[geeks] This Litle Green Monster...

[Kevin]

Max came out early summer of 1996.  I first used 3DSMax under NT 3.51
with 64megs of RAM.  The base app was usable but it became very
difficult to deal with stuff like particle animation where each
particle was an instance for an actual object instead of being just a
sphere or a four or eight face object (we used the Digimation Sand
Blaster plugin at the time to do this.)  Even when i bumped the RAM
up to 128, it was slow going for large particle renders.

/KRM

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 11:10:39 -0500
Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 10:55:25AM -0500, Kevin wrote:
> 
> > Moved to a 486DX266 with 24 megs of RAM and 3DStudio V.2.  Then
> > when i finally quit doing 3D as a job in 1998, my machine was an
> > HP dual Pentium Pro 200 with 128 megs of RAM and the Perception
> > with a 4 gig Cheetah.
> 
> My first exposure to 3DS was on a Sun IPX with a weitek chip and a
> SunPC sbus card.  It was version 3.  Would do modelling on that
> machine, then zap the files over the network to a SS10 with dual
> SM41 (I think) and a ZX card running Sense8's WTK.
>  
> > I understood why people said you needed top notch stuff back
> > then, but i don't believe that that still holds true today.
> 
> I understand why it held true back then for awhile as well,
> somewhat.
> 
> However, I don't think it has really been all that true since
> 1993ish, or whenever it was that 486s with math-coprocessors (so
> DXs and DX2s, not SXs) and/or Macs with math-coprocessors because
> affordable. Granted, things have gotten better, but Lightwave was
> certainly quite usable on a 486 with coprocessor.  Not to mention
> 3DS pre-Max.  Of course, that puts us at 1995ish.  Granted, you
> needed a bit more ram than the average person might have, but my
> recall is that in late-1995 or early 1996, that extra ram only cost
> me $160 (went from 8 megs to 24 megs.  I tried to go to 16, but my
> machine wouldn't take 8 meg simms, and for some reason I decided a
> single 16meg piece was a better deal than 2 4 meg pieces).
> 
> Of course, all along, the software tended to be a fairly major
> cost. Although, Lightwave used to be only $1500, and animation
> master was always far cheaper still.
> 
> So, maybe it wasn't until 1995ish that that really was true about
> not needed the very best you could afford.
> 
> Of course, if one can stick out learning blender, one can easily
> use a 1996/1997 era machine to turn out really high quality stuff
> (though for sanity, one would want a newer machine when it comes to
> doing renders)._______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks


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