Subject: Hey, hey, hey... it's...
Date: Mon, 9 May 94 21:50:58 EDT
From: jgoldman@acs.bu.edu (Jeffrey Goldman)

	... Imagine3.0 arriving late last week on my doorstep. Can you
see my grin? Unfortunately, I will fail all three of my finals during
the next three days... Sigh... I have an Amiga for future reference.
	First off let me say Bones and Kinematics are a GODSEND!!!!
Not only are they incredible, but they're incredibly easy to use.
Well, Bones is totally self-explanatory, but I'm a bit shaky on the
kinematics. I can set it up and all, but does anyone know exactly what
affects what?
	Another thought more on the critical side. Does anyone else
get the impression the Imagine3.0 they have ob their machines right at
this moment is not complete? That's not quite the way to put it. I
made another analogy on the USENET in comp.sys.amiga.graphics (for
those who caught it). Imagine3.0 feels like what Imagine1.1 was to
2.0... Know what I mean? Most people probably know that 2.0 refined
and fixed a lot of 1.1 bugs and problems (at least that's what I
thought). I'd consider 3.0 to be a totally full-fledged separate
release. Given that, I get the impression 3.0 isn't quite up to par.
Anyone else?
	What's up with global haze? I copied the FX from disk #1 and
applied it to the Globals FX bar in the Action editor. I used a
'bright' object in the scene. I used both a solid bright white object
and a (255,255,0) colored bright object. The Haze key-off color was
255,255,0 (default) both times. I rendered this with two 'pixel width'
settings (10, and 20). I rendered the scenes both as quickrender and a
hi-res scanline. The effect took a long time with the pixel width on
10 and forever with the pixel width at 20. I saw absolutely no
difference both times. Actaully I saw nothing special. What's up with
that? Could it be the scanline thing? Does it inly work in trace?
	Has anyone found any SCANLINE improvements? I see none. If
anything it has gone backwards with the ground reflect bug thing. This
is the most disappointing thing. I animate, and raytracing is
prohibitively slow. I was really hoping for an improved scanliner
(isn't it strange how most 3D packages can't get both types of
rendering right at the same time? How's Lightwave on this?)
	Lens Flare exists, but I was sorta hoping for Lightwave
quality visible light FX... Is it that difficult to get a simulated
realistic visible light halo, star point, flare, thing ala Lightwave?
	The Slice function still isn't terrific...  The Forms editor
hasn't been touched. I would have enjoyed some sort of spline
manipulation there, or at least a Transform Position feature.
	Things tha didn't make it in that I expected to get in:

	Scanline Shadows (I got the Impulse word just prior to the
release, however)
	Field Rendering
	Compatibility with old Essence (maybe it's time to get Forge
and the latest versions of Essence)
	Cleaned up Booleans w/merge

	Things that didn't make it in but didn't expect to make it in
(ie. Wish List):

	Motion Blur (really want this for anims. Anyone know how much
of a time penaly Lightwave's motion blur is?)
	Soft Shadows (via some sort of shadow mapping, or the option
of an automatic bundled set of lightsources, or something to that
effect)
	Collision Detection (would be nice to go along with Kinematics
and all the new particle and animation stuff)
	Friction
	Physics
	Visible Lightsources (I mean, well done)

	I guess I would wish for Real3D combined with Imagine combined
with Lightwave... huh, yeah right... :-)

	Don't get me wrong, I love Imagine3.0. It's just not as much
as I expected in certain departments. It's Bones are definitely cool.
Very cool.
	The intention of this post was to bring up the bad points and
to critique (albeit a little negatively) 3.0. I mean, why would I
critique the good stuff? Most of you already (or will) know the good
stuff. For those that don't know whether to upgrade or not, I'd say
3.0 is definitely worth the ~$100US!! If I were going to pay the ~$700
retail I personally would wait a little to see what fixes, other
versions, or whatever come out...

	Thoughts? Comments?

							J.---->

E-Mail: jgoldman@acs.bu.edu




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