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| AMATEUR'S ANECDOTES |
| |
Background in the Foreground
Written by Philip M. Ware
vol. I, article I
Background in the Foreground
Yeah, so it's sort of a vague title, and there's no real topic that can be defined easily based on the vagueness of the title. That's the point. This isn't going to be a very specific article on a very specific topic relating to 3D rendering or animation or modeling. As the title of column suggests, this is an article written by an amateur, and it will mostly be stories about some experience I have had in the field, or relating to the field. That doesn't mean that they won't contain insight, or how-to information, but what it does mean is that I'm an amateur animator.
"OK, fine," you say. "You're an amateur. Who are you and why are you writing a column?" Good question, and fair enough. Well, as you could glean from the byline, my name's Phil Ware and if you've never heard of me, that's probably good, because if you had, I'd have to find out where and what back-royalties I was owed. Seriously, I'm an amateur animator that monkeys around on my PC at home, now, since I'm not at the job where I did most of my 3D work anymore. My experience there, however, was extensive for doing production stills and animations for a cost analysis house. I forged the path for multimedia, there, and since I have left, the path has grown over with weeds and brambles from disuse. That's all good. While I was there, I used TrueSpace2.0, Lightwave5.0 and 3DStudioMax2.0. I also spent a lot of quality time in Premiere4.0 and PhotoShop3 and 4.0. Towards the end of my stint there, I also did a lot of production work in PageMaker, producing trifolds, brochures and programs for a local organization.
So what grand insights will I have for you? Probably nothing more than you would get out of a nice $60 book from Barnes and Noble, but they weigh 70 pounds and are usually a little more dry of a read. This being said, I will also give you some funny stories about mood and animation or a horror story of producing an animation for a client in under a day or something else that is amusing, painful for me but not for you, or just useful to think about if you're in the business or even if you're not.
I also want to say that I am nowhere near an expert in anything 3D related, but have had considerable experience and have toyed with many 3D products over the past 5 years.
With all this introductory stuff out of the way, why don't we toss in a funny/serendipitous story before I go?
So, I've been working for weeks on this interactive brochure thing in Authorware, TrueSpace and Premiere. I was also using, at work, basically what I have at home, a Pentium 100MHz machine with 32MB RAM and a 2MB video card. In other words -- things tended to crawl along when I was rendering the animations in TrueSpace or compiling the AVI files from Premiere. Authorware was a beast and GPF'd regularly because of memory issues. Now, we had been trying for a long while to get machine upgrades, but it just hadn't happened and the CEO and VPs were coming down for a little pow-wow with our top folks. One of the things they wanted to see was a demo of this project they had been funding out of the overhead budget. No problem.
Well, my supervisor and I are sitting in my office with the VP sitting there watching my machine just crawl through my little demo of the creation process. We had already shown him the real product, but even it had been a little sluggish and there had been several cases where the computer just dropped frames to keep up with the 640x480x16MB anims compressed with your standard cinepak codecs for avi. About 2 minutes into one of the renderings, he looks over at me and says, "You need a faster computer. Put in a PO and I'll sign off on it." H'okay, this was novel. This from a company that wouldn't get the applications developers(including me) faster machines for the development of things we actually had clients for... So, I put in for a Dell PentiumPro 200MHz monster with 64MB(at the time), an 8MB Number Nine #2e graphics card, 3GB of storage -- the works for that time. It was around a $3,100 machine. The signed off on it. I put in the PO on the last day before the week off for the Christmas holidays and such, and when I got back on January 3rd, there was a LARGE box sitting on my floor. I couldn't get into my office.
The following months saw several thousand dollars of application software arrive, and within several more months the project had been canned. I worked there another year and a half before deciding that greener pastures were anywhere but there.
That's it for this installation of Amateur’s Anecdotes. Check back later to see if I have anything else to say. Thanks for reading!
Would you like to add, share, or correct some information? 3D ARK welcomes your contributions. Send mail to: webmaster@3dark.com
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