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trueSpace 7 reviewed in Digit
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trueSpace 7 reviewed in Digit // Roundtable
Post by splinters // Apr 18, 2006, 12:41pm
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splinters
Total Posts: 4148
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Anyone read the trueSpace 7 review in Digit magazine issue 99 (UK)?
Would be interested to know if it scored higher than 3D World's review. |
Post by splinters // Apr 19, 2006, 1:26am
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splinters
Total Posts: 4148
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Ok, I bought the mag....
Overall it got 3.5 out of 5 which is the same score they awarded Carrara 5 Pro, Poser 6 and lightwave 8 (even Maya only got 4).
Pictures are pretty naff and were obviously done by the reviewer; consisting of basic items placed in the screen space. One exception is Dave Bokon's HDRI water test image.
Bulk of review sings the praise of the player and makes sharedspace out to be very unique. Several references to Maya and Softimage-some good some not so. Overall, while not very indepth at all, it does err on the more positive side. As for errors; they refer to TS having a Lightscape render engine and that TS7 is capable of cloth and even fur...not good advertising for Vray there (well very good advertising but unfortunately not exactly true)
Usual niggles with GUI-love it or hate it (lovingly referred to as the Marmite of interfaces ) Note made about the truncated text based icons.
Final recommendation is to wait for a demo.....
Their summary;
PROS: A lot of impressive technology is built into trueSpace 7. The modelling is good and the interface puts related tools at your fingertips.
CONS: The interface can be erratic in its attempt to be helpful. Takes a long time to learn.
Offers usual alternatives; Shade 8, Carrara 5 and Cinema 4D 9.5. |
Post by Garion // Apr 19, 2006, 7:11am
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Garion
Total Posts: 116
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Personaly I am waiting on the 7.5 update, reinstalled to 7.1, but the whole thing seems to have slowed to a crawl and this with a wipe and full install. I have since unistalled it again :(
My PC is no slouch either :)
Shared space makes me wary, if I could use it over a LAN in a secure envornment then fine, but I am not so sure about opening another port for possible exploitation. Also IIRC its dependant on caligari servers being up and running and properly maintaned.
As it stands atm I do not have any need for it at all.:D
Is Shared Space availible yet for us all to use?
The Player: I just can't get my head around it as a modeling environment, as a preview its fine but it must by design put a lot of presure on the GFX processor just to display in realtime the scene and objects you are working on. The gods help our GFX cards on content heavy scenes :confused:
When push comes to shove though, none of the reviews advise new users to go out and grab a copy of TS-7 and the price IS prohibitive now.
Only time will tell and TS-7.5 will have to produce a miracle of 3D useroligy and workflowyness not to mention stability if it's going to encourage new users :(
Back to TS 6.6 for me atm, but still hanging in there...
Cheers
Garion |
Post by JPSofCA // Apr 19, 2006, 7:15am
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JPSofCA
Total Posts: 300
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I fully understand their pros and cons. trueSpace is very powerful and functional.
I will stress that the interface is how all of the window elements work with each other, how consistently they operate, and how intuitive those features are to use.
For example:
All windows and dialogues which come to have a scroll bar should be assotiated with mouse wheel scrolling functionality.
All buttons that act as a toggle should not only become active or become inactive, but should reflect their active or inactive state visually as well.
Over time, window docking behavior should be advanced until it is obvious no further refinement is necessary - or rather apparent.
Windows, dialogues, and custom containers should share a consistent visual theme - all "Help" icons should match not by size, but thematically, as differing icons used for common functionality can be considered instant clutter from an interface perspective. All "Open" icons should match. All "Close" icons should be the same thematically - not a checkmark for one window, and an X for the other, for example.
Interface, interface, interface! Having an icon for all functions is not an interface in itself, but rather a collection of tools. It is the presentation of this toolset which makes an interface.
All this is not to discredit any of the work so far, as trueSpace is really taking off and capable of some serious performance. But a consistency pattern is a good thing to get solidly implemented early on, and new features programmed alongside that pattern. Objects of one type can intrinsically consist of particular "types" of elements that refer to a common file. And if the "look" is to be enhanced at a later time, it's best to be done globally, from a single spot, which instantly affects the entire program in a consistent manner.
:) |
Post by splinters // Apr 19, 2006, 7:43am
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splinters
Total Posts: 4148
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I agree with you both although I found 7.1 to be faster than 7.0 with no PC upgrade at all.
You will always get a differing view from those fresh to TS and those who have used it for a while, beta testers for example; we can be a little biased but then again, the 3D World was done by a tester so that blows that idea out of the water.
I used to be very defensive about my work on UI and took every negative comment as a criticism but I came to realise that what I did, I did pretty well but the icons were not always put into the UI as I might have expected.
Certainly, my designs for collapsible/expndable toolbars unfortunately did not make it into 7.1 and I asked for a clearer way of toggling icons on or off. You all know how I feel about those little icons so I made a larger toolbar, but I still use the small one on my laptop; choice is good.
At the end of the day UI design is Roman's baby and what he says goes but I know he listens to user feedback and I am pretty sure that some more changes will be implemented, but given the time spent on the manual, I doubt there will be any drastic makeover of the UI...:o |
Post by TomG // Apr 19, 2006, 8:03am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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One quick note about heavy scenes in the Player - in ALL cases I have tested so far, the Player runs much more smoothly than the Modeler. Scenes and models that slowed my Modeler refresh rate to a jerky crawl (even in wireframe) now work smoothly in the Player (even in solid rendering).
The thing is that while the new effects possible in the Player may make it sound like it will be more greedy of gpu than the modeler, the truth is that advances in gpus and in DirectX make it much BETTER at handling large scenes and heavy geometry than the modeler.
HTH :)
Tom |
Post by frank // Apr 19, 2006, 8:34am
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frank
Total Posts: 709
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Shared space makes me wary, if I could use it over a LAN in a secure envornment then fine, but I am not so sure about opening another port for possible exploitation.
Hi Garion!
I want to put your mind at ease about the 'security' thing because I've seen it mentioned before.
Having an open port doesn't mean much unless there's a malicious program listening on that port (OR if it's a service port that is commonly exploited). Since it will likely be a high-number, non-service port, with Shared Space running on it you don't have much to worry about.
Hope that makes sense. :) |
Post by Mike // Apr 19, 2006, 9:38am
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Mike
Total Posts: 121
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This has been my experience as well.
One quick note about heavy scenes in the Player - in ALL cases I have tested so far, the Player runs much more smoothly than the Modeler. Scenes and models that slowed my Modeler refresh rate to a jerky crawl (even in wireframe) now work smoothly in the Player (even in solid rendering).
The thing is that while the new effects possible in the Player may make it sound like it will be more greedy of gpu than the modeler, the truth is that advances in gpus and in DirectX make it much BETTER at handling large scenes and heavy geometry than the modeler.
HTH :)
Tom |
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