Gabor Nagy has released an IRIX version of Equinox-3D! I'd e-mailed him asking about a possible IRIX download last month and received this response (December 19th):
"Hi and thanks for your interest in EQUINOX-3D.Actually, I started developing EQUINOX-3D on IRIX, back in 1993, but I don't have easy access to SGI machines any more. Since I'm not really making any money on EQX, I can't afford or justify buying an IRIX box.
Trust me, I'm not a big fan ot the Intel architecture, but you can get a Linux box that's over 10 times as powerful as a similarly-priced SGI, and it's pretty much the same thing: UNIX / C / X11 / OpenGL etc.
I will probably do occasional releases for IRIX if I can find an SGI machine somewhere, but I can't promise much at this point."
Then out of the blue I hear about this new vesion, and not via e-mail either ... if I hadn't seen a post regarding it on Usenet I wouldn't have even bothered to go back to the Equinox-3D site. So I'm glad that a new version did come out, and a little miffed that he didn't tell me about it :)
On to the program (from the website):
EQUINOX-3D aims to be a complete 3D package, including modeling, animation and rendering.
Some of the main features and strengths:
Super-fast renderer, a fully interactive ray-tracer!
Clean, easy to use user-interface.
Universal, unlimited undo/redo infrastructure
Very fast and memory-efficient design. For example: thanks to some design decisions and custom tools to aid plugin development, EQUINOX-3D starts up in ~ 2 seconds with about 50 plugins loaded (1 second on my system)! (*) Try that with other 3D packages :)
Multiple Geometries allowed on transform nodes (compared to most other 3D packages, much fewer NULL models needed to group things, resulting in cleaner/more efficient hierarchies).
A robust internal structure and a direct-API (Application Programming Interface) for manipulating and displaying 3D geometry from plugins.
3D file formats supported: I/O for SOFTIMAGE ".hrc" and Wavefront "OBJ" (it's very easy to add a new one).
2D file formats supported: JPEG, PNG, SGI, SOFTIMAGE, TIFF.
Plugin-manager: allows you to unload, change, re-compilie and reload plugins without restarting EQUINOX-3D.
Plugins for creating primitives (torus, cylinder etc.) and complex surfaces (Revolve, Skin etc.).
More and more modeling tools every couple of weeks... ("Mirror", "Merge", "Cleanup" etc.)
I plan on giving it a try myself this weekend; looks to be a great program.
Unfortunately no support for MIPS3 machines, so I have no chance to check it out... But I bought an O2 which will arrive next week and than I will give it a try :) BTW you have a great website!!
it's very inspired by Softimage|3D with a very similar ui and hotkeys - but it's way incomplete (animation-wise and god knows where else).
it has some annoying flickering and display errors on my I2 High Impact.