Imagine
R_Michae...@cup.portal.com
scene in full trace multiple times. For example, if I create a car and set
the lamps and cameras etc. and then go out to the project menu..if I am in
full trace mode the first time out I am ok. But if I go back to the stage
area and say change a lamp or camera position..when I go back to render
again from the project menu I get a screen full of black. This problem
does not occur when I use scan line mode.
The other thing I don't like is not being able to adjust the zoom factor in
the preview window in the Cycle Editor. Well actually you can if you zoom
out in the three views but then your object is more difficult to work with.
The preview window should have variable zoom.
I don't like Impulse's opinion that Imagine is so easy to work with that it
hardly needs a manual. It does have many very easy to use features but the
program also has a lot of depth, it really is hot. But that means it deserve
s an equally excellent set of documentation. Sculpt Animate 4D is a fine
example of excellent documentation (tho the images created by sculpt pale
next to silver or imagine in my opinion). One thing that could be explained
better is proportioning objects relative to the diamond shaped primatives
in the cycle editor. I've experimented with this quite a bit and I'm still
not entirely clear on that relationship.
The movie editor is not funtioning yet.
Udo K Schuermann
The Tutorial Manual is 75 pages, bound the same as the Reference
manual that came with v0.9, but it has 17 tutorials in it, with a lot
of pictures to help you along. There are some ideas in there that I
haven't thought of myself. Basically, the manual describes the usage
of various features, at hand of examples (some of them get fairly
involved). A tiny-printed 12 page errata sheet gives a lot of nice
information on the textures and the special f/x.
Textures: checks, bricks, grid, wood (used also for marble),
disturbed, angular, linear, radial, and dots.
F/X: explode, ripple, grow.
You know what I'll be doing this weekend :-)
._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in
( ) wal...@cscwam.umd.edu a canoe?" -- "Both are f***ing close to water."
R Michael Medwid
another couple of months..when a developer says a month you add on a factor
of at least three! I haven't been home yet today but now I'm anxious to get
there. The FIRST thing I have to try out is the 3D texture mapping,
ie bump mapping. Second are the fX. I'm glad that Impulse put out
v0.9 otherwise I'd be trying to figure out how to open a project or subprojct
tonight (or whenever 1.0 arrives) rather than getting down to the heart
of the matter. Impulse received a lot of flack for v0.9 they deserve more
credit.
Steve Pietrowicz
]In an effort to help Impulse bring a bug-free version of Imagine 1.0
]to market, which ultimately benefits us, the users, I have recently
]taken it upon myself to ask the Usenet Amiga community to report bugs
]and observations to me so that I may bundle this in one package to
]mail to Impulse.
You're probably too late for 1.0....It's already been released.
--
--------------
SR Pietrowicz UUCP: ...!uunet!modcomp!srp CIS: 73047,2313
Udo K Schuermann
>lastly, every time I show the final traced picture I cannot close the screen
>short of rebooting.
NO NEED TO REBOOT!
Press ESCAPE but don't do anything to activate another screen. I
don't understand why they removed the menu from 0.9 -- I would have
thought they add hotkeys to it (Amiga-N, Amiga-Q, etc)
A handy thing to have is one of these programs to flip screens with
RightAmiga-N or DMouse.
P.S. Most of the bugs seem to be gone (hooray) although I have been
lured into playing with starfields, the new textures, the bump
mapping, and all the other nifty things ... instead of going over my
bug list ... maybe tonight ...
Has anyone gotten the World Brush to work, in the Globals requester?
If so, what settings did you use?
RID...@ddnvx1.afwl.af.mil
> I hold in my hands Imagine v1.0 which arrived yesterday.
>
>
> Textures: checks, bricks, grid, wood (used also for marble),
> disturbed, angular, linear, radial, and dots.
>
> F/X: explode, ripple, grow.
>
> You know what I'll be doing this weekend :-)
>
> ._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in
> ( ) wal...@cscwam.umd.edu a canoe?" -- "Both are f***ing close to water."
tutorials. Some advice is to read the errata sheet and make the notes in the
tutorials. Otherwise you will be lost.
I am trying to use the wood texture to simulate marble, If anyone can findout
the settings I would like to hear about it.
lastly, every time I show the final traced picture I cannot close the screen
booting with a very minimal system so I can run. I am not loading workbench.
I have a one meg 2000. Before someone tells me that I shouldn't try until I
have more memory, I want to learn this while I wait for my memory.
--
****************************************************************************
* Brian Ridout Internet: rid...@ddnvx1.afwl.af.mil *
* wl/scev *
* Kirtland AFB NM 87117 My Apple is better than your Orange. *
****************************************************************************
Robert E. Huebner
In article <90338.1...@psuvm.psu.edu>, R...@psuvm.psu.edu (Me!!) writes:
|> I am patiently waiting for my copy.
|> .
|> .
|> .
|> Hmm.
|> .
|> .
|> WHERE IS IT????!!!! I put my order in to Creative Computers a week ago,
|> on the same day I called Impulse to hear they were shipping to distributors
|> that day. So where is it? I've waited so long now, I can wait a few
|> more days, but not weeks.
|>
|> Just curious...
|> Marc Rifkin, r38@psuvm
Well, since Creative doesn't read the 'net, I doubt they'll respond.
I have an idea what might have happened and I figured that others that
deal with Creative might want to know about this:
If you are ordering a particularly hot item from Creative, your shipment
might be delayed. The reason for this is that Creative runs a thriving
walk-in business here in LA and, since the retail showroom and shipping
area are in the same building, it is not uncommon for a salesperson to
slip back and take an item intended for mail order and sell it to an
in-store customer. Since LA is full of video people, Imagine is certainly
a hot item here.
I don't mean this as a criticism, since its simply natural for a salesperson
to operate in this manner (I didn't say ethical or nice, but natural). I
think overall Creative is one of the most trustworthy dealers I've dealt with.
Anyway, I've occasionally been on the "other" end of this situation :)
-----
Robert Huebner hue...@aerospace.aero.org
The Aerospace Corporation
also @ecn.purdue.eud Computer Security Dept
-----
Me!!
