Toaster’s 3-D Add-On Really Cooks

First Newtek Inc. brought television production to the masses with the Video Toaster, which allows an Amiga computer to create broadcast-quality video effects.

This small, Topeka, Kan.-based company is now about to do the same for 3-D animation with the Screamer, a $9,995, four-chip parallel microprocessing extension to the Toaster that runs at a blistering 150 megahertz.

The Video Toaster has always been able to produce elaborate animated video titles and hundreds of transitions from one scene to another in real time, sending the results to a videotape recorder.

The latest model, Video Toaster 4000, is a $2,395 expansion board and software for the Amiga 4000. The Toaster and computer can be purchased together for about $4,300. It also allows you to retouch images or create new ones and design three-dimensional animations, but the 3-D images take a long time to render on the Amiga.

Introduction of the Screamer means that advertising agencies, small video producers and even hobbyists will be able to afford to produce video-quality animations. Even Steven Spielberg won’t need to spend so much on expensive graphics workstations anymore.

According to Paul Montgomery, Newtek vice president, the first shipments of Screamers are destined for work on Spielberg’s upcoming television series “SeaQuest DVS,” where they will produce many of the underwater scenes.

Another upcoming television science fiction series, “Babylon 5,” will also utilize Toasters with Screamers to create space stations and other out-of-this world scenes.

Both TV production companies already use Video Toasters, but addition of the Screamers will speed up the process about 40-fold, Montgomery said.

Unveiled last week at the Siggraph computer graphics exhibition in Anaheim, the Screamer is a specialized 3-D animation-rendering engine that plugs into Newtek’s Amiga-based Video Toaster. It takes over from the Amiga to render scenes created in LightWave 3-D, the Toaster’s 3-D animation modeling software.

Many of the surrealistic scenes in television commercials are 3-D computer animations, as are special effects in some music videos.

What lies behind such realistic images are millions upon millions of mathematical calculations solving formulas so complex that few people even know how to read them.

The 33-megahertz Motorola 68040 microprocessor in the latest Amiga 4000 can handle the calculations that the Toaster’s LightWave program requires, but it takes a while. According to Tim Jenison, president of Newtek, most animators start leaving out features from scenes that take more than 15 minutes to render. Among the more math-intensive features are blurring, which imparts the illusion of motion to moving objects, and ray tracing, which gives realistic lighting effects--so they are the first to go in complex scenes.

Fifteen minutes might not seem long, but it takes 30 scene frames to make one second of video and 1,800 to make a minute. That is 450 hours of Amiga processing time. But plug in the Screamer and it can be done overnight--about 11 hours. Or let it run for 24 hours and add in blurring and ray tracing.

All of a sudden it becomes possible for one person with a good idea and some artistic talent to create professional video animation quickly enough to be salable. Total capital outlay required: $15,000 to $20,000.

The Screamer is housed in an eye-catching sculpted red and gray, tower-style box with tiny, blinking blue lights signaling its activity and one corner twisted into a frozen pirouette.

It is too big to fit onto a desktop, but I doubt it will be hidden beneath many desks. I think there is a good aftermarket for Screamer pedestals--maybe a circular padded bench with room for an upraised Screamer in the middle, mimicking the Cray 1 supercomputer that it outruns by a factor of two.

Inside the box are four motherboards, each with a MIPS R4400 microprocessor, each running at 150 megahertz. It connects to the Amiga with standard network or SCSI interfaces at the user’s option.

A 100-megabyte hard disk will contain the program files necessary to make the Screamer work, but the rendered images will be sent back to the Amiga’s hard disk for storage.

Hidden from the user will be the operating system that manages the four-board parallel processing tasks, none other than Microsoft’s new Windows NT.

The one issue not nailed down is how much memory will be installed in the Screamer at its announced price. Newtek’s Montgomery said it could range from 0 to 32 megabytes, depending on what happens to memory chip prices by the time of the first retail shipments, scheduled for October or November.

At the moment, chip prices are rising amid turmoil over shortages of a crucial epoxy resin ingredient, caused by a recent factory fire in Japan.