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From: adh@well.UUCP (Allen D. Hastings)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Interchange program for Sculpt 3D and Videoscape3D
Message-ID: <4523@well.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Nov-87 03:06:17 EST
Article-I.D.: well.4523
Posted: Tue Nov 24 03:06:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Nov-87 07:21:17 EST
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Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
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Summary: HAM in VideoScape and free object converter



    In response to John Foust's latest comments on VideoScape:

>Do you mean to say "lots of colors" equals "eleven fixed colors, plus fixed
>shades of those colors"?  My point was that Sculpt does choose a new
>palette for the picture, which looks much nicer than a fixed palette.  

    As I said in my previous posting, polygons in VideoScape 1.10 can be
set to any of 121 colors (not counting the various surface types such as
dull, shiny, luminous, transparent, etc.), and the palette used can be
set by the user.  Even in VideoScape 1.00, many colorful scenes (such as a
sphere with blue, green, red, yellow, and white bands) will look better
than in Sculpt 3d's paint mode because there are 56 shades available
(achieved through dithering) as opposed to 32.

>light to dark, because of the limits of dithered coloring.  To be fair,
>this is true of any any non-HAM rendering scheme, so this isn't a
>particular criticism of VideoScape.

    Actually, VideoScape 3D 1.10 does support not only Extra Halfbrite
mode, but also Hold and Modify mode, and can render a complex 4096 color
scene with realistic specular highlights (from multiple variable intensity
light sources) in well under a minute.  This has been under wraps until
now, but since John mentioned HAM I couldn't resist...

>To me, the best situation would be both a fixed but user-settable palette
>and dithering to get shades.

    This is what VideoScape 1.10 does (see earlier comments).

>no one has explored the use of dither patterns with two colors, instead of
>one color and black.  They used to squeeze dozens of extra colors from the

    VideoScape has always used dither patterns with two colors, and never
dithers with one color and black in version 1.00.  In version 1.10, you can
mix any of the basic colors this way.

>You had once told me you'd been using Stuart's program for some time prior
>to his showing at BADGE and Aegis, and I incorrectly assumed it was
>preferable to graph paper.

    I didn't say that graph paper was preferable.  I just said that tracing
scale drawings from books is an efficient way of creating real-world
objects and is more accurate than "eyeballing it" with the mouse (it was
easy to enter the Lotus and the F15 this way, for example).  I'm sure I
will use Modeler 3D heavily once it is completed, as it is already the most
powerful 3D object editor on the Amiga.  It will make a great companion to
VideoScape.

    However, Modeler 3D is not due out for a few months, and since some
people like John are used to Sculpt 3D's user interface, I have written
a program that allows the use of Sculpt 3D as an object editor for
VideoScape.  The program reads the object descriptions saved in Sculpt's
".scene" files and, taking into account color and texture information,
converts them into "3DG1" files for direct use in VideoScape.  The program
also can produce the new "3DB1" binary format files used by VideoScape 1.10
for high speed loading and compact storage.  I plan to upgrade the program
to handle objects created by other packages such as Forms in Flight.  The
program will be included with VideoScape 1.10 and is freely distributable,
so look for the Foreign Object Translator (FOT) soon on a BBS near you...

    - Allen Hastings