Bob Lindabury, SysAdmin
>Press ESCAPE but don't do anything to activate another screen. I
>don't understand why they removed the menu from 0.9 -- I would have
>thought they add hotkeys to it (Amiga-N, Amiga-Q, etc)
> A handy thing to have is one of these programs to flip screens with
>RightAmiga-N or DMouse.
>
>._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in
>( ) wal...@cscwam.umd.edu a canoe?" -- "Both are f***ing close to water."
They probably wrote it under the 2.0 specs which allow you to toggle screens
via the left-amiga-n key...or is that left-amiga-m key...or is that
right-amiga-something key? <grin> It's configurable I believe.
-- Bob
______ Pro-Graphics BBS "It's better than a sharp stick in the eye!" ________
UUCP: crash!pro-graphics!bobl | Pro-Graphics: 908/469-0049
ARPA/DDN: pro-graphics!bo...@nosc.mil | America Online: Graphics3d
Internet: bo...@pro-graphics.cts.com | CompuServe: RIP
_________ ___________
Raven Enterprises 25 Raven Avenue Piscataway, NJ 08854
Stephen Menzies
>next to silver or imagine in my opinion). One thing that could be explained
>better is proportioning objects relative to the diamond shaped primatives
>in the cycle editor. I've experimented with this quite a bit and I'm still
>not entirely clear on that relationship.
To understand the cycle editor, I found it very helpful to
"snapshot" (you'll find it in the menu) the object (this
saves the object in any of it's inbetweened positions and
then load it into the detail editor. You'll find that your
object(s) now are "threaded" together with a skeleton. Pay
attention to the relationship between your objects axis(s)
and the skeletal line. Hopes this helps.
-steve
--
Stephen Menzies
Email: S.Me...@CAM.ORG
R Michael Medwid
on 1.0 Imagine pleaes include the following: You can NOT render to
anim-op5 format if your have only 512k of chip ram (!!!). I have an
Amiga 1000 with a Lucas board (4 meg 32bit ram) and a frances bd
(68030/68882) and if I render to Impulse "movie"format I get a
warning message "only two screens available" but then it proceeds
on to render all the frames and the movie. HOWEVER if I choose
ANIM format in the project modify requester..I get a message
"can not create anim file" (after receiving the "only two screens
to work with" message). I am surmising it's a chip ram problem
because my housemate has an Amy 2000 with the new chip set and
1 meg chip ram..any how the identical procedure ran a-ok on his
machine.
Surely I can't be the last Amy 1000 owner out there! I hope impulse
corrects this..the only option I have now is to render all the image
files and use Page-Flipper f/x to string them together.
btw..I have now rendered using the new f/x modules that came with
1.0 Imagine and all I can say is "Radical..Dude!". I exploded a
faceted sphere with a brush mapped onto its surface..the shrapnel
maintains the image it had originally (this observed after peaking
behind two screens on cell five of a thirty cell anim). In this
case Mr. Spok is wrapped around the sphere and he appears to
explode quite nicely. Then there the "ripple" f/x. This one is
wonderfully easy to use to create a waving flag or water etc..
I've viewed it in preview mode and it's now rendering (looking
forward to tomorrow morning even with 030 and 32 bit memory!).
The "grow" f/x seems kind of like a filler to me..I mean why not
just tween object to make something grow? Or for that matter just
use the Size channel in the Action section. If somebody sees
something in this effect that I don't please enlighten me.
Oh above I mentioned "peeking behind two screens"..I didn't see
this in the manual so fyi..if you simply pull down the imagine
window..then the work becnch window..then the big blue "nowhere"
window..if Imagine has already completed redering of a few frames
you will be able to see how they came out here..not have to wait
till "the cows come home".
R Michael Medwid
I wrapped digitized impressionist paintings onto planes to create sort
of a "pictures in a gallery" effect. I had roughness set to 0, it was
a color replace brush/map, tried varyious hardness settings, turned
off dithering (and tried on too), turned off phong shading (and tried
on too)..and my "paintings" look like they were painted on a tree
rather than canvas..as I said very rough. Any insight anyone?
One feature I notice that's really lacking in imagine is the ability
to load a background image into a scene a la Sculpt 4D. The brush
in the globals setting only is for a kind of mock reflection for
reflective objects. I'd rather see here "load background image"
rather than a brush requester for this pseudo reflecting. I tried
to get around this limitation by mapping a background picture onto a
plane..then placing and sizing this plane behind the objects I wanted
to animate. Well as I mentioned above, the brush wrapped plane looked
very rough..not convincing at all..and besides the plane picks up light
from the lamps etc..in this case I simply want that picture to look like
it looked when it was in dpaint only behind all my other stuff.
-Mike (amigan)
Duane Fields
some of these pictures/anims to the archives? I am sure they would prove
quite popular...
Duane
Me!!
I should be getting my order soon. I can't wait. I'll upload my
coolest traces.. anyone else?
>Duane
Marc Rifkin... Artist and Technical Dude
& Penn State Amiga Student Consultant
R...@PSUVM.PSU.EDU / R...@PSUVM.BITNET
(814) 867-4837 (SCHOOL) / (215) 825-3138 (HOME)
"Take thy beak from out my heart." - The Raven
david r watters
For those of you with extensive 3D usage on the Amiga, you will immediately
identify with this!
If you could take the best from every 3D package on the market, and combine
it with even more and fresh abilities you would have... Imagine!
It is simply a total joy to use!
The best of Sculpts object editor... and more!
The same beauty of Silvers rendering engine... and more!
Fluid character based motion.
Powerful keyframing.
Spline based paths that recalculate when manipulated, in REAL TIME.
( I have a A2500/30 )
Function based object manipulation. (explosion, ripple, growth, more to come.)
IFF to planner object.
Boolean operations. (GREAT for outlined font fills!)
ect... ect... ect...
My point??? Well, 95% of the joy of Imagine comes from the creation of pics,
and anims, not just the results.
--
Due to the shape of the North American Elk's esophagus, even if it could speak,
it could not pronounce the word "lasagna!" - Cliff Clavin, `Cheers'
David wat...@cis.ohio-state.edu "It's 12:35... and Michigan STILL sucks."
