![]() Inspire's Layout module contains the animation and texturing controls. What is missing is Spline Patching (although MetaNURBS can make this redundant), the very useful Knife tool for adding extra geometry to fine up models, and, bizarrely, the ability to turn off Grid Snap. Other modelling tools include a full set of very robust Boolean operators and a full set of LightWave's Deformation tools. It's possible to produce remarkably fluid and detailed creations with little effort. Modelling in Inspire is extremely easy, since the package supports an easy-to-use implementation of NURBS modelling, MetaNURBS, which allows you to rough out your creation as a polygon mesh and then turn it into a super-smooth NURBS model with a tap of the Tab key. Apart from the interface colours, at first glance both programs appear identical. Modeller and Layout, where rendering and animation are carried out. Like LightWave, Inspire is split into two separate applications: Inspire 3D is a new product from NewTek, maker of LightWave 3D, the world's most popular 3D package, and it shares many features with the senior program. The first product under review here, Inspire 3D, is one that misses the price points we've set, but gets in due to its wealth of high-end features. IKEA has a competing product, which of course only has IKEA items, and that's more successful.NewTek Inspire 3D (£349) Win 95/98, NT MacOS ![]() It's a great piece of technology that's not very successful. It's free, supported by sales from the furniture for which it has models. Now they have Autodesk Homestyler, a phone/tablet app which takes a picture of your room, builds a 3D model, lets you add furniture, and provides photorealistic renderings. Years ago they had Autodesk Kitchen Designer, for laying out cabinets to fit. But there are only so many design engineers and architects. An AutoCAD setup was originally about $1K of software and $3K of hardware.Īutodesk has been trying to come out with low end mass market products for years. It was kind of clunky, but way ahead of manual drafting. The original big achievement of AutoCAD was cramming large drawings into a 640K DOS PC. The competition was selling high-end workstations bundled with a CAD package. Autodesk was originally, in the early 1980s, the price leader in CAD. That's what worries Autodesk's Carl Bass. SGI was in the expensive computing business, and expensive computing was over. They made a big commitment to the Itanium, Intel's attempted successor to x86. They got into servers, but 1U commodity servers crushed them. They bought Intergraph, which built expensive CAD workstations. SGI thrashed around for years trying to find a niche. But it was close to the end of $10,000 to $20,000 graphics workstations around 2000, the gamer graphics cards became good enough to run the high end software. Impressively, SGI got their people to work together and produce Maya. In 1995, SGI bought Alias and Wavefront, each with their own animation systems. That's how Autodesk ended up owning the 3D animation business. They bought Alias/Wavefront Maya from SGI when SGI tanked in 2004. In 2008, Avid sold that to Autodesk.Īutodesk had developed its own 3D system, 3D Studio Max, which is still around. It was a product Avid was stuck with, and it had its own team in Montreal. ![]() Softimage could do that on commodity hardware.Īvid had no idea what to do with the 3D product line. ![]() These were called "editing suites", and cost upwards of $100K. Avid used to sell furniture they built computers with lots of accessories for handling video into wooden desks. Avid wanted Softimage because they also had a good non-linear editor, Softimage|DS, which was a threat to Avid's business. That ended SGI's reign in Hollywood between 19, studios moved off SGI onto PCs with lots of memory and graphics cards that rapidly got cheaper. Softimage sold out to Microsoft, which had no idea what to do with a high-end product other than to make it run on Windows NT.
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