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==================================================
 THE   T E S S E L L A T I O N   T I M E S   #508
     Issue #8 of 1995, for Monday, April 17th
==================================================

TESS is Columbine, Inc.'s weekly electronic publication usually posted
Monday evenings to supplement 3D ARTIST magazine.

See the end of this file for contact information for companies whose
products are mentioned here.
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Published by and (c)Copyright 1995, all rights reserved
  Columbine, Inc.
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  E-mail: [e-mail]

Staff:
Alex Kiriako, Editor, TESS & Sysop, 3dartist.com <[e-mail]>
Bill Allen, Publisher & Pres., Columbine, Inc. <[e-mail]>
Sally Beach, Vice Pres., Columbine, Inc. <[e-mail]>
Carol Williamson, Admin. Asst. <[e-mail]>

This issue was assembled primarily by TESS Publisher Bill Allen.
________
CONTENTS
508.00 - Heads Up
508.00.01 - The Fortnight in 3D
508.00.02 - Special Offers
508.01 - Autodesk to Beef up 3rd Party Support
508.02 - Elastic Reality & Avid
508.03 - NAB Report, Part 1
508.04 - News on High
508.05 - Other News
508.06 - What's Up in Santa Fe
508.06.01 - TESS
508.06.02 - 3D ARTIST
508.07 - Continuing Listings
508.07.01 - Special Offers
508.07.02 - Galleries & Exhibits
508.07.03 - Shows & Exhibitions
508.07.04 - Artists' Calls
508.08 - Contacts

508.00 - Heads Up

See also "Continuing Listings" (508.07 below).

Here's the stuff you need to know the soonest...

508.00.01 - The Fortnight in 3D

April 19, 7pm, Savannah, Ga.: Savannah Area 3D User Group meeting in Room
333 at the Savannah High School. Contact John Brooks, 912/920-3719, CIS
75551,2037.

April 22-25, Santa Clara, Calif.: Computer Game Developers' Conference at
the Westin Hotel. Expensive and likely to sell out. Call 415/856-4263.

April 23, 3-5pm, Sharon, N.H.: Opening reception for "Out of the Internet"
art show at the Sharon Arts Center, 603/924-7256.

April 26, Santa Clara, Calif.: Microsoft Win95 Game Development Forum at
TechMart next to the Westin Hotel, sorry, no contact.

April 26, Los Angeles, Calif.: Seminar on copyright for digital artists,
$60, American Film Institute, 213/856-7600.

508.00.02 - Special Offers

Macromedia's MacroModel with RenderMan for Mac or Windows is now available
for $199 "for a limited time." Presumably owning it will put you on the
upgrade path for Macromedia's coming full 3D animation package (code named
Daffy) for Mac and Windows.
  When we recently wanted to do some 3D text work, we again found MacroModel
to be the best of several programs on hand here to get the job done quickly
the way we needed. This can be a very handy alternative modeler to have in
your toolkit. It generates beautiful meshes from its native spline format.
See Rob Glidden's article in 3DA#15 for how to work around MacroModel's
speed problems, and look up "surface smoothness" in the docs (the default
setting may yield unacceptably large DXF files).

508.01 - Autodesk to Beef up 3rd-Party Support

ALERT: If you are developing 3D Studio IPAS plug-ins and are not a
registered developer, you should contact Kathy Clinton soon by E-mail at
[e-mail], or call 800/879-4233 or 415/507-5000. A program is in
development to better reach 3DS owners about IPAS programs, and assistance
is being prepared for moving DOS IPAS programs to Windows NT.

Although Autodesk hasn't finished working out the path it will take to
better help third party developers, it was clear from what we learned at NAB
that the company is getting very serious about playing a larger role in
helping 3DS users to learn about and obtain third-party plug-ins.
  This comes at an important time. Many developers, large and small, have
been expressing frustration about difficulty in reaching users and about low
sales numbers. From the users' point of view, there is a bewildering array
of plug-ins available (reportedly well over 200), but, except for a few
well-publicized programs, it is hard to find out what routines exist and
what they do. Dealers are not well plugged into sales channels, and there
isn't much help for understanding how to mix-and-match routines available
from competing suppliers.
  As a first step in improving the situation, Autodesk announced at NAB on
4/10/95 that it will hold a Multimedia Developers' Conference on 6/22/95 in
San Francisco at the Art Teco show.

