Power Series

From: Mark Green <mark_at_cs.ualberta.ca>
Date: Thu Dec 27 10:24:14 2001

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Tothwolf [mailto:tothwolf_at_concentric.net]
>
> > On Wed, 26 Dec 2001, Christopher Smith wrote:
>
> > > Well, on one hand, yes, but on the other hand, I like my
> > Indigo 2 Elan with
> > > no texture memory just fine. I'm also considering trying
>
> > I didn't know you had another SGI box ;)
>
> Yep.
>
> > A couple people I've known who ended up with old SGI gear thought they
> > were going to create some kind of fancy animations with this kind of
> > hardware, so I never know what to think now.
>
> Depends on what you mean by "fancy animations." It will probably do better
> out of the box than most new peesees depending on what you'd like to
> animate. (and whether it requires texture memory, of course) Both of my
> SGIs, for instance, have analog video in/out, which is a start. On the
> other hand, you can't really do a good animation with anything "out of the
> box." It usually takes a lot of strange stuff.
>

What it really takes is software. Most computer animation is a batch
process, you run a renderer for hours, days, months, etc. I run two
rendering farms at work, neither of which have a single graphics card
on them. All the texture mapping and similar visual effects is done
in software, no need for graphics hardware.

Back on topic, the early versions of Alias and SoftImage (mid 1980s)
ran on SGI workstations, long before they had texture mapping
hardware. Pretty much any 4D series machine would run these package,
though maybe not very quickly.

The VGX was the first SGI workstation to do texture mapping in
hardware. The texture mapping implementation in the VGX was
incorrect and was fixed in the VGXT. Neither were particularly
fast at texture mapping, the RE was the first SGI that did a
significant amount of texturing in real time.
Received on Thu Dec 27 2001 - 10:24:14 GMT