The Way of the Weasel

By Jerry Pournelle

August 22, 2005

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Column 301 (Continued from the Previous Week)

A collage of many of the items discussed in this month's column.

Martin Hash's Animation Master

If you want to play around with 3D object creation and make your own short movies, you can't do much better than start with Martin Hash's Animation Master. This is an inexpensive program that has many of the features of the professional 3D programs like Maya and Softimage, and while learning Animation Master won't make you qualified for a job in the film industry, little of what you learned playing around with it will be a waste of time if that's your goal. When I asked David Em about Animation Master, he said "In general, I've only got good things to say about it: capable (particularly for character animation), really cheap, easy to learn, good non-photorealistic rendering capability."

David's only real complaint was that the last time he used it, the program required you to have the CD installed whenever you ran it, and that made it difficult to use with a laptop. This has changed: Now the program requires you to have the CD installed when you start it up, but after that you can remove it. There is also an optional "dongle" you can use instead of a CD (which would be necessary if you were going to use it with most TabletPC systems since they don't have a CD drive).

You may have seen Animation Master at many shows. It's hard to miss. It's demonstrated by Greg Rostami, who ranks up there with Quarterdeck's legendary Gary Seltzer and Play Inc.'s fabled Kiki Stockhammer in possessing the ability to hold your attention while showing off the product. Greg puts on a show that's hard to forget: Starting with some freehand lines he ends up with a talking jar complete with hair in about two minutes.

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