Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!haven!wam!walrus From: walrus@wam.umd.edu (Udo K Schuermann) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Imagine memory usage. Keywords: imagine interface turbo silver Message-ID: <1990Oct21.212916.8818@wam.umd.edu> Date: 21 Oct 90 21:29:16 GMT References: <5168@crash.cts.com> Sender: usenet@wam.umd.edu (USENET Posting) Reply-To: walrus@wam.umd.edu (Udo K Schuermann) Organization: University of Maryland at College Park Lines: 94 In article <5168@crash.cts.com> bobl@pro-graphics.cts.com (System Administrator) writes: >In-Reply-To: message from walrus@wam.umd.edu > >I've seen alot of talk about the features of Imagine but nothing about the >user interface. Isn't there a new user interface? I found the old TS >interface to be the worst out of all the packages. I hope that has changed. > >The Lightwave 3D interface is what I would expect..much like Caligari. > >-- Bob The program represents 3D space with a Quad View: Four windows, one each for TOP, FRONT, and RIGHT view. The fourth is handled by a sub-task to display a 3D view of your object. Each of these four windows can be expanded to full screen size, to another view, or back to quad view with a single mouse click. The perspective can display in either wireframe or solid (hidden lines removed). The perspective in full-screen can also display in a 16-level gray, flat-shaded view. There is no more World Size. The axes are now large enough for just about any job. Pointer coordinates can be displayed in the title bar. Interlace can be turned on and off at any time. A user-sizable grid can be laid into the 3D space to help placing objects. Existing points (when selected) can be made to snap to their nearest grid locations, or the snapping can be done interactively as points are moved or new ones added. The zoom factor can be entered manually. Objects can be moved, rotated, and scaled interactively at the press of a key. A bounding box (with hidden lines dotted) will represent the object and mouse moves apply the motion, rotation, or scaling changes. Anything can be selected in several ways: Turbo Silver's method is still available; added are: DragBox to select all that fall within this box; and Lasso to drag around points that aren't easily reached through DragBox. Options in requesters that aren't available are ghosted, and sliding gadgets will display the current value as the knob is moved. Textures and Brushes are applied to objects from the Attributes requester. The disassociated and limited brush and texture menus are gone. The limit of 8 textures and 8 brushes per scene is gone (yeah!) Four textures can be applied to any object (and optionally its children). The filename is selected as soon as you press on the [X] Texture boolean, from where you can enter the familiar 16 parameters for the texture, as well as interactively edit or numerically transform the texture axes. Four brushes can be applied to any object. A brush can be used for any of the following four functions: Color Map (just as in TS), Reflect Map (different reflectivity for different portions of the object), Altitude Map (map a contoured surface onto an object), and Filter Map (different filter values for different portions of the object). Wrapping around any combination of the X and Z axes is also available. Brushes can also be applied to all child objects. A magnetism function is one of the neatest things I've seen in a while. Depending how you define the magnet, you can drag long "noses", flat mesas or blobs out of an object, or raise random mountains; all just by grabbing a point and dragging it along, the others follow according to the way you've configured the magnet. The Stage editor is the place where all objects are assembled to play their part in the final animation. The Project and the Stage's Action editor provide the equivalent of the old Turbo Silver "film-strip" except that now it is packed so that up to 50 elements are visible on the screen at any one time. The Action screen produces something that looks not unlike a spread sheet. The columns are Object name and 50 columns of movie frames. The rows are the objects with every object having 6 rows for the Actor (object), Position, Alignment, Size, Hinging (tying by distance to another object) and F/X (algorithmic) special effects such as exploding an object into its parts and sending them off, reeling into deep space. It should be noted that sliders are available to scroll the movie frame columns to display any 50 frames in the animation. The Action editor is used to specify initial positions and changes over time of particular attributes (Position, Alignment, Size, etc). This replaces Turbo Silver's Key-Cell with Stories, and it makes it possible to make an object change size in the first 10 frames, then rotate over 25 frames, then change color while spinning backward and shrink back to original size. Other changes that are possible are morphing one object to another (red sphere changes to a blue cube). I have not gotten to play with the Forms and the Cycle editor. Disclaimer: I am not connected to Impulse Inc. except by virtue of being one of their customers. I provide the information above as a service to the Amiga community. If you have specific questions, please email me. ._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in ( ) walrus@cscwam.umd.edu a canoe?" -- "Both are f***ing close to water."