| I picked up Silver at the Software Shop for $115.
A few things you should know first; Silver is a combined Ray Tracer
AND animation program. No need for a seperate animation module.
Like all normal people, I ripped open the package as soon as I got
home. I fired it up without even glancing at the manual. Well,
I could make no sense whatsoever out of the menu bars. I tried
opening some files, but had no luck. Back to the manual.
The program uses several custom screens. The opening screen resembles
a strip of 35mm film. Each frame of film represents a frame of
animation, called a cell. You may have up to 512 cells per file, and
you may chain files.
From this screen, if you select NEW from the menu, it will prompt
you for a file name. It will then build several subdirectories
such as FILENAME.CEL, FILENAME.ANIM, FILENAME.SCL.
After starting a new file, you can double click on any cell on the
strip of film. A new custom screen will open, dropping you into
the editor window. Here's where you really get confused. The object
editor can't hold a match to Sculpt for ease of use. First of all,
you are only allowed to see one view of your scene at a time, ie
Top, Front, or Right. This is a big mistake in my opinion. You
can select which view to use from a drop down menu, but you can only
see one at a time. This makes construction of complex scenes very
difficult, unless you completely sketch out an isometric view on
graph paper before hand.
The way that entities are added is also very cumbersome. You add
an 'object' to the scene first, then you must go back and define
the object. Wierd.
Silver has a big advantage over Sculpt regarding placement of objects,
though. You get to type in the X Y and Z coordinates of every thing
on the screen. By selecting an object, you can reposition it very
accurately with respect to other objects.
There is also much greater control over surface properties and terrain
properties. You can import any IFF graphic as a backdrop or horizon.
The manual IMPLORES you to read every page before starting, and
then re-reading it. They know it's an intimidating program.
I read the step by step tutorial and created a simple one-sphere
cell with a sky and ground. Following the instructions made it
easier, but it still is nowhere near as easy as Sculpt. But get
this: the sucker is FAST! This scene rendered in 400 line HAM
mode in under 7 minutes! Sculpt would have taken several hours.
I did not try to build any animations, but that part seems very
simple, based on the loop of film concept. Just create your cells,
define the order and speed at which they are to be played, and your
finished. Silver will animate overscan hi-res HAM images at 60
frames per second.
I did notice a few bugs; the file requestor window would not recognize
my DH0: or DH1: or RAM: directories. Also, I couldn't get the Ray
Traced image off of my screen after it had been generated. I could
slide the screen up and down all day long, but there were no close
gadgets, and ESC, ^C, etc all failed to erase the screen.
So, I still haven't finished reading the manual, so I really don't
have any right to bitch yet. In summary, Silver seems incredibly
powerful and fast, with fantastic control over lighting, camera
parameters, and surface properties. But I found the editor very
cumbersome, and maybe a few bugs here and there.
DISCLAIMER: I have been doing 3d design on UniGRAPHICS for about
six years now, using a 13 MByte program on 32-bit minis, so I
have some preconceived notions of how a 3d modeler should work.
In fact, I'm totally spoiled. However, I think Sculpt is more true
to the concept of how a 3d wireframe should be built than Silver.
Ed.
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It's not so easy to specify textures of objects. In Sculpt, you
merely pick DULL, SHINY, GLASS, MIRROR, or LUMINOUS. Silver gives
much greater control. However, you have no idea what your texture
will be like until you try it, although the manual does give you
some hints on how to achieve certain effects.
After creating an object, you have several pull down choices to
adjust. The PROPERTIES sub menu will throw up a window with slider
controls for SMOOTHNESS, REFLECTIVITY, and SPECULAR, which they
define as the sharpness of reflections off of an object.
The COLORS sub-menu will produce the standard R G B slider window.
FILTERS pops up sliders for the RGB values that you wish to reject,
just like a real camera.
SURFACE offers MATTE, SHADED, GENLOCK (yes, you can overlay a genlock
signal and your objects will be seen on a live video background)
and BRIGHT.
The menu choices for the TERRAIN are MATTE, IMAGE (IFF) CHECKER,
SPACE, GENLOCK, SHADED, BRIGHT, MAGNIFY.
HEURISTICS allows you to control the sharpness of the transition
between forground and background objects. Sounds like a fancy word
for aliasing.
EDGE LEVEL and PERTURBANCE are pretty slick. PERTURBANCE selects
a random color mix for the terrain for each frame. By setting the
PERTURBANCE to 100%, you will get random patterns for each consecutive
frame. You could simulate a blizzard or wind blowing through a
field of grass with this effect.
Lots of features, but a pain to learn. By the way, the 125 page
manual is very poorly written, in my humble opinion. Some sentences
make no sense whatsoever. The layout is also poor, jumping from
topic to topic without much logic or reason.
I really have mixed emotions about this program. I'd go try it
out myself before buying it, or wait for a real review of it.
Ed.
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| Can anyone add any new information about Silver? Upgrades, new
versions, etc.? I have used Sculpt-3D and I think the interface is fine,
but I left the thing on for 8 hours and got an eighth of a page. I like
the sound of faster drawings, better textures, and animation. Does anyone
have anything else to say about this product (before I go out and buy it!)?
thanx,
--mikie--
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