Ryan Fox wrote:
Its fantastic to see people still use their Sgi gear for animation/CAD work!
I think lot of "old" software are capable to do serious work.
I worked in a studio around 1999 and we used Softimage|Toonz 4.x and Softimage|3D 3.x animation software (the same ones what I used for create my own film). We were official Softimage beta-testers and we used mostly sgi servers, sgi o2's and sgi NT workstations for creating animation series for UK producers. (Toonz was the very same animation software what Studio Ghibli used at the same time in Japan for animated movies, and the first traditional animation software on IRIX - even the NT port of the program used the gui of the IRIX version
and it was capable of interactive work in mixed IRIX / NT environment.
The system and the software was almost flawless so I can't imagine at the time, what will be the next step, because with Toonz you were capable to do everything what was needed for traditional animation work. The software had all the features what we needed, it was well written optimized code, the workflow was fast and efficient on those 200-300MHz computers.
So they fucked up the whole thing, just as the XSI. (Although this was an independent coder division in Italy). Toonz 5.0 was a totally new ware with pure Windows only codebase, new user interface and full Flash support. It was slow (even with 1000 MHz processors), buggy, it had lost a lot of features (they added them one-by-one, slowly in the following ten years). This was my first encounter with the new era: the 21th century software development.
People have to use these computers with these well written, optimized and reliable software. With just collecting them, we cannot save them. We have to use them, without it they will become only rusty boxes and fading memories.
Keep it up with your animation short. Sabrina looks great!
2x1GHz PIII, 1GB RAM, 300GB 10K Hitachi HDD, 1600SW, Medea VideoRAID, Windows 2000
