Animator program usage

[Jesse]

what program is easiest to use for the animation, n how do we use it? the computers at our school only have windows 98SE

[mightywombat]

The program most commonly used is 3d Studio Max - I believe a copy came in the kit. However, it is not the easiest thing to learn, nor is any other 3d animation program that I have come across. The best way I've found to learn new these programs is to find a book/website with a bunch of tutorials and go through and do a bunch of them. 3d Studio will run on win98se but its not the operating system that matters. To use 3d studio you either need a nice computer or a whole bunch of patience... Good Luck.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

i use 3dsm 6 that came in the kit this year. It runs fine on y brand new p4 3.0 ghz machine w/ a gig of ram, but when i downgrade to 1.7 with 512 of ram., its pretty laggy. But ur processor speed can be lower in this program, seeing as it relies on memory so much

[sygterm]

Originally Posted by ToMMan b182

But ur processor speed can be lower in this program, seeing as it relies on memory so much

Uhm, not so much actually. It depends on what you are doing, it uses up memory when you are rendering. It also depends on how complex your animation is. If you start manipulating objects that have a high poly count, especially with things like deformable space warps, even on a good processor it will take a few seconds just to even goto the next frame. However, in this persons case, it doesn't look like they will be doing anything like that anytime soon. Anyways, when your working with your animation it takes anywhere from 50-100mb of RAM, rendering however is a differant story.

[Matt Hallock]

The two major dependants of 3DSMAX are processor speed and memory, I honestly wouldn't suggest less than 512, 256 at the very least. A processor over 1.4 GHZ would also be nice. However, even on a beast of a computer like mine, rendering things such as glass,materials with reflections/refractions, caustics, and procedural materials can take forever to render.