______________________________________________________________________________
Mark Thompson
>If you could take the best from every 3D package on the market, and combine
>it with even more and fresh abilities you would have... Imagine!
>The same beauty of Silvers rendering engine... and more!
>Fluid character based motion.
>Powerful keyframing.
>Spline based paths that recalculate when manipulated, in REAL TIME.
> ( I have a A2500/30 )
>Function based object manipulation. (explosion, ripple, growth, more to come.)
>IFF to planner object.
>Boolean operations. (GREAT for outlined font fills!)
Well quite frankly, when I first saw Imagine at Siggraph this year, I
was totally unimpressed. The animation control in JourneyMan was vastly
superior and LightWave's rendering capabilties made Imagine look like a
toy. But I am open minded and hoping someone can convince me that this
is no longer true because I have considered purchasing it just for its
object editors. Could someone possibly detail some of its more stellar
features? Can it do reflection mapping (not ray-traced reflections) or
transparency mapping? How are explosions accomplished? What do you lose
rendering in scanline mode? What antialiasing support is there? Will it
accept or output objects in formats other than its own? And how fast is
it (lets do some benchmarks)? If I have to wait over 20 minutes for a
high quality image, it is too slow.
If anyone in the Boston/southern New Hampshire area would like to get
together and do some comparisons and benchmarks, I would be delighted.
You supply the Imagine based system, I'll supply the LightWave/Toaster
system.
Eagerly awaiting replys............
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Mark Thompson |
| ma...@westford.ccur.com |
| ...!{decvax,uunet}!masscomp!mark Designing high performance graphics |
| (508)392-2480 engines today for a better tomorrow. |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------- +
Udo K Schuermann
>
>Well quite frankly, when I first saw Imagine at Siggraph this year, I
>was totally unimpressed. The animation control in JourneyMan was vastly
>superior and LightWave's rendering capabilties made Imagine look like a
>toy.
Too bad you feel this way. Imagine is anything but a toy. I have not
seen JourneyMan, but you have made me curious. If it's really that
superior to Imagine, I'd like to see it!
>But I am open minded and hoping someone can convince me that this
>is no longer true because I have considered purchasing it just for its
>object editors. Could someone possibly detail some of its more stellar
>features?
Keyframe cycle animation, meaning it's very easy to create objects that
perform a certain range of motion repetitively (such as an ant or human
walking, a locomotive's wheels, piston engine, etc).
Boolean operations involving objects cuts objects along their
intersections into multiple pieces, each of which can be used or
discarded as needed.
>Can it do reflection mapping (not ray-traced reflections) or
>transparency mapping?
Both. It is accomplished by mapping an IFF picture onto the object.
The IFF picture's colors define the value of the reflectivity and/or
transparency. This is also the way that bump mapping is implemented,
as well as color mapping (image wrapping).
>How are explosions accomplished?
The object is algorithmically separated into its individual triangular
face components, which are exploded away from the center according to
a variety of parameters, which include control over how much the faces
spin while they fly away.
This is also the method used for Ripple, where an object's
surface undergoes the wave effects seen on a flag in the wind or the
water when a stone is dropped in.
>What do you lose rendering in scanline mode?
True reflectivity, refraction and CAST shadows. A scene renders much
faster in Scanline mode. You still get brightside/darkside effects on
objects.
>What antialiasing support is there?
A user controlled "edge level" value which determines how much effort
the program spends on antialiasing. You could set it to 0 and get
none for faster traces, then raise it high for final results.
>Will it accept or output objects in formats other than its own?
Imagine reads/writes only TDDD format which is read by at least one PD
(or is it Shareware?) program named TTDDD can read/write this format
to produce or process ASCII files. It's fairly easy to convert these
to other formats. I am working on one to convert from decwrl OFF
format to TTDDD. But no, Impulse does not provide such programs.
>And how fast is
>it (lets do some benchmarks)? If I have to wait over 20 minutes for a
>high quality image, it is too slow.
Benchmarking will be difficult because lighting, positioning, and the
properties of objects can affect the rendering time greatly. Here
are a few bits, though, which may be useful to you:
My system: 68030/68882 @ 32MHz
A red ball, just about filling the entire display, rendered at
352x470 interlaced HAM in Scanline required: 2 min 22 sec
The same images scaled down to 64x64 pixels took 5 seconds.
Before you leap with joy: this is a single object, a totally
primitive scene.
I have a scene with a very large diamond (12 faces) has a
disturb texture on it (to produce obvious flaws in the
mostly transparent material), three spheres, a multi-color
pyramid, and all this on a black ground with a thick grid
texture mapped onto it. A torus with an explode effect on
it goes into several hundred facets that fly outward.
The scene requires about 15 minutes in Scanline mode
at 352x470 interlaced HAM.
Another scene with a crystal sphere, multiple reflective
objects, others with roughness and some with brushes wrapped
onto them, as well as three light sources, takes (again at
352x470) about 40 minutes in full trace mode.
Summa summarum: Full traces with refraction, object reflection, and
cast shadows require more time, and for these 20 minutes is only
possible if you have relatively simple scenes. An unaccellerated
1000, 500, or 2000 will not be too impressive.
Despite all this, Imagine is a fine product, although still suffering
from Young-Product-Problems. It is *far superior* to Turbo Silver,
and truly a joy to use. Creating objects and animations with it is
child's play!
._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in
( ) wal...@wam.umd.edu a canoe?" -- "Both are f***ing close to water."
David Tiberio
A lot of people seem to be upset about Imagine. I know someone you can talk
to on PLink. He is often in line 68 of the chat lines, and his name is IMPULSE.
He is the president of the Impulse company. Maybe you could talk to him there.
:)
Udo K Schuermann
>Definately check out JourneyMan, it is the only 3D
>package to use spline surface objects for fantastic organic animation
>control.
Could you elaborate on this? I won't have a chance to check out
JourneyMan until perhaps early next year. What are "spline surface
objects" and what is "organic animation control"?
