dmaas

ATI's drivers are not known to be as solid as NVIDIA's, especially for non-game applications and/or on Linux.

The “upside-down bitmap” thing could be a video drive issue. I once had a crappy Intel chipset that rendered bitmaps upside-down.

From what I have seen all of the operators in Houdini that create approximations (e.g. fillet) have an error tolerance setting. You can trade off more error/less vertices against less error/more vertices.

Double-precision is very rare in the 3D animation world. I don't know of any renderers that use double-precision, so there isn't much point in modeling with double precision. (of course if you want to output to a CAD system, that's another matter)

I would check out Rhino as well. They boast about extremely precise NURBS operations, and I think Rhino uses double-precision as well. I'd use it more except I don't really like their GUI.

Thanks guys. An “archive generator” sounds like just what I want. (bonus points if it can also give me the bounding box for each RIB). With Maya I use MTOR's “archive export” feature, which sounds similar (although MTOR can't do lights). Motion blur is essential on both the transform and object deformation. Basically my workflow is

create stuff in various apps -> dump to per-frame RIBs -> integrate and render with custom code

I will see if I can get an eval license to try out this feature.