At Eggington, we wore out the phone receiver making calls to Hash about problems and E-mailed them data and descriptions.
Many of them were never fixed.
“nobody was using it so we took it out” and,
“which sounds sexier: no blocky artifacts, or Radiosity?”
“more people will buy it if it says Radiosity.”
The excuse was “the average user will never encounter this bug”
so… how many ‘average users’ do we have getting kicked off of mailing list, or harrassed by the zealots, or browbeaten for their stupidity because they encountered this bug, and had no idea how to work around it?
Animation:Master is a great peice of software, but mostly on paper.
The feature list is oh so sexy, should any of you glance through it the first time. Mmany of them are just ink on the box, and many have been broken and ignored through the product updates.
Since starting their ‘subscription’ service, A:M has consistently gone downhill. Those who paid in november get one month with new software, those who paid in January got the entire year.
The subscription schedule is not good for any 3d product. Instead of focusing on helping the users they have, and ensuring a permanend upgrade-freindly userbase, They push really hard to get that next number version out the door on time, with half working, very unstable features. Newer version numbers sell many units at trade shows, I guess.
And then there’s the apprehensive users that will humm and haww, and get duped for one more upgrade by reading the next version’s feature list.
After all, we professional A:M users went through alot to convince you to put up the money for this product. More work goes into those renders than I can even say in this post.
I can almost guarantee, many animations you’ll see at their website, and at the trade shows was done on Versions of A:M several years old. few, if any, use the latest version of the software, Even in the live demonstrations.
They’ve lost that drive that made the software and users so fun.
It has been replaced by dollar signs, half baked designs, and angry people. Gone are the exciting days of testing new features, and figuring out how to use them for your characters.
Half of my time has been spent Re-updating models for each revision of software. no, not every new version. revision.
This year and part of last year has been very barren for A:M animations, movie tests, and demo reels. The Users are not showing off their work, because stablilty and compatibility issues are keeping them from creating.
Very few of the knowlegable people exist on their mailing lists anymore. They have simply faded into the background. Instead, what I see is hordes of new users asking very simple questions that will not get answered.
The talent and knowlegebase that taught A:M on the list is rare or has dissappeared completely, thanks to the latest crop burning over the last few days.
back in the 80’s, Martin Hash started programming A:M(or its forerunners) about the time Newtek started working on Lightwave(as well as many other companies such as 3d studio, Alias, Softimage, et al). They were all very small companies, and they all had a dreams of the future of 3D.
So, ask yourself these questions.
Why is hash still a 5 person operation, when The rest of these companies grew 100 times bigger?
Why isn’t Martin’s ‘better than anything’ Hash Patch technology
a de facto industry standard?
And why aren’t we seeing powerful demonstrations of 'The software even an artist can afford." ?
) has a suggestion box right on their site!!! If you dont like something or you would like something added just go there and tell em…you dont get your membership revoked for doing so either 
Of course just like Alias, not everything you ask for is going to be implemented.