>Booleans huh, as in CSG (constuctive solid geometry)?! This one of the
>reasons I really like Imagine as a modeler. I also would like to really
>see the capabilities of the forms editor.
Correct. This is power that I haven't even begun to tap yet. It's
*easy* to cut holes into objects in the shape of lettering, for example.
The forms editor is one of those things that I'm not entirely
sure how to handle. It's easy to make some "twisted mutant hypercube
from the eights dimension" then make a few more and morph between them
for some very interesting transformations, but it requires a lot of
restraint to produce something coherent. In the right hands it can be
very impressive, I'm sure.
>>Imagine reads/writes only TDDD format which is read by at least one PD
>>(or is it Shareware?) program named TTDDD can read/write this format
>>...
>>I am working on one to convert from decwrl OFF format to TTDDD.
>
>Are you willing to make your converters publically availble?
Naturally! At this time I'm too busy with some other project that
has priority, but I'll finish "off2ttddd" sometime early january.
>I will look into writing one for Lightwave if you have info
>on the format.
TTDDD should be on abcfd20 (/incoming/amiga/3d/ directory) which
contains information on the textual Three Dimension Data Description;
that's the docs I'm working from.
[benchmarks removed]
It looks as if LightWave may be faster than Imagine. I'll post
results when I find the time (perhaps next week).
>FINAL BIG QUESTION!!! Can Imagine render to devices other than the
>Firecracker, ie. the Toaster? I know the output files are compatible
>but I am looking for more direct support like a device library.
Negative. No direct support except for Impulse's own FireCracker/24.
>| Mark Thompson |
Mark Thompson
>Too bad you feel this way. Imagine is anything but a toy. I have not
>seen JourneyMan, but you have made me curious. If it's really that
>superior to Imagine, I'd like to see it!
I really didn't mean to say that it was a toy, I just meant that back
in August, Lightwave was clearly the leader in rendering capabilities.
Obviously since then, new capabilities have been added to the other
3D renderers. Definately check out JourneyMan, it is the only 3D
package to use spline surface objects for fantastic organic animation
control.
> Boolean operations involving objects cuts objects along their
>intersections into multiple pieces, each of which can be used or
>discarded as needed.
Booleans huh, as in CSG (constuctive solid geometry)?! This one of the
reasons I really like Imagine as a modeler. I also would like to really
see the capabilities of the forms editor.
>>How are explosions accomplished?
>The object is algorithmically separated into its individual triangular
>face components, which are exploded away from the center according to
>a variety of parameters, which include control over how much the faces
>spin while they fly away.
Sounds great! Lightwave does a similar function but doesn't allow for
polygon spin. :-(
>Imagine reads/writes only TDDD format which is read by at least one PD
>(or is it Shareware?) program named TTDDD can read/write this format
>to produce or process ASCII files. It's fairly easy to convert these
>to other formats. I am working on one to convert from decwrl OFF
>format to TTDDD.
Are you willing to make your converters publically availble?
I will look into writing one for Lightwave if you have info
on the format.
>My system: 68030/68882 @ 32MHz
> A red ball, just about filling the entire display, rendered at
> 352x470 interlaced HAM in Scanline required: 2 min 22 sec.
> ........some other tests deleted........
Unfortunately I can't duplicate your benchmarks because Lightwave
doesn't support 352x470 resolution or HAM output so I put together
some fairly representative tests that anyone should be able to run.
My machine: 2500/30 w/68882 @ 25MHz
All images 640x400 @ 24bits, single distant light source, no
antialiasing, all objects fill the screen and have both diffuse
and specular surfaces.
1) Public domain Amiga 2000 and keyboard models.
models obtained from /incoming/amiga/3d on abcfd20.larc.nasa.gov
used surface attributes that were supplied with the model
5520 polygons from 1876 points
2 minutes 6 seconds
2) 4 spheres 128 polys each with 4 different surfaces
surface1 = smooth and shiny
surface2 = smooth shiny glass (100% transparent with opaque edges)
surface3 = smooth shiny wood grain
surface4 = smooth shiny with rippled bump map
512 polygons from 456 points
2 minutes 5 seconds
3) same as 2) except with shadow casting
6 minutes 3 seconds
4) 99 spheres 128 polys each in 11x9 array
all have smooth and shiny surface
12672 polygons from 11286 points
5 minutes 4 seconds
If you would like, try these out with Imagine and post the results.
I would have put together some tests that more thoroughly tax the
machine using more mapping functions, antialiasing, etc. but I wanted
to keep them generic enough not to exploit unique features of one
program over the other. I already have a volunteer Imagine owner in
my area and hopefully we can put both these programs to the test.
Anyway, thanks much for the info. Imagine seems to be evolving into
quite a nice product and will most likely end up chewing up some disk
space on my system in the not too distant future (when finances permit).
FINAL BIG QUESTION!!! Can Imagine render to devices other than the
Firecracker, ie. the Toaster? I know the output files are compatible
but I am looking for more direct support like a device library.
> ._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in
> ( ) wal...@wam.umd.edu a canoe?" -- "Both are f***ing close to water."
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
David Pochron
>package to use spline surface objects for fantastic organic animation
>control.
Speaking of JourneyMan...Has there been a demo version of it created for it
yet? I know it was discussed on the net here a few months ago, but I haven't
heard anything from HASH yet. I would really like to see whether it is exactly
what I need before spending $500 or so on more software.
(ie, I would love to "check it out" myself, but no one around Madison owns it,
and you certainly can't buy it here (or anywhere) - only from HASH themselves.)
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David M. Pochron | from Rescue Rangers, _A Fly in the Ointment_
poc...@garfield.cs.wisc.edu| Gadget to Dale: "Keep the hands off the body!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kent Paul Dolan
[about Imagine performance:]
> Benchmarking will be difficult because lighting, positioning, and the
> properties of objects can affect the rendering time greatly. Here are
> a few bits, though, which may be useful to you:
> My system: 68030/68882 @ 32MHz
> I have a scene with a very large diamond (12 faces) has a disturb
> texture on it (to produce obvious flaws in the mostly transparent
> material), three spheres, a multi-color pyramid, and all this on a
> black ground with a thick grid mapped onto it. A torus with an explode
> effect on it goes into several hundred facets that fly outward.
