Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!athena.mit.edu!spworley From: spworley@athena.mit.edu (Spaceman Spiff) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Imagine raves (long) Summary: its wonderful! I hate it! Keywords: imagine 3d raytrace render review potatoes Message-ID: <1990Dec31.102729.16901@athena.mit.edu> Date: 31 Dec 90 10:27:29 GMT Sender: spworley@athena.mit.edu Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 109 I bought Imagine about a week ago, and I've probably put in 60 hours playing with it. I've done a lot of DPaint animation, but Imagine is my first 3D design tool. General comments: Good features- You can create objects pretty easily. It can automatically trace IFF pix to make outlines, which can be spun or extruded or swept to form a 3d object. It also can use IFF pix mapped onto objects to define color, reflectivity, transparency, and altitude. Altitude is especially cool- you can actually make the object's surface bulge according to the intensity of the iff file. Has great potential! Overall high quality- the program is SMOOTH. Caveats below. Bad Features- Very few. Any 3D effect I can think of exists- its just a matter of implementing them. Some VERY complex actions, like exploding an object into its component bits wich go spinning off, are trivial to implement. It is possible to automatically fill an outline with triangles to make a surface (like PIXEL3D & others) by using a tool called slice. Its kinda annoying, and has too many steps. I would LOVE to just select the outline and select "tesselate." The Form Editor is a bit strange, and I don't know why it exists. Yes, I'll use it to build asteroids, but what else? The Major Flaw- In-Box Support. Imagine comes with a SINGLE 3.5 floppy, two thin manuals (reference & tutorial), and two Xeroxed sheets explain textures and effects. Thats all. My big flame, especially when I was first learning, was THERE ARE NO ON-DISK EXAMPLES! THERE IS NO PREMADE OBJECT LIBRARY! THERE ARE NO SAMPLE PICTURES! I cringe when I hear of Alan Hastings "phonebook" of objects. I have not used Lightwave, but I'd LOVE to pull a car out and play with it. Every object I render was CREATED BY ME! Turbo Silver objects (at least the ones on abcfd20) don't work, though they should. The manuals are also not comprehensive enough. They aren't badly done, or wrong, they're just brief. The tutorial manual leads you though a good number of examples (about 5 or 6 "projects") but the tutorials are more like "click on this. Select That. Now slice." as opposed to "Slice is a powerful tool that will let you cut one object with another, like a big 3D cookie cutter. You can then use the pieces any way you want. Click on this to tell Imagine this is the object that should be sliced (the cookie dough), then select the slicing object (the cookie cutter). The last object to be selected is always the object that actually does the slicing. Slice can be used in many other neat effects..." The reference manual is especially brief. It consists of a sentence describing each pull-down menu selection, and not much more. "Group will take and combine all selected objects into a group." Fine. Whats a group?? What is the difference between group and join? WHY DO I EVER WANT TO GROUP?? This is not sarcasm- I still don't know. Small bugs: Loads. Only one guru, but I was mega-tasking, and it could have been another program. Small bugs abound, though. After you view a picture, DO NOT PRESS A MOUSE BUTTON TO ESCAPE! Why? It will freeze Imagine (but not hang the machine). If you do this during a looping anim, YOU MUST REBOOT TO ESCAPE! I can't render glass! Transparency does not seem to work!! It could be my fault, but I've tried LOTS of stuff, filter maps, ambient light, index of refraction, using full raytrace (which is essential) playing with reflection, putting light sources everywhere- but nothing. I cannot see through anything. I've got a 6M A3000, and Imagine & Imaginefp give identical results. My friend's A2000 couldn't do it either. Any suggestions? My big flame was no in box support. I haven't used it, but Impulse has an Imagine helpline that I'll get around to calling this week. Until then, has ANYONE rendered glass? Or am I just daft? A warning: this program does not have a learning curve. It has a learning WALL. It is not pleasant like D-paint's "smiley face to colored smiley face to bouncing colored smileyface to stenciled animbrushed colored smileyface perspective" its all thown at you at once. Keep plugging. Read the tutorial through before you start, and read the reference manual each time you use a new command. I was VERY frustrated for a while, but its inherent in 3D design. I expect that SA4D or Lightwave are probably bad for the neophite as well. Anyway, my overall impression is VERY positive, despite all the annoyances that I listed. I am VERY pleased with it, especially now I know how to get around everywhere. I can't compare it to Lightwave or SA4D or TS, but its a SMOOTH product and I know I'll use it a lot in th future, just for fun. A closing suggestion: All us Imaginers should get together on a mailing list! I'd love to swap techniques, questions, objects, ideas! If one doesn't exist already, we should make one! Anyway, everyone should feel free to e-mail me with any questions you have if you're thinking of getting Imagine or especially if you're trying to learn the thing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Steve Worley spworley@athena.mit.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------