SGI: Computer Graphics

Didn't PA evolve into the Alias Studio series, aimed at CAD? Design Studio, Surface Studio, etc. I have some
demo videos somewhere, and glossy brochures. When one executes Alias 11, it offers some of these packages
as startup options instead of the animation suites.

Ian.

I know that the design guys at SRAM used to use Pro/e for the majority of their work, then do some of the surfacing in Design Studio and import. Since Wildfire improved the surfacing tools they skip using Design Studio now. My surfacing abilities suck so I can't comment.

For normal CAD, I tried once or twice and it was too strange.

As luck would have it, I do Have Alias 11 on My Fuel .. I can check the startup options..

*Just got up, 09.00 am here, switching on the Fuel now*

Btw, there was someone asking in a previous thread how the Realtime OpenGL performance in Poweranimator was compared to Maya. Well, if you compare Maya 6.5 with Alias 11, Maya wins hands down. No contest. Where I can have a model of almost 360K polygons running at 20-25 fps in Maya on my Fuel with a V12, I get like 1 Fps in Alias 11. So Alias 11 is extremely slow, at least on my system, maybe some configuration one has to do to make it faster.?

Damn, the Fuel is slow today.....

.
..
...
....

*yawn*

......
........

Booting

............
...............

Okay, that was weird.. It's standing here, just after the selftests and starting to boot, but locks up just when it is setting rbaud to 19200.

Guess I wont be able to check it out since it seems my Fuel just broke down.. Ah, crap..

/jonas

Edit fixed some errors in my text.

Pheeeeeeeeeeeeeew.....

Back again.. Took the Fuel apart, and checked the memory modules, nothing burnt or anything, check all the cables, cooling ducts/fans and reassembly.

Now it is working again.. I got a red blinking light when she just stod there, freaking me out, considering how much she cost me. My beautiful, practically mint condition Fuel.

Anyway.. Testing the Alias 11 now.

In the "starting box of Alias 11 you have the following options:
__________________________
Studio
Advance Modeling
Advance Evaluation
Advance Design Animation
Direct Model

AutoStudio

SurfaceStudio

DesignStudio
__________________________

I myself have only tested the stuff under Studio.

/Jonas

Very interesting, I'll have to check. Thanks!

super bump here

Since people are already bumping this thread back to life, here is a screenshot of Maya Composer 5.5 running on my SGI O2 system .



Here is a link to the fullsize image: Maya_Composer_5.5_screenshot.png

The image shows a bluescreen image of a Tiger Lily being keyed with Maya Composer. A TravelMatte node was used as a garbage mask to hide the uneven lighting on the edges of the bluescreen. The final composite operation is performed with an Over node and the output is written to disk with a FileOut node.

here we have a PowerAnimator 7.5. compared to the default settings i changed the following:
- small palette/shelve icons
- icon labels
- small multilister icons

the rest is default. 7.5 had the final "look" and most of the menus and features later versions had. the last version to look like this was 9.7. at that time however PA didn't exist anymore but since the basic program always was the same it still lived on in a way although the entertainment branch wasn't sold anymore. that however was just a licensing model that showed a few features less or more here and there so just from the look of it you couldn't tell if it was studio or animator or whatever else versions they had over time. the last official version was 9.0 (released nov. 98).
versions before 7 had a different interface. the palette on the left didn't exist and there were no icons. instead at the bottom there were big buttons sorted by sets (pick, xform, render ...). pretty much the same subdivisions (pun!) as the menus in the picture have. when pushed the menu came out above those buttons. in version 7 and above you can still have that effect if you right click on the tab labels.

the blue lambert shader was the PA default unlike the studio versions which came with a silver like blinn as default. if you wanna use that shader in any other 3d program here are the values:
RGB: 0, 150, 255
diffuse: 0.8

PA was/is a great program. the gui is very well designed and very fast. the results of the renderer look quite neat imho and many of the default features look great right away. things like light effects or particles e.g.. PA has always been my favorite and still is. there's so much more to tell but i think for a quick overview it's enough now. anyway if you wanna know more about something in particular don't hesitate to ask

Thanks Foetz.

I always liked the colour of the Power Animator / Studio Tools lambert blue. Since I now have the exact color values I'm going to have to change my copy of Maya to use that as the default color for the initialShadingGroup lambert1 material.

Here is the Maya MEL code for the Power Animator Blue color:


To automatically apply the "Power Animator blue" color to the default lambert1 material in Maya you can paste the following code in your userSetup.mel script:


Regards,
Andrew

not an application screen shot but i figured it might fit the topic well anyway