> The scene requires about 15 minutes in Scanline mode at 352x470
> interlaced HAM.
> Another scene with a crystal sphere, multiple reflective objects,
> others with roughness and some with brushes wrapped onto them, as well
> as three light sources, takes (again at 352x470) about 40 minutes in
> full trace mode.
I'm still a bit confused. Are those the times to render a single frame
of the animation, or to render an entire animation? In either case, how
many frames of animation did you create, and what was the missing (total
or frame) time to do the animation?
> Summa summarum: Full traces with refraction, object reflection, and
> cast shadows require more time, and for these 20 minutes is only
> possible if you have relatively simple scenes. An unaccellerated 1000,
> 500, or 2000 will not be too impressive.
Probably so since the unaccelerate machine should take at least six to
twelve times longer, and possibly much more if you're using an FPU as
well, but one of the joys of multitasking is to put something like this
in the background and let it grind while you put your system to other
uses. The limiting quantity here seems to be chip ram, so the obvious
question: is it possible to render to fast ram, or better, directly to a
file, to prevent a squeeze in chip ram over the long period of an
animation? Is it possible to checkpoint and restart an animation to
avoid a restart from scratch due to power problems or system guru's
during software development?
These are some of the features that would make such a system "fully
professional".
On a separate subject, one of the real roadblocks to doing animations
these days is the high cost/low availability/marginal quality of single
frame videotape recording. Frankly, recording a single frame to a videotape
is an abuse of the technology. Is anyone doing work onto other media, such
as floppy optical storage, that would allow an animation to be created and
then dumped to videotape at normal recording speeds?
This is a tough problem, since, as the CD versus CD-ROM converstations
finally convinced me, it is laser videodisks that use a recording technology
similar to FM radio in how it encodes the signals, so a digital floppy optical
recording couldn't be just blindly dumped to tape, but would require a digital
to analog step in real time.
Input?
Kent, the man from xanth.
<xant...@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xant...@well.sf.ca.us>
Ken Baer
>>Definately check out JourneyMan, it is the only 3D
>>package to use spline surface objects for fantastic organic animation
>>control.
>
>Could you elaborate on this? I won't have a chance to check out
>JourneyMan until perhaps early next year. What are "spline surface
>objects" and what is "organic animation control"?
We call this 'Patch based modeling.' This means 3D objects are created
with curved surfaces, and not polygons, though a patch can be flat and
have sharp edges, so mechanical objects can also be modeled. The Journeyman
interfaces use a special kind of spline curve that has control points
on the curve (unlike B-splines), with tension and bias control. What
does this mean, it means that complex objects (with organic curves) like
faces and muscle-bound chests etc. are much easier to make. And since
they are made out of true curves, closeup shots don't reveal unsightly
polygon edges. :-) It also means that objects take up much less disk
space, and memory.
For motion control, there are two level, relative and absolute motion.
Relative motion is for character motions like walks, jumps and is handled
by the Action module. It does 3 kinds of motion, skeletal actions,
muscle morphs, and spine morphs (which can be combined). And, in
Version 1.1 (which is now shipping), are controlled by channels (time graphs)
and not keyframes. In plain English, this means that you can bend, twist,
and morph with very smooth and natural motion control. For absolute
motion, the Direction module is used to set up the final animation.
It uses spline based paths, also with channel control (instead of keyframes).
In short, Journeyman goes beyond what you can do with simple keyframed
animation.
> ._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in
> ( ) wal...@wam.umd.edu a canoe?" -- "Both are f***ing close to water."
--
// -Ken Baer. Programmer/Animator, Hash Enterprises / Earthling
\X/ Usenet: ba...@qiclab.UUCP or PLink: KEN BAER
"What?!? Sore again?" -- Bugs Bunny to Yosemity Sam
David A Kavanagh;902(ILA);icsg6
my 1000 with 2.5 meg of RAM and 65meg hard drive. I ran it on a 3000 at
a local dealer and was quite impressed. It not only looked great, but was
decently fast (no real benchmarks yet).
I have been impressed with the object editing features (and the ability
to use my old Silver objects). Imagine is also a powerfull animator.
If you have Imagine, try the Explode F/X. (has anyone tried the Ripple F/X?)
________________________________________________________________________
David A. Kavanagh ||Rochester Institute of Technology Grad CS
65 Tahoe Drive ||"Great spirits have always encountered violent
Rochester, NY 14616-1007||opposition from mediochre minds" - A. Einstein
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Udo K Schuermann
>wal...@wam.umd.edu (Udo K Schuermann) writes:
>
>
>I'm still a bit confused. Are those the times to render a single frame
>of the animation, or to render an entire animation?
Single frames. Keep in mind that full raytracing is _much_ slower than
Scanline rendering. My machine traces nearly anything in 30 minutes or
less.
>In either case, how
>many frames of animation did you create, and what was the missing (total
>or frame) time to do the animation?
The Scanline rendered scene came out well, so I went for a "final" with
full trace. 60 frames at 352x470 interlaced HAM, each frame roughly
25 to 35 minutes, takes it a good 30 hours to trace.
>but one of the joys of multitasking is to put something like this
>in the background and let it grind while you put your system to other
>uses. The limiting quantity here seems to be chip ram, so the obvious
>question: is it possible to render to fast ram, or better, directly to a
>file, to prevent a squeeze in chip ram over the long period of an
>animation? Is it possible to checkpoint and restart an animation to
>avoid a restart from scratch due to power problems or system guru's
>during software development?
I always have Imagine running at priority -1 so that the system responds
well when *I* want it to respond. Imagine just gets all the left-over
cycles.
No (or very little) chip RAM is used during rendering, and the
frames are written directly to disk. Chip RAM is used when the
animation is created. Thus, I render an animation's frames, store
them all on disk (this requires disk space, of course) and when the
whole thing is ready, I'll create the animation without killing the
rendered frames (in case of trouble). Once that's done, I can wipe
the frames.
