Shark FX

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Rick82

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Shark FX

Hi All,

Just curious if anyone has had any experience with a 3D program called "Shark FX" ?

It's by Punch Software and it appears to be a real native Mac modeler, but it's certainly more expensive than Cheetah.

Thanks for the input.

Rick
 
there's a sweet video with eighties music up on their site. yeah, it's cad, and parametric nurbs or whatever.... might be good for hard surface stuff... but I would rather use MoI if I liked to model that way.... which I don't.
 
Hi Rick
i'm interested in having a good 3d cad modeler too and watched at punch! among some others. to be honest the shark line is too expensive for me but i tried ViaCAD pro and it's very good for the price (see punch product comparison here): it would be my choice in the turboCAD, touchCAD etc. segment (VCpro is 250$).

on the other hand if your budget lets you look at FX you may consider Rhino, as it seems in advanced beta under OSX (you can test it by yourself by now if you like) and it should cost a half if the current Win price will be maintained for the osx version too. I have no news about the future release (and I never looked for) but it could be out in months, maybe (the current beta is pretty usable anyway). Ashlar-Vellum and Solidthinking have some nice high-end products too.
MoI is an outstanding app with a clean and intuitive UI, I'd have bought a license for sure if there was a Mac version but I'm not going to spend my money on Win app anymore. hope there will be a MoI4Mac some day (hopefully before Rhino for OSX is out... 'cause i'll buy only one of them:rolleyes: )

only some feelings I got during my Mac-CAD-evaluation-Days, of course...

cheers,
A
 
podperson said:
MoI runs perfectly under Parallels or Fusion.
Click to expand...

I know as we talked about this before, but I would have to buy Parallel/Fusion and, most of all, a non-oem Win license to run it... and i definitely don't want to. if Rick already has a decent physical or virtual Win machine it could be a perfect (and cheap) solution anyway.
AFAIK it still doesn't work under VirtualBox (last test with VB 3.0.6 and Win7RC, not tested under 3.0.8)
 
Cool!

SurfingAlien said:
I know as we talked about this before, but I would have to buy Parallel/Fusion and, most of all, a non-oem Win license to run it... and i definitely don't want to. if Rick already has a decent physical or virtual Win machine it could be a perfect (and cheap) solution anyway.
AFAIK it still doesn't work under VirtualBox (last test with VB 3.0.6 and Win7RC, not tested under 3.0.8)
Click to expand...

Thanks Guys.

MoI looks really nice and very powerful in terms of the modeling. I still prefer Cheetah, but I do wish that it had more powerful modeling tools.

I contacted the MoI staff and asked if they were considering a Mac Version.

Thanks for the input gentlemen.

Rick
 
SurfingAlien said:
I know as we talked about this before, but I would have to buy Parallel/Fusion and, most of all, a non-oem Win license to run it... and i definitely don't want to. if Rick already has a decent physical or virtual Win machine it could be a perfect (and cheap) solution anyway.
AFAIK it still doesn't work under VirtualBox (last test with VB 3.0.6 and Win7RC, not tested under 3.0.8)
Click to expand...

why can't you install the OEM version in parallels/fusion?
 
MoI Reply

Just heard back from Michael Gibson, the developer for MoI and he said he would love to make a Mac release of MoI, but the time to make that version would be prohibitive.

I was under the impression that it was fairly easy to port C++ code back and forth from Mac to PC these days.

Too bad he couldn't just hand it to a competent Mac developer and have it ported for him.

At any rate, I am a bit jealous of MoI's ability to create a clean mesh after a boolean operation, instead of a bunch of triangles. Also jealous of the lofting feature!

Rick
 
Rick82 said:
At any rate, I am a bit jealous of MoI's ability to create a clean mesh after a boolean operation, instead of a bunch of triangles. Also jealous of the lofting feature!