508.02 - Elastic Reality & Avid

In a news release dated 4/3/95 (received 4/14), Elastic Reality announced
shipment of Volume 1 of TransJammer transitional effects for Mac, PowerMac,
and Windows at $149.95. It includes 100 effects, such as "rocketing space
shuttles and falling cows," that work with Adobe Premiere, Avid VideoShop,
and In:sync Razor Pro.

We heard the news earlier but received official word today 4/17/95 by fax:
Avid Technology, Inc. has acquired Elastic Reality, Inc. as a wholely owned
subsidiary. Avid also announced that it had acquired The Parallax Software
Group, an English developer of "paint and compositing technology."

Avid, of course, helped launch the digital, nonlinear revolution a couple
years ago with its Mac-based video editing stations. A few days before NAB,
they announced Media Suite Pro 4.0 for PowerMac "expected" to ship in May at
$7,995, a $2,000 price drop.

508.03 - NAB Report, Part 1
By Bill Allen, TESS Publisher <[e-mail]>

This was our first NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show. It was
begun years ago for radio and TV broadcasters. Today it is undergoing
wrenching changes as the field moves to digital video production and grows
with the influx of a horde of new suppliers and video/multimedia producers
quite unlike what oldtimers are used to.
  Perhaps the main image that remains in my mind's eye a week later is of a
literally grizzled veteran watching someone try to demonstrate how to edit
video on a little TV screen using a mouse. I don't know, but I imagined him
to be one of those people not quite finished with a long career in analog
video, used to working with a room full of rack-mounted hardware, and now
suddenly having to learn everything all over again.
  Another image the first day was finding myself in a sea of suits and
thinking, "Wait a minute! Where are all the artists?" When I put on a coat
and tie for a graphics show, I expect to be overdressed. Not for this crowd.
  But this was in the large main South Hall, or maybe the North Hall, which
we came to think of together as a desert maze separating the areas where the
"real" stuff was: MultiMedia World in the Las Vegas Hilton, a far corner of
the South hall where NewTek, MS Softimage, and Autodesk were located, and
the easily overlooked new S6 hall.
  More than twice the attendance of Siggraph is claimed, and the room is
certainly there for it, though many attendees have little interest in
computer graphics. In fact, the whole show was notable for a lack of
interest in content, only in delivery channels and creation tools for
content. The loud and sexual content often used onsite to catch attendees'
attention was definitely aimed at a mostly-male audience. (3DA Associate
Editor Sally Beach said one of the best things about NAB was that there were
no lines in the women's restrooms, notable in a show noted for lots of long
lines.)
  In four days, almost the only expression of concern about what all these
tools and delivery systems will be used to deliver came when we ran into
attendee Peter Rosen <[e-mail]>. He told us about his work to
set up the Creativity Cafe in the San Francisco Bay Area, to be a smoke-free
multimedia nightclub and artists' networking salon "to use art and
technology for a better world."

Here's a first report on what we saw. The order of this report is not meant
to reflect importance. It's almost TESS upload time late on Monday
afternoon, so we're just getting out to you. There'll be another installment
next week.

DPS announced the Perception Video Recorder (PVR) as the follow-on product
to its revolutionary PAR board at the same price, $1,995, promised for June
1995. The new product uses Windows NT 3.5+, PCI bus, and SCSI-2 to allow
owners to record on up to seven SCSI hard drives. There will be some limited
support for Windows 3.1 use as well, and sequential image file streams can
be used from DOS-based programs.
  The Perception supports CCIR 601 4:2:2 processing, 10-bit oversampled
video encoding, a live video capture (with optional daughter board), and
output to component, composite, and S-video. "During live video recording, a
sophisticated entropy prediction circuit is used to automatically determine
the optimum amount of compression required on a field-by-field basis."
  When asked about an upgrade path from the PAR to the Perception, DPS's
Brad Nogar said they really couldn't give one because DPS is holding the new
product's price down. However, he promised continued support for the PAR and
pointed out that it should be easy to sell a used PAR (and for more money
than an upgrade program could credit).
  As part of that continued PAR support, DPS announced version 1.5 of their
DOS software (including dual drive support, definable hot keys, an improved
file requester, and better RAM conservation), and new Windows NT PAR 1.0
software compiled for Alpha, Intel, and MIPS CPUs. Both can be downloaded
free from the DPS BBS at 416/754-8368.

