references in BibTeX format, available
to the computer graphics community as a research and educational resource.
  The database is located at siggraph.org. Users can download the BibTeX
files via ftp and peruse them offline, or Telnet to siggraph.org and log in
as "biblio," and interactively search the database for entries of interest
by keyword.
  For people without Internet access, there's also an E-mail server. Send
mail to [e-mail] and, in the subject or the body of the
message, include the message "send" followed by the topic and subtopic you
wish. A good place to start is with the command "send index," which will
give you back an up-to-date list of available information.
  Questions should be directed to the adminstrator: [e-mail].
  The WWW version of the Siggraph online bibliography is at
http://siggraph.org/library/bibliography/bibliography.hmtl
Contact: Stephen Spencer at [e-mail].
______
Eric Haines hosts the raytrace SIG meetings held quietly at Siggraph every
year, and puts out an online publication called *The Ray Tracing News*. Last
week he sent two long compilations of online listings from which we
extracted the above. He says that "an old version of [the longer file] is at
princeton.edu [as] /pub/Graphics/Papers/GraphicsFTP.txt. In
/pub/Graphics/RTNews are the archived Ray Tracing News issues."

503.03.04 - CorelNET
In a 3/7/95 announcement received here 3/6/95 by fax, Corel Corp. announced
a WWW site called CorelNet hosted by Kazak Communications (*CorelDraw
Journal*) "anticipated to be up by the end of April" at
http://www.corelnet.com
  The site will offer product support and an "Artist in Residence area" for
experts to openly discuss their work.
  Send E-mail to CIS 70730,2265 or [e-mail], or call 416/924-0759.

503.04 - On High

503.04.01 - Wavefront Prices Cut 50%
In a news release dated 3/1/95 received here 3/9/95 by fax, Wavefront
Technologies announced Studio 21, three software packages comprising
"various combinations" of Wavefront software aimed at film/broadcast (Media
Studio), games (Interactive Studio), and architecture/engineering (Visual
Studio). Specific prices were not given, but the packages were described as
being "aggressively priced at up to 50% less than the previous stand-alone
component prices."
  Background to this announcement includes SGI's 2/7/95 announced purchase
of Wavefront Technologies, and Microsoft's 1/6/95 50% cut in the price of
its competing Softimage software.

503.04.02 - Autodesk Ships SGI Renderer
Autodesk announced 2/29/95 that their 3D Studio Renderer was shipping for
SGI systems using MIPS 4000 series chips. This appears not to be a harbinger
of moving 3DS itself to SGIs, but rather is aimed at the many film,
broadcast, and game shops that mix desktop and workstation machines,
particularly those that use 3D Studio to create work destined for use on SGIs.
  The program, which installs from a CD-ROM, lists for $1,495 for one node,
or $4,995 for unlimited stations. It works on the Challenge network with
Irix 5.2 or later, driven by a PC running 3DSr4, and also can run standalone
by batch command line.
  Rendering is 64-bit scanline, reportedly twice as fast on a 150MHz MIPS
4400 as on a Pentium 90. 32Mb of RAM and 20Mb of hard drive space are needed.
  A plug-in toolkit "is expected to ship in March."

503.04.03 - Sony 16:9 28" Monitor
In mid-February, Sony Electronics announced their GWM-3000 monitor, "the
industry's first high resolution computer display with a 16:9 aspect
ratio...[with] a usable screen area 23.6" wide by 13.3" high [60x33.8cm]" at
1920x1080 pixels non-interlaced, with four preset color temperatures, to be
available in April. It's Swedish safety standard and Energy Star compliant,
which, after all, is what you'd expect from a video display listing at $21,900.
  Although 16:9 is the HDTV ratio, this is a computer display--not a video
monitor, and not a TV or HDTV.