Rick
Click to expand...

yep, for many reasons MoI is some kind of "Rhino lite" and this is obviously not a surprise: it misses some advanced feature but it's more intuitive and has a better UI. Converting from nurbs to meshes seems to be its strength, where it beats even his big brother (following some comparison i read)

if you're still interested in Punch products I just received a mail with a discount coupon -20% till nov01 12:00 CDT ("HAUNTED20")

don't know what you're doing now but MoI, Rhino & Co. should be perfect for that kind of models you were trying to do lately (rings, jewelry, etc.). no matter what will be your choice, take a look at the Jewelry tutorials you can find in Rhino website.

cheers,
A
 
I'm going to install:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116754
on fusion 3.

Fusion 3 can be purchased for 54 bucks at smithmicro right now with discount and coupon codes. probably due to the shaky launch they had.

I'm not going to bother with boot camp, since I would rarely ever need it.

Parallels and VMware have actually done mac users a disservice because many companies now use virtualization as an excuse not to bother with a native mac port. Autodesk now considers 3ds max through parallels as the mac version of there software. There will never be a mac port. It's a sad reality.

And how much do I care about the M$ EULA?
 
For a 3D program like MoI a Mac Port is virtually irrelevant. Its UI is both (a) totally platform independent and (b) very Mac-like. Sure -- it will never get ported to Mac, but I'd rather run the Windows version under Fusion than get a half-assed Mac port (or a six months behind Windows version).

If you're like most long-term PC users you have Windows licenses all over the place (I think I have something like six Windows license -- including Windows 2k, XP Home, XP Professionalm and Vista Home Premium).
 
well, by that logic we should all just run silo in fusion, and tell that David guy not to worry about the snow leopard issues....
 
nervouschimp said:
well, by that logic we should all just run silo in fusion, and tell that David guy not to worry about the snow leopard issues....
Click to expand...

I may be reduced to just that :)

The fact is Silo 3D was written from the start as cross-platform. MoI was specifically written as a Windows tablet program... you can't blame the guy for not wanting to rewrite everything from scratch. It's a shame he didn't write it as cross-platform since it doesn't gain anything by being Windows-specific.
 
so I just set up win 7 home premium in fusion 3. it does indeed run aero, but I just ran 3dmark 06 and it was a joke.... just a fraction of the performance compared to native, and I've got an 8800gt. The first sequence ran between 4-15 FPS. Silo runs like crap on win 7 in fusion 3, probably because the opengl support in win 7 on fusion is only 1.3. It's not quite as bad on xp in fusion (opengl 2.1). It looks like xp is still the way to go.
 
hi

if i want to try UDK (thanks to nervouschimp!)what would be better:bootcamp/parallels/other?and what about 3dmax and why?
please understand my lack of experience and that i apreciate your advise !
 
Having just tested Fusion 3 and Parallels 5, I would recommend Parallels 5 for virtualization, especially if you were looking for direct X performance. My 3D mark score was tripled in Parallels 5. Unfortunately, the most practical solution is boot camp. Max, and the Unreal Ed are heavy apps that don't run well virtualized.

I would prolly choose cheetah over Max... but I would also choose blender over Max. Blender is available as a 64-bit cocoa app, and is free... of course it needs bmesh before I'd really consider it. I would also choose Unity over Unreal... seriously.

There's a lot of great tools right here on your mac, if you aren't interested in windows....
 
When I first considered getting Fusion, I looked into Parallels. We had Parallels at work, and I wasn't impressed. It ran slow and the support from the company was pretty much nil. So, I went with Fusion.

I've been using Fusion for a while. I don't have Fusion3, and prior to a few updates back, it ran virtualized Windows and apps great. Now, it's much slower than before. One thing I like about it is that although I have Windows setup in Bootcamp, I can also reach it while in Snow Leopard through Fusion, thereby allowing me to drag files and run them in both systems at the same time.

However, I agree, that booting into Bootcamp is best for this kind of thing.
 
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