Following its arrival on PCs with the recent introduction of its Pennello
plug-in for 3D Studio, the previously SGI- and Mac-based Xaos Tools
announced at NAB (4/10) that NewTek will bundle Pennello with LightWave 3D.
The other side of this development is that Xaos Tools has become the
worldwide distributor for the SGI version of LightWave at $1,995 ($995 until
5/31/95). NewTek will continue to distribute the PC and Amiga versions of
LightWave at $995 list.

Digimation showed a new Russian terrain generation program to be available
soon for $895 that goes well beyond any such program we've seen so far. It
runs standalone but creates 3D Studio files that show very realistic
complexity from fields of grass to leafed-out trees and distant mountains.
We were unable to get a polygon count on the scenes we saw, but presume much
of the detail is handled by mapping tricks to allow so much detail in a file
of manageable size.

Autodesk officially announced 4/10/95 that 3D Studio will move to Windows
NT. Pricing, availability date, and even the product name (will it be simply
"3D Studio release 5"?) still remain unannounced. Besides giving all the
usual reasons for moving to a sophisticated, CPU-independent, 32-bit
operating system, the announcement cited "support for hardware acceleration
of the 3D graphics pipeline" as another motive. (See TESS#501.03.01 and
#503.06 for our reports weeks ago about this move.)

In:sync Corp. has moved from sharing booths to having a large display of its
own for Razor Pro. That program now includes support for Truevision's Targa
2000, as well as for direct support for the DPS PAR.

508.04 - News on High

Wavefront (in a 4/5/95 news release received 4/12) has announced ArcVision,
a $10,000 architectural visualization program for SGI (Indy and up)
machines. The software, which includes a modeler and DXF file import/export,
is aimed at architects for rendering and animation (it can be upgraded into
a full animation system). Rendering allows interactive tuning of lighting,
materials, and textures, and the program comes with libraries of materials
and props (furniture, trees, etc.). Options include Amap for generating
trees and plants.

508.05 - Other News

Summagraphics in a 3/29/95 news release received 4/10/95 announced the
SummaFlex and Summa Expression cordless, pressure-sensitive graphics
tablets. Both are said to be embellished with "stunning 3D graphics" in
place of traditionally plain key and function menus.
  The $849 SummaFlex is described as a 18x24" desktop blotter-like device
that can be rolled up when not in use, or can be turned off entirely or
partially to use as a normal, non-tablet working surface. It comes with a
three-switch stylus.
  The $389 lightweight Expression is only 6x8" in size, and has options for
three-button pen or stylus, or two- or four-button mini-cursor.
  Software for both is available for Mac, PowerMac, DOS, Windows 3 and 95,
and coming for SGI, Sun, and Windows NT (May 1995).

*LightSmith* as described in a fax received 4/12/95 is "a new magazine for
learning and exploring the world of 3D graphics in LightWave...covering
everything from initial conception [to] completed project." Yearly
subscription is 50 Canadian dollars (Cdn$50), 90 Fairway Dr., Edmonton, AB
T6J 2C5, Canada; 403/437-9765; [e-mail].

508.06 - What's Up in Santa Fe

508.06.01 - TESS

Deadline for TESS#509 will be 1pm MDT (3pm New York time) Mon., 4/24/95.

508.06.02 - 3D ARTIST

We're still hearing from U.S. subscribers who haven't received 3DA#18. There
are always a few errors in a mailing, but, if you haven't received yours,
please give it another week-plus (especially if you live in the mid-Atlantic
region, which seems to take longest).
  For overseas subscribers, we have had enough problems with KLM delivery
that we will go back to regular postal service beginning with 3DA#19.

3DA#19 went to press at 40 pages on 4/10/95, eight weeks following 3DA#18
(2/14/95).

Editorial and space deadline for 3DA#20 is this Tues., 4/18/95. However, we
will be flexible for another week. The issue focus will be hardware for 3D
graphics, stereo viewing, probably a lot of 3DS IPAS stuff, texture
libraries, and the radiosity articles originally planned for 3DA#19.

3DA#21 will have a special focus 3D medical illustration, and we're looking
for related how-to's. Looks like we may do a focus on courtroom presentation
in this or the following issue.

508.07 - Continuing Listings

See 508.00 above for new items of immediate interest.

508.07.01 - Special Offers

Through 4/30/95: Avalon site archive on CD-ROM for $30 postpaid instead of
$49.95 + S&H, from Syndesis. Contains 1,200 models in 20+ file formats, file
conversion utilities, textures, and more.