This approach means that when the machine does go down I lose
only a minimal amount of work: Never more than one (incompletely)
rendered frame, and Imagine updates the project status immediately to
reflect the presence of a new rendered frame.
It goes to say here that I don't create an animation unless all
the animation's frames have already been rendered. This way I kill as
little Chip RAM as possible.
The size of individual frames can range anywhere from 20K to
140K -- depends on the output format as well as the size and complexity
of the scene.
>These are some of the features that would make such a system "fully
>professional".
I agree. Imagine _is_ professional.
Mark Thompson
>as floppy optical storage, that would allow an animation to be created and
>then dumped to videotape at normal recording speeds?
I would like to hear someone tell me I am wrong but I am fairly certain
that floptical/CD/CD-ROM and the like are not capable of the data
bandwidths required for high quality video storage. The recordable laser
video disks are currently the only things capable of this. Of course
you could always stack a BUNCH of them in parallel to achieve it but then
whats the point. Then again, MPEG will probably change the situation.
>Kent, the man from xanth.
Mark Thompson
>In article <61...@masscomp.ccur.com> ma...@calvin.westford.ccur.com (Mark Thompson) writes:
>>package to use spline surface objects for fantastic organic animation
>>control.
>JourneyMan until perhaps early next year. What are "spline surface
>objects" and what is "organic animation control"?
Except for Journeyman, all the other 3D animation programs out there for the
Amiga use polygonally based objects. This makes animating there movements
blocky and awkward. Take for example the ripple effect in Imagine. This is
a special chunk of software to do a series of displacements on all the
vertices in your object (something you would hardly think of doing by hand).
The operations like ripple are conceptually simple, but because you are dealing
with polygons, they are very tedious to perform manually. Imagine's
ripple effect is a tool to help get around that fact for one special case.
Journeyman replaces polygons with spline patches which allows you to move
a single control point and cause the entire object (or portions of the
object) to deform accordingly. A single spline surface patch can do the work
of many polygons. This concept of just moving control points makes for
very simple and fluid character (organic) animation. By appling a spline
path to the control points of a spline surface object, very realistic
character (human, animal,...organic) movements can be created with very
little effort. This is Journeymans greatest strength.
>TTDDD should be on abcfd20 (/incoming/amiga/3d/ directory) which
>contains information on the textual Three Dimension Data Description;
>that's the docs I'm working from.
Thanxs!!! I got it.
>>FINAL BIG QUESTION!!! Can Imagine render to devices other than the
>>Firecracker, ie. the Toaster?
>Negative. No direct support except for Impulse's own FireCracker/24.
What a shame. Supposedly NewTek is planning on releasing libraries for
the Toaster in the not to distant future. Maybe enough letters to Impulse
will get them to allow some sort of device independance.
> ._. Udo Schuermann "How is American beer similar to making love in
R Michael Medwid
predecessor and the anims looked like scupt's "paining" 32 color mode.
Not to take away from the neat organic animation abilities of Journeyman..
I just think Journeyman and Imagine are like apples and oranges..not
comparable.
R Michael Medwid
bath using the forms editor and wrapped a stone brush/texture around it..
looks great..ok so I make some "water" by taking a hemisphere and squashing
it down in height..then I use the ripple effect over 20 frames in the
actions editor having placed the "water" inside the bird bath. Now the
water is filtering a lot of light..slightly blue..and the ripple come out
great..radial from the center..as if someone is dripping watter in the
center ..BUT.. the BASE of the birdbath changes hues during the ripple
effect..as if the reflections from the water were bouncing off some ceiling
(ther is no ceiling) or as if the bottom of the bird bath basin were
translucent (it is not) or as if some how the ripple effect were connected
to the base of the bird bath object (it is not). This is WEIRD.
On the good news front..Vista-Pro objects are completely compatible with
imagine..save out as silver object and import directly to Imagine. The
coloring is all retained when you go into imagine (yay!)
I heard someone say Mike Halvorson and others from Impulse are on PLINK..
does anyone have info (tel #, other?) for PLINK..I'd like to be able to
sit in on an on-line chat session with these guys.
One other item..the explode f/x works splendidly even with very large
objects like a 180k object file of Mount St. Hellens (ka-boom!).
Mike Greer
You state that Journeyman is the only spline based Amiga 3D package. This is
not true. The new release of Caligari also uses splines. Granted, there is a
quantum leap in price from Journeyman ($500 ?) to Caligari (>$2500), but we mustbe accurate. Since you are obviously familar with Journeyman, tell me about
it's interface, it's ease of object creation, it's ablity to import objects
created else where, it's rendering scheme(s) (ray tracing, phong shading, etc.)
I basically know nothing about Journeyman. It sounds very interesting. Is the
format in which the objects and scenes are saved documented by Hash? In other
words, if I have polygonal objects and want to convert them to spline based
objects, a) will Journeyman do this? b)does Hash provide a utility program
that does this? c) does Hash provide the format the data must be stored in if I
wanted to write my own converter? Lastly, what exactly is the price? And it is
my understanding that Journeyman can only be ordered directly from Hash. Is
this correct?
Mike G.
Jeffrey Yuan
For Sale: AMIGA STUFF
Novation Parrot 1200 baud modem (credit card sized modem) - $50
Dunlap Utilities - $25
DOS to DOS (MSDOS file transfer program)- $20
Deluxe Video 1 and 1.2 - $25
WordPerfect 4.1 - $75
Manx Aztec C ver. 3.6a - $50
Menace - $7 - a Psylapse game
Nevermind - $7 - a Psylapse game
Aegis DIGA Telecommunications program - $20
Opcode Music Mouse MIDI controller and instrument program - $35
Call Jeffrey Yuan at 212-861-0014 (leave message on machine) or
212-570-7614 (day)
or email yu...@rockvax.ROCKEFELLER.EDU
Ken Baer
>With journeyman..can you ray-trace these spline patches?
Yes, you can. In fact, with the currently shipping version, it does true
patch intersection with both the ray tracer and the scanline renderer.
The 1.0 version tesselated the patched into polygons at rendertime. It
no longer does this, so reasonable complex scenes can render in 3Megs,
very complex scenes can render in 5Megs.
