nice work...

I cant sing Cinema4D's praises enough though... try the demo if you get a chance..

here is one of my more recent visuals... a bit thrown together ... but you get the idea... it took 2mins 15 secs to render at A4ish dimensions :)

I like the way you handle light, esp. incoming sunlight..

you find radiosity in C4D puts a big hurt on your render times? It does in LW...

gphz

well........ I use a Vray plugin which is much faster than most traditional built in renderers..

typically we find on Maya and C4D that using Vray improves the quality of the visual beyond belief AND more than halves the render time... so its better and quicker... :D

Okay over the years this is what I have noticed:

I mainly do a lot of graphics, desktop publishing, web design, etc using Quark and Adobe CS. Here is my simplistic digital assessment (I'm not a gamer or video editor):

I started with using a Mac Classic with a 7" screen in 1989, then went to a IIsi with a 13" monitor - WOW! But mainly because of the screen size and RAM increase. Going from OS 7 to OS 8 was an improvement, but not ground shaking.
Going from the 68000x processors to a G3 was also nice but again the 17"+ screen screen sizes made the most notable difference. Going from OS 8 to OS 9 hey, I believe we're on to something here!

Going from G3 to G4 and to OS X, the os transition was a little difficult but speed improvements were much improved, screen sizes bigger (Apple Cinema Displays also great!) - I LIKIE!!
The big jumped that I really noticed was from G4 (1.25GHz) to my G5 2.0 DP - FANTASTIC!! Almost everything seemed better, faster and smoother especially with Tiger.

From G5 DP/Quad to Mac Pro (Intel Xeon) with Leopard which I use at work, not really all that impressed with the performance differences. I also don't have the need for any Intel/Vista based applications at home so I'm still loving my Power Mac G5 DP.

Computer hardware gets faster cpus and bigger RAM and disk space. So the software engineers write new versions of the software to take advantage of the increase in power, RAM and disk space. So the net perception to the user is ..... no change.

I remember thinking how fast Photoshop was on my Mac IIsi, which had 8Mb of RAM and a 40Mb hard drive. My iMac is more than 100 times more powerful, but Photoshop still takes about the same amount of time to start up.:D

yeah..."new features" are what sells software.

how many would buy if the ads said "No new features, but lots of under-the-hood improvements to speed and stability."

I know I would but prlby lots of ppl would say "Meh...I'll stick with what I got."

and there's merit to that, too.

even the very first Mac did things hundreds or thousands of times faster than any human could do them...in one sense, we prbly should have stayed put...

gphz

Apple's trying that out right now. Leopard wasn't that exciting to many users, but a serious review like this one uncovered a vast amount of reworking of OS X under the hood to enable future major advances.

Now we have "Snow Leopard," which is being touted as no features, just optimization.

If the Mac computing public really wants performance and stability before feature bloat, everybody better pull out their credit cards for Leopard and Snow Leopard. If that doesn't happen, then the mainstream software marketers will have proved that no matter what the public said, they really wanted the flashy bloat features all along.

I was quite excited to hear about snow leopard and thot "Finally! someone's showing a little leadership here."

if I were to move to MacIntel, I'd be way happy about snow leopard, but Apple got it SO right with Tiger I'm quite happy to stay where I am.

gphz