The whole reason I bought my first Amiga back in the 80's was to animate. I have used Arexx to combine a few software packages to speed up rendering times and combining effects but I wanted to build a 'render farm'. So now I own 6 Amigas, two with ethernet cards and all with lots of rendering and animation software. I am NOT thinking about a commercial film or a high-tech space shoot-em-up, but actually a dull educational video about early low-tech art technologies, like Greek kilns, Pueblo pit firings etc. So this Screamernet stuff would enable my Miggies to join up and assist my project? Where can I get it? I have 3 Toasters and 2 Supergens. I have Toaster 4000 software, too.
Heck, I don't think that slogging along with a networked Amiga render farm is all that bad. Maybe a bunch of high end PCs could do the same thing 100's of times faster, but why is that more satisfying than using ancient beat-up old Amigas to create educational art? My ceramics can take weeks to sculpt and up to 18 hours to fire. You can't speed up a wood fired kiln, but you also would find it very very hard to get the same effect from a gas or electric kiln. So I am going to try to do what I started out to do many years ago: build the render farm and make some videos.
I think there is a lesson to be learned here. If we were traditional Japanese we might be happy to slowly, carefully, produce a work of art. There is nothing wrong with not making a profit, not speeding to a destination, and looking down at the strawberries that are growing at our feet. As I told my students when I taught sword work: sometimes fast is slow, and slow is fast.