Through 5/30/95: Schreiber Instruments' IPAS six-pack: Lightning, Explode
Volume, Particle Cloud, Rings, Comet, Starburst, all for $150.

508.07.02 - Galleries & Exhibits

Through 5/28/95, Sharon Art Ctr., Sharon, N.H.: "Out of the Internet," held
by the Center and *Digital Video* magazine. Works by artists from 17 states.
Open Mon.-Sat. 10-5pm, Sun. 12-5pm, four miles south of Peterborough on Rt.
123, admission free, 603/924-7256.

508.07.03 - Shows & Exhibitions

VR World 5/22-25, Convention Ctr., San Jose, Calif., sponsored by *VR World*
and *CyberEdge Journal*, held by Mecklermedia, 800/632-5537; 203/226-6967,
-6979 fax; [e-mail].

508.07.04 - Artists' Calls

April 24th for the Electronic Cinema at the Int'l. Symposium on Electronic
Art, Sept. 17-24, Montreal, Que., Canada. Call 514/990-0229, fax
514/842-7459, E-mail [e-mail].

April 26th for the Computer Animation Festival/Electronic Theatre at
Siggraph 95 (Aug. 6-11, Los Angeles, Calif.) Contact: Frank Foster,
310/280-7603, or E-mail [e-mail].

May 1 for 3rd annual New York Digital Salon, hosted by the School of Visual
Arts. Contact Dr. Timothy Binkley at the school, 209 E. 23rd St., New York,
NY 10010; 212/592-2535, -2509 fax; E-mail [e-mail].

June 1 for Autodesk's Siggraph '95 Demo Reel. Send Betacam SP tape(s) to the
Autodesk Multimedia unit at 111 McInnis Pkwy., San Rafael, CA 94903,
attention "Siggraph 95 Video." See TESS#506.00.05 for more info. Fax
inquiries to 415/507-5150.

June 16, 1995 for CD-ROM Showcase, a CD of software demos with a "Digital
Portfolio" section for artists' work, to debut at Siggraph '95. Contact
Oregon Data Products, 1730 S.W. Skyline Blvd. #208, Portland, OR 97221;
503/292-5119, -5146 fax.

June 30, 1995 for "3-D Coolness '95" animation contest. See TESS#507.00.04
for more info. Contact World Fusion Software, 5942 Edinger, #113-718,
Huntington Beach, CA 92649; 714/894-4094; worldfusion.com.

508.08 - Contacts
The following companies have products mentioned in this issue of *The
Tessellation Times*. When you contact companies, please BE SURE to say you
heard about them from TESS.
> Autodesk, Inc.; 111 McInnis Pkwy., San Rafael, CA 94903; 800/879-4233;
415/507-5000, 491-8311 fax; autodesk.com
> Avid Technology, Inc.; 1 Park W., Tewksbury, MA 01876; 508/460-1600,
481-8620 fax
> DPS - Digital Processing Systems; 11 Spiral Dr., Florence, KY 41042;
606/371-5533, -3729 fax
> Digimation; 1000 Riverbend Blvd. #L, St. Rose, LA 70087; 800/854-4496,
504/468-7898, -5494 fax
> Elastic Reality, Inc.; 925 Stewart St., Madison, WI 53713; 608/273-6585
> In:sync Corp.; 6106 MacArthur Blvd., Bethesda, MD 20816; 301/320-0220,
-0335 fax, -0338 BBS
> Macromedia; 600 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94103; 800/326-2128;
415/252-2000, 626-0554 fax
> NewTek, Inc.; 1200 S.W. Executive Dr., Topka, KS 66615; 913/228-8000,
-8001 fax
> Schreiber Instruments, Inc.; 4800 Happy Canyon Rd. #250, Denver, CO 80237;
800/252-1024; 303/759-1024, -0928 fax, -3598 BBS; [e-mail]
> Syndesis Corp.; 235 S. Main St., Jefferson, WI 53549; [phone],
-6363 fax; [e-mail]
> Summagraphics Corp.; 8500 Cameron Rd., Austin, TX 78754; 512/873-1576
> Wavefront Technologies, Inc.; 530 E. Montecito St., Santa Barbara, CA
93103; 805/962-8117, -0410 fax
> Xaos Tools, Inc.; 600 Townsend St. #270E, San Francisco, CA 94103;
415/487-7000, 558-9886 fax
__________________
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