Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!well!jfoust
From: jfoust@well.UUCP (John Foust)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: New stuff
Summary: 3-Demon review
Keywords: 3-Demon, F-18 Interceptor, European flight scenery
Message-ID: <6236@well.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jun 88 05:15:52 GMT
References: <3125@leo.UUCP>
Lines: 105


> From: root@leo.UUCP ( Big Brother)
>      And I probably left a lot of other things out. 3-Demon saves
>      in its own format, which seems to be the sum total of all
>      Amiga ray tracing formats, so creating objects with 3-Demon
>      will give you the best possible object definition for the
>      most capable ray tracing programs.

Probably?  Where should I begin?  I've been beta-testing 3-Demon for more
than six months.  The program and manual was written by Todor Faye, the
primary author of SoundScape, also from Mimetics.

3-Demon's format is triangle-based, which means 3-Demon isn't optimal for
VideoScape or Forms In Flight, which can do polygons as well as triangles. 
Sculpt 3D, Silver and Gossett have only triangles.

I haven't seen the final shrink-wrapped disk, but all the versions I've
seen support only Silver 1.0, which is not polygon-based, as you might
recall.  (Instead, it has mathematically defined objects including spheres,
cones and triangles.)  Also, Silver 1.0's format is ASCII-based, which
means a reasonable-sized triangle-based object takes up about 150K on disk,
and takes about ten minutes to load or save in 3-Demon.

However, triangle-based objects in Silver 1.0 are impractical, which is one
of the reasons they made Turbo Silver.  When considering making a Silver
1.0 module for InterChange, I rendered the VideoScape "InfLoopShip" in
Silver.  It has 478 triangles.  It took about 3 1/2 hours in Silver 1.0,
and less than half as much time in Sculpt or Turbo Silver.

Turbo Silver, a $30 upgrade to Silver 1.0, is optimized for triangles,
although the 1.0 mathematical objects are retained.   It has a binary file
format incompatible with Silver 1.0.  We just released an InterChange
module for Turbo Silver.  The package includes a module that smooths
objects for Phong-shaded programs such as Turbo Silver and VideoScape 2.0.


>      Handles hierarchical objects.

Funny, the 3-Demon manual doesn't spell "hierarchical" that way.  :-)

 
>      Selectable diffuse and specular reflection, metallicity,
>      transparency, and refractive characterisistics.

To a point.  For Sculpt 3D, you must enter a magic number into a gadget
instead of selecting Shiny, Mirror or whatever as you do in Sculpt itself. 
So you enter 130 to get Smooth Mirror, which is 128 plus 2.  For textures
in other programs, you set ambient light, diffuse, specular, metallicity,
reflection, transparency and refractive characteristics.  The manual
explains what these settings are, but doesn't really explain how these
become textures in other programs, so you're pretty much left in the dark
as to how things are going to look in your favorite program.

As for Forms In Flight format, 3-Demon has limitations, too.  It only
converts the first 32 colors used in an object.  So if you load an object
from another format, the colors could get screwed up.  InterChange, by
comparison, chooses the most popular 32 polygon colors, and remaps the rest
to those.  The InterChange Forms In Flight can also match palettes between
objects.


>      Create objects for Sculpt 3D, VideoScape3D, Forms in flight,
>      Silver, and Gossett Graphics. (Anybody know about Gossett?)

Gossett is named for Phil Gossett, a sometimes Mimetics employee.  He
designed their ReaSyn frame buffer.  He has some kind of custom rendering
machine in his bedroom, and he plans to someday offer a rendering service:
you send him an object and he renders it in high res for you.  So that's
why Gossett format is there.  Maybe the rendering service will ship when
ReaSyn does.  I guess we could call Gossett "WYSIWYGE", (whizzy-wiggy), for
"what you see is what you get elsewhere."  You can't see it until he
renders it.


> From: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page)
> How much memory does this take?  Somehow I don't think putting I/O for
> a zillion formats into a 3D-modeler is the way to go (or is this a

The 3-Demon executable on disk is 189K, the Workbench said 189K was used to
load the program.  Is that too much?

I think this is one of the biggest advantages of the InterChange system.  I
could name about six more 3D products coming in the next six months, all
with different formats.  How fast is Mimetics going to update 3-Demon to
handle these formats?  (Related trivia question:  How long did it take
Todor to produce the SoundScape Utilities Disks?)

I noticed a few other problems with 3-Demon.  It loads VideoScape objects
incorrectly.  Severely wrong, depending on the polygon.  I reported this in
my beta-testing, to no avail.  The manual doesn't mention this feature of
its translation.

3-Demon needs to convert VideoScape's complex polygons to triangles in the
equivalent shape.  3-Demon starts at one vertice and starts cutting
triangles, which means the letter "C" turns into a scallop shell, because
it cuts triangles across the concave bay of the "C".  When InterChange
converts "C" to Sculpt or Silver, the "C" looks like it should.

My partner in Syndesis, Harriet Maybeck Tolly, wanted to see what this
problem meant in practical terms, using the alphabet objects from the
VideoScape disk.  She said 3-Demon converted the objects correctly, as long
as you don't want to use the letters A, B, C, D, E, G, J, K, L, M, N, O, P,
Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y or Z.  (In other words, these letters were
translated as various kinds of Tar Monsters.  Only F, I and H were OK.)

Also, 3-Demon is copy-protected with a "look up a word" scheme.