SGI: Computer Graphics

Dear All,

I've been wondering for a while now about the State of Creative Endeavour on IRIX. Yes, there's a bit of coding and porting going on, but is there any Art or Design happening still?

Oh, and if you've recently created some Film, Design, Music or Poetry using your IRIX machine... please Show-n-Tell, who knows... It might inspire the rest of us to give it a go again.



J

Whew ! Almost got trampled in the stampede !

Okay, it's not art and a couple years old now but at least it's a start ... sorry about the color scheme. I was going through a period of mental unbalance at the time ...

Ha! So, inquiring minds in the stampeding herd want to know what the difference is between your 'play' and your 'fiddle' desk.

I use my Octane2 all the time, for, uh, Really Important Stuff...

Well, at one point I was practicing to become a famous musician, either with Phil's Harmonica or It's a Beautiful Day . And the play desktop was for the sequel to SGI Coach I was doing with Rodge, but he had an accident in the garage - hit himself with a hammer while drinking beer, I understand - after that it just wasn't the same. So I took up astrophysics and sex, and have occupied myself that way ever since ... nothing to it, really.

How about yourself ?

Whenever I used Desks I'd lose track of where my terminals were, so I gave up on it. Oh well.

Am I the only one here who uses the iconbox? I've always felt it to be vastly superior to using desks...

Any good .dwg editors available for irix? (either free or pirated is acceptable ) That and the ubiquitous MS office...

Autocad 13, but good luck getting your hands on the IRIX version, if you call Autodesk they will just laugh at you and hang up...

Do you mean CAD programs ? As far as I know you can't edit dwg fiels directly ... Pro/E will import dwg and work on it, but imports are stupid (I mean they don't have any logic associated with them, not that the practice is stupid.) I am pretty sure you can export dwg's as well, but haven't done it.

I-DEAS and Unigraphics can import-export dwg's as well, I'm pretty sure. There are some translators, too. Most of the places I deal with want step or iges, if they are going to do any import to a foreign application. For lower-cost CAD programs, there is sort of a hole in Irix between the bottom (Qcad, ugh) and the top. I built SAGCAD for Irix, it's on nekochan somewhere, it might read-write dwg but I never used it much.

It's not easy to find a nice CAD program, actually.


I agree, not so easy to keep track of a bunch of programs. I separated the desks into functional units and try to control myself but sometimes fail. I still miss the way OS/2 does background apps - you can right mouse on any empty area of the desktop and get a popup list of what's running, from which you choose what you want. Of all the methods I've tried, that one is nicest (to me. Everyone is different.)

I mean like an autocad-ish program that can make basic drawings... Draftsite (Dassault) seems to work best for me (way better than autocad for basic use and it's free) But it's for mac and not irix...

Not to mention, an email client that works with both mobileme and the company-provided gmail account, dealing with various random types of files (ms office etc) without half an hour of bitch work, USB support for the various network interfaces I need (CAN, RS485, various proprietary serial protocols) as well as the software for that.

This isn't that easy a problem, unfortunately. You'd think there would be a good, simple, clean CAD program by now. But I don't know of one .... If you run Windows, I'd scrounge up a copy of Cadkey 7 (DOS). It's wireframe but 3D, does all the good stuff - hidden line removal, automated view placement on a drawing, shaded rendering, nice to use. I have an antique parametric thing from Computervision that's pretty cool, too. Comes on two floppies, runs in DOS.

But the thing is, at least for me, keeping up with two or three different apps is just too much trouble. So I use Pro/E for everything, even stupid little honeydos like this :

The Pro is kind of cumbersome for that but on the other hand, what you use all the time is what you're fast with.

Per your question, yes, dwg, dxf, iges, step, vrml, iv, obj, about a hundred other file formats. jpeg, even


Now we're getting into "use Irix all the time" which is a different subject. That's really only worth doing if you like Irix and are too stubborn to let the obnoxious corporate imaginary-property types push you around.

Anyway, I don't know mobileme but Thunderturd works fine with gmail. One of these days I intend to transfer over to Ishmail - it's niftier but I have too many old mails to sort through


I be da bitch, homey ! Open Orifice reads in everything but docx. Even Word on Windows does not read that shit, when some foo sends me one of those turds I have to do an online conversion. Idjuts. Ted is kind of weird but not all that bad for rtf. I think I like it better than Open Orifice and Winnders can read/write rtf.

Normally the Assist makes me do the various textfile-to-pdf conversions because I can do it faster and better from Irix. She'll print to a ps file from wahetever she is using, then I ps2pdf over the network, right in her shared directory. That actually works better than creating a pdf from within Illustrator or PhotoShop. Somehow, the real pdf's are always bornked in some fashion. Typically the margins but if I want to make a multi-page pdf, it's easier and you have more control from a command line. The Adobe apps always mess things up.


Ja, for USB you are screwed. But I can do most everything usb-ish that I need from firewire, so it's not such a problem. CF and SD cards are actually faster on my firewire than the Windows USB.

Furflop, however .... sigh. Nekochan looks much nicer on Irix but a lot of places are screwed on an older browser. Luckily for me I don't like most of that crap

Oh. You wanted a drawing, not a model ? yes, can read and save as dwg, drw, tiff, etc. I can't really recommend Pro/E for basic drawings - whoever thought up their system was weird, but it does work.


Oh wait ! Just found my claim to fame as a computer artiste. You can laugh if you want ... did this in Amazon Paint, which is more interesting than the ... errr ... end result itself, I'd imagine ...

i'm still using them for gfx stuff. i even posted a pic for the nekochan 10th bday

EDIT: which is there: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16727438&p=7358453#p7358400