Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!umb!ileaf!io!carlos From: carlos@io.UUCP (Carlos Smith) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Sculpt 3D, ray tracing. (Bugs with morerows and screenblanker) Message-ID: <362@io.UUCP> Date: Thu, 20-Aug-87 17:32:21 EDT Article-I.D.: io.362 Posted: Thu Aug 20 17:32:21 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 11:45:38 EDT Reply-To: carlos (Carlos Smith) Distribution: world Organization: Interleaf, Cambridge, MA Lines: 73 I have been happily playing with Sculpt 3D for the last two weeks. It is a wonderful program (already one of my favorites on the Amiga) and Eric Graham has done a wonderful job of taking something inherently difficult (3D design on a 2D display) and made it easy to use, but powerful. I recommend this program to anyone interested in 3D design and ray-tracing. It is NOT an animation program, but is meant as a modeling and rendering package. A companion animation package may be done "in a few months" (Byte-by-Byte rep at Siggraph). One of the nice things about Sculpt 3D is that it is easy to learn, and well-documented. The user interface is very well thought out: it seems to have a minimal number of tools (some important ones seem to be missing at first), but with use one finds that almost anything can be accomplished fairly easily. Colors and surface properties of faces are selectable. Color is set with sliders (no fixed palette), among the surface properties are dull, shiny, mirror, transparent. Light sources can be colored. Viewing is easily set up with a target and observer. "Lenses" are selected to alter viewing of the scene (normal, wide angle, telephoto and selectable). Smoothing of planar facets is selectable on a face by face basis. The imaging modes include wireframe (no hidden line removal, good for fast scene setting), paint (flat shaded faces, much faster than ray-tracing), snapshot (ray-tracing without shadowing, HAM output) and photo (shadowing, HAM output). Anti-aliasing is also selectable, as well as interlace and high-res (for non-HAM modes - HAM is 320 only, right?). There are also several image sizes for very fast ray-tracing just to get a feel for whether lighting and camera postion are correct. One nice thing is that rendering is a background process, you can continue to work on a model while it or another is being rendered. A couple of warnings though. I have found destructive interference between Sculpt 3D and Morerows, as well as with Screenblanker (from Charlie Heaths FastFonts package). Morerows seems to confuse it as to the image size of the rendered image, to the point where if the image is saved and immediately reloaded, it is shifted to the right and wraps around to the left, and a requester tells you "Error loading image". It also does not load correctly into DigiPaint (a great companion, since it allows you to touch up and/or work with the results of the ray-tracing, since they are in HAM mode). This is solved by eliminating morerows. Oh well. The interference caused by screenblanker is very bizarre. In HAM mode large images take a LONG time (I have had them go overnight easily, especially with mirrors). At some point screenblanker kicks in, dimming the colors in the screen used for the ray-traced image. Apparently the HAM algorithm looks at the brightness of the preceding "real" pixel, decides how bright it wants this one and sets the color accordingly. The result is that the HAM colors are fine with the screen dimmed, but when you move the mouse and the colors go back to full brightness, there are garish bright streaks across the image emanating from the leftmost "real" pixels. Its kind of neat to see the HAM interaction, if it didn't take ten hours to do it! So no more screenblanker either... Thanks to Jim Shook for warning me about morerows... It is not copy protected. I hope this doesn't mean it will be heavily pirated, the guy did a hell of a job. One Meg or more is recommended for complex scenes. Speaking of copyrights, I got a real shock today at the NCGA CAD expo in Boston. While passing the Intergraph booth, a friend said "Hey, that looks familiar!" There was the Juggler, running in a window on an Intergraph workstation! Is the workstation really an Amiga?! Is it the first Amiga clone?! No, actually it seems to be another case of a stunning Amiga demo finding its way onto other machines, this time a very high end workstation. Is the juggler copyrighted by Eric Graham? It is certainly as readily identifiable as Red the unicycle. I get the feeling that Mr. Graham is more likely to be flattered than to break out the lawyers. I could be wrong... By the way, many Amigans are taking the wrong tack in the "Mac multitasking" war. Everyone is pointing out that they can do ray-traces in the background while accomplishing real work (certainly true). But Mac people will not comprehend this. Ray traced images are just not very impressive on a tiny black-and-white display. Tell them they can have multiple copies of the talking moose arguing with each other. This they will appreciate. -- Carlos Smith uucp:...!harvard!umb!ileaf!carlos Bix: carlosmith