Subject: Re: Stand Alone LightWave (SALW)
From: [email-masked] (Jamie Krutz)
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 94 23:58:28 MST

In article <Pine.3.89.9409251049.A12509-0100000@netcom16> John Gross <[email-masked]> writes:

> > Does this version work quietly in the background? 
> 
> Sure, but remember that Modeleing and rendering are two very intensive 
> CPU tasks. I wouldn't want to be doing a lot of other stuff while doing 
> either of these.
> 
> JG

I've had this discussion with Stuart before.  The simple answer is that
you can lower the priority of Lightwave's rendering using a utility like
PriMan or ARTM.  Then you could model away and your Amiga would efficiently
pass all the CPU cycles you weren't using in Modeler on to the rendering
process.  As you were modeling, you wouldn't even notice the rendering
going on since your actions would have a higher priority.  While your
actions will slow down the rendering, you will still be getting frames
rendered using CPU cycles that would otherwise have been wasted.  And
with 35 million 68040 CPU cycles going by every second (on my system),
there's a lot of processing power that goes unused when I'm in modeler and 
I'm thinking about what to do next, grabbing a snack, doing something that's
not too processor intensive, etc.  A few million CPU cycles here, a few
million CPU cycles there, and pretty soon you're talking about real
rendering power... ;)

The ability to harness those otherwise wasted CPU cycles _without_ bogging
down your access to the computer is the beauty of the Amiga's preemptive 
multitasking.  It's a pity I can't take advantage of it using the versions of 
LW and Modeler that ship with the Toaster.  But if you have the stand-alone 
versions, I guess it's possible to render and model at the same time.  I'm 
not sure (since I don't have that version) but you might have to run two 
copies of LW to pull it off.  Ideally you wouldn't have to do that.

I hope that in the future, even the Toaster version of LW and Modeler
will allow multitasking, as well as the ability to run without running
the switcher (as well as the ability to run on a Spectrum graphics card,
as well as the ability to simulate slow and fast motion when importing
image sequences by skipping or doubling frames, as well as...oops, got
me started there on my features wish list... :)

Best,
 -Jamie

PS.  LW is great.  Just finished a 30 second PSA with lots of layers
including live video, all done in LW.  Cool!  Did I mention that I wish the 
image sequence importing had a field for skipping or doubling frames to make
slowmo and fastmo easy using the same source frames?

Hey Allen, how 'bout it? :)