> I saw its
>predecessor and the anims looked like scupt's "paining" 32 color mode.
Journeyman's predecessor was Animation:Apprentice, the first 3D animation
program to be released on the Amiga. It's 4 years old, and used
topological modeling (voxels). It was not patch based, and supported
all Amiga standard display modes. Some of the character animation concepts
proved to be very valuable, and are in Journeyman. But nothing related
to modeling and rendering in Apprentice is in Journeyman.
Journeyman is 24-bit based and supports interlaced-HAM and IFF24 output.
And the new renderer in Version 1.1 is very clean. I'd suggest you look
at the real thing, and not judge Journeyman on 4 year old software based
on a different technology.
>Not to take away from the neat organic animation abilities of Journeyman..
>I just think Journeyman and Imagine are like apples and oranges..not
>comparable.
I think can compare them, but they are designed for different applications.
Journeyman is designed for organic character animation that uses lots of
fluid motion and morphing. Imagine concentrated more on logo and mechanical
object creation.
Helge Egelund Rasmussen
[Description of nice scene with bird bath and rippled water]
>center ..BUT.. the BASE of the birdbath changes hues during the ripple
>effect..as if the reflections from the water were bouncing off some ceiling
>(ther is no ceiling) or as if the bottom of the bird bath basin were
>translucent (it is not) or as if some how the ripple effect were connected
>to the base of the bird bath object (it is not). This is WEIRD.
I'm not sure that I understand this, are you saying that the COLOR of the
bottom of the basin is changing depending of the form of the surface of
the basin (ie. the water)??
This would either indicate that Imagine is so advanced that it can handle
different indices of refraction for different wavelenghts (of the light
not the water :-). Or it would indicate a bug.
I don't think that the first case is true, so it may be a bug :-(
What colors do you get on the bottom?
>On the good news front..Vista-Pro objects are completely compatible with
>imagine..save out as silver object and import directly to Imagine. The
>coloring is all retained when you go into imagine (yay!)
Vista-Pro is the fractal landscape generator which contains real landscapes
isn't it?
Is it good? useful? Cheap?
>One other item..the explode f/x works splendidly even with very large
>objects like a 180k object file of Mount St. Hellens (ka-boom!).
THAT I'd like to see! Could you mail it to me, or maybe even better post it
or place it somewhere ftp'able??
(Unfortunately, I haven't direct ftp access, but I could use BITFTP if
neccessary)
What about creating an Imagine object database somewhere?
I've got some converted TS and Sculpt objects which others could be interested
in, and I know that I would be interested in nearly any object that I could
put my hands on!!
Helge
---
Helge E. Rasmussen . PHONE + 45 31 37 11 00 . E-mail: h...@compel.dk
Compel A/S . FAX + 45 31 37 06 44 .
Copenhagen, Denmark
R Michael Medwid
fractal landscapes (altho you can "fractalize" the real scapes if desired).
As I mentioned it is fully imagine compatible..for 3D landscapes I have
seen nothing that even comes close..this comes under the heading of
"virtual reality"..for instance using this data you could create a
helicopter flight over one of Saturns moons (this is included w/ program).
Explaining my problem w/ imagine inthe bird bath example..you can think
of it in three parts, the water, the basin and the base (tho the basin and
base are actually one object). As I was saying, when the water in the
basin ripples, the BASE has changes in colorizing. As the bird bath
itself has NO transparency/filtering..it should pass NO light when
light is cast on it from above..but as I mentioned the lamp shine on the
rippling water and somehow appears to travel through my "stone" birdbath
to reach the base of the bird bath.
I'm happy to send out some of my Imagine objects..I just have *no*
familiarity with ftp or bit ftp or whatever..I'm new to this whole
Internet stuff. I'll send stuff via disk (compressed using lhrc)
if you send a disk. Just send E-mail to arrange. Also would send
out Imagine anims if they'll fit in compressed format on a diskette.
Bob Lindabury, SysAdmin
Ken,
What about a demo version of Journeyman? Most of us are VERY interested in
your product but we don't want to plunk down $500 of hard earned cash on a
product we've never seen and can't get a demo on. In fact, we haven't even
seen a single animation or rendered image from your product. I'm sure there
must be SOMETHING around now that you guys are at version 1.1.
We will seriously consider Journeyman and even recommend it if we can get some
paper literature, demo of the software and sample images/animations. BTW, do
you have a dealer program?
-- Bob
______ Pro-Graphics BBS "It's better than a sharp stick in the eye!" ________
UUCP: crash!pro-graphics!bobl | Pro-Graphics: 908/469-0049
ARPA/DDN: pro-graphics!bo...@nosc.mil | America Online: Graphics3d
Internet: bo...@pro-graphics.cts.com | CompuServe: RIP
_________ ___________
Raven Enterprises 25 Raven Avenue Piscataway, NJ 08854
Bob Lindabury, SysAdmin
Sean Cunningham
Interested parties should be watching for my review of ANIMATION:Journeyman
v1.1 shortly. I hope to have it done by Monday evening.
I've had my copy since last Friday (now Wed.), and all I'll say right now is
that it's nothing short of fantastic.
Sorry to leave you hanging like this, but I want to do the package justice (as
best I can :)
Sean
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> .SIG v2.5 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
UUCP: ...!crash!pnet01!pro-party!seanc RealWorld: Sean Cunningham
ARPA: !crash!pnet01!pro-party!se...@nosc.mil Voice: (512) 992-2810
INET: se...@pro-party.cts.com ____________________________________
// | * All opinions expressed herein |
HELP KEEP THE COMPETITION UNDER \X/ | Copyright 1990 VISION GRAPHICS |
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Harv Laser
>
>I heard someone say Mike Halvorson and others from Impulse are on PLINK..
>does anyone have info (tel #, other?) for PLINK..I'd like to be able to
>sit in on an on-line chat session with these guys.