503.05 - More News

503.05.01 - Simply Scenes for 3DS
Visual Software is preparing ready-to-use theme environments in 3D Studio
file format to sell on $99 CD-ROMs. The first is called Northern Castle
(walls, interiors, dungeon, royal court, etc.), to be followed by Pacific
Beach (pier, restaurant, palm trees, etc.) and Orbit City (complete space
station). Visual claims that all objects are supplied with materials and
location to a common coordinate system. There are 360-degree background
maps, texture maps in four resolutions, and provisions for multiple lighting
scenarios.
  Visual Software also publishes the Renderize renderer for Windows (3DA #s
7 & 10), as well as Visual Reality, Simply 3D, and other model libraries
(3DA#14).

503.05.02 - WalkAbout for AutoCAD
In a news release dated 2/28/95 received here 3/9/95, McNeel & Associates
announced "WalkAbout, a realtime walk-through and fly-over utility for
AutoCAD for Windows" r12 or r13. The $95 product, which uses B&W or AutoCAD
colors for shading, comes from the publisher of AccuRender and Sculptura. It
"does not require special hardware or display drivers," or file conversion.
Using a 486-66 or faster reportedly displays at "2 to 3 frames per second."

503.06 - Follow-Ups

502.01: About Alec Jason's 3D Studio work for CBS's Simpson trial coverage,
in a call 3/10/95 Alec said that a lot of his work hasn't been used yet,
waiting for the appropriate parts of the trial. Also, instead of steady
coverage, CBS is dropping occasional "OJ Minutes" into the regular soap
programming, so there's no way to be sure to catch Alec's stuff.

502.06: Byte by Byte's Web page address is http://bytebybyte.com

501.01.06, 501.06: The E-mail address for Modus is now [e-mail].

501.03.01: We received 3/7/95 the complete text to Autodesk product manager
Bob Bennett's informal announcement to the asoft forum on CompuServe "around
the 10th of February" about 3D Studio release 5: "This week we finally
confirmed what many people had concluded on their own--that 3D Studio will
be moving [to] WIN NT. We are purposely sketchy on timeframe but can state
publicly that it will be around the end of the year. There is lots to look
forward to and hopefully this confirmation will help people to plan, make
purchasing decisions re: NT etc.  The additional benefits of NT are well
known and we all think it will be an excellent environment for 3DS.--BOBB"

501.05: For Playmation/Animation Master users in Australia and the Orient,
Jeff Paries' fonts are available now through CAX2 Design Associates in Japan
(852/2-385-3781, fax [phone]).

3D ARTIST #18 errata:
> Modus (pages 46 & 47): We learned 3/8/95 that the E-mail address for Modus
is now [e-mail].
> Writer Bob Lindabury's E-mail address (page 45) is now [e-mail]
> Newsstands (page 49) not included:
California/San Diego/RH Fleet Sci Ctr...238-1233
New Mexico/Albuquerque/NewsLand Bkstr...242-0694
Thailand/Bangkok/Vector Raster Tech.....26763889
> ProCGI address (page P-1 following page 3): the suite number has changed
to 203

503.07 - 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
> Byte by Byte Corp.; 8920 Business Park Dr. #330, Austin, TX 78759;
512/795-0150, -0021 fax; bytebybyte.com; http://bytebybyte.com
> Corel Corp.; 1600 Carling Ave., Ottawa, ON K1Z 8R7, Canada; 613/728-8200,
761-9176 fax
> McNeel & Assocs.; 3670 Woodland Park Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103;
206/545-7000, -7321 fax
> Sony Component & Computer Products Group, 3300 Zanker Rd., San Jose, CA
95134; 800/352-7669, 408/432-0190, 955-5171 fax
> Visual Software, Inc.; 21731 Ventura Blvd. #310, Woodland Hills, CA 91364;
800/669-7318, 818/883-7900, 593-3750 fax
> Wavefront Technologies, Inc.; 530 E. Montecito St., Santa Barbara, CA
93103; 805/962-8117, 963-0410 fax; wti.com

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