>
1-800-524-0100 (voice) Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm Central Time
1-800-826-8855 (modem) 24 hours every day 300/1200/2400
Indeed Mike H, Pres of Impulse is on Plink frequently. His ID there is
IMPULSE. His recently-hired VP of Software, Steve (MAGELLAN) Gillmor
is also on daily,as is Rick Rodriguez who wrote the Imagine manuals.
We have a "Graphics/Video/Animation" live conference each Wednesday
night and have been doing it for years. In tonite's conference were
Mike and Steve, along with Amiga art & video luminaries Allen "LightWave"
Hastings, Louis Markoya, Ken "Hash Enterprises" Baer, Oran J Sands,
Brad Schenck,
Marvin "Amiguy" Landis, Leo "The man in the cape" Schwab, and a dozen
others, whoops, forgot Mark "NewTek" Randall, all "talking" at each
other for a couple hours. Besides Plink's Amiga Zones (which I run),
Impulse has just last week opened their own support area on Plink.
Today Mike posted there a 350K "Robo-cop" Imagine object he created.
The conferences we hold are completely open to any Plink subscriber.
We held a special conf. with Mike last week, had 78 people in it,
and gave away three copies of Imagine. If you decide to sign up,
you can reach me there at my Plink ID in my .sig below.
Harv Laser {anywhere}!crash!hrlaser
"Park and lock it. Not responsible." People/Link: CBM*HARV
Mark Thompson
>In-Reply-To: message from ba...@qiclab.uucp
>Ken,
>What about a demo version of Journeyman? Most of us are VERY interested in
>your product but we don't want to plunk down $500 of hard earned cash on a
>product we've never seen and can't get a demo on.
I couldn't agree more!
Well I just got off the phone with someone at Hash Enterprises so
here is the latest I know about Journeyman. It has already been
discussed that Jman uses spline patches rather than polygons. But
the latest version directly renders these patches rather than
internally converting to polygons. This allows for scene complexity
not achieveable with any other 3D package as well as eliminating
the rough silohette produced by polygonally interpolated surfaces.
Scenes that would require 300,000 polygons are easily handled by
Jman without the normally associated memory burden. Also, as Ken
Baer mentioned, the animation capabilities have been greatly expanded.
In the rendering realm, both scanline and ray-tracing are possible.
Surface textures that are available include wave, fractal noise,
algorithmic (bricks, check, etc), bump, and image mapping. You can also
add specular reflection, shadows, and transparency. These are all
available regardless of rendering mode. When ray-tracing, you add
true reflections, crisper shadow generation, hairy surfaces,
transparency mapping, and other features. I don't know why you
can't do transparency mapping in scanline mode, but the hairy surfaces
sounds great.
A demo disk is supposedly in the making but not yet available and there
is still no printed literature. I was told that if you have access to
P-LINK they have many demo images and animations as well as a product
description. Would someone like to grab these and either post them or
upload them to an ftp site? The program costs $500 and it is still
only available through Hash Enterprises (rather annoying).
Hash can be reached at (206) 573-9427
Ken Baer
>
>Ken,
>
>What about a demo version of Journeyman? Most of us are VERY interested in
>your product but we don't want to plunk down $500 of hard earned cash on a
>product we've never seen and can't get a demo on.
Yes, we're still planning a demo version, probably of the Direction module
with built in objects. We just finished V1.1 last week, which was
consuming 100% of our time. I agree, a demo version is important, but
making the program rock solid is more important (and it is now). There are
however some Journeyman users on the net who could tell you about it,
Sean Cunningham is one of them.
> In fact, we haven't even
>seen a single animation or rendered image from your product. I'm sure there
>must be SOMETHING around now that you guys are at version 1.1.
Most of the stuff we've done is related to the film we're doing, and won't
be released until the project is done. The rendering has improved
dramaticly with V1.1, and since it's only been out for a week, there
aren't many ANIMs from it in circulation. However, there should be soon.
And we should start seeing some JMan animation from CalArts soon, since
they are planning to teach a course with it.
>We will seriously consider Journeyman and even recommend it if we can get some
>paper literature, demo of the software and sample images/animations. BTW, do
>you have a dealer program?
We only sell direct. The only dealers we would consider for Journeyman
are dedicated video solutions dealers. We personalize the software for
every customer, if we went through dealers we would have to use key disk
copy protection (and we really don't want to do that). It works best
when we can deal direct with customers.
>-- Bob
> UUCP: crash!pro-graphics!bobl | Pro-Graphics: 908/469-0049
J. Eric Townsend
>And we should start seeing some JMan animation from CalArts soon, since
>they are planning to teach a course with it.
Great. CalArts is about *the* school for animation...
>We personalize the software for
>every customer,
What does this mean in reality? (Here's a chance for free publicity
on the net. :-) I have a Polaroid Palette and a Mimetics FrameBuffer/Grabber
for video/hardcopy output. Would I get a copy of Journeyman that would
write directly to my framebuffer? I'm kinda pissed since newer products
are magically bound to the framebuffer their owning company makes.
Impulse only generates IFF and Firecracker images, for example. Mimetics
claims that Sculpt supports their product, but SA4D Jr. certainly doesn't,
and I can't get S3D (ver 1.0d?) to do anything with it either. (If
I'm doing something wrong, somebody please tell me.) I'd be almost
willing to cough up $500 based on a quickie demo at SIGGRAPH and a
promise of Mimetics support.
One more question -- how free are you with the description of the
object format? I'm trying to decide what format to finalize my raytracer
on (I use NFF currently, quick and dirty :-). S3D formats don't seem
to support parametrics or beziers, what about Journeyman?
Again, this message is based soley on my experiences. If anybody thinks
I'm saying something wrong, feel free to correct me.
--
J. Eric Townsend Internet: j...@uh.edu Bitnet: jet@UHOU
Systems Mangler - UH Dept. of Mathematics - (713) 749-2120
"If you are the system administrator and this is the first time you are
logging into your system, use the login name root." -- IBM RS/6000 docs
R Michael Medwid
mechanical object creation" (contrasting it with fluid character animation
abilities in Journeyman). ..I wish we had some of the folks from Impulse
posting here. I have to say that Imagine is hardly limited to being a
"flying logo" generator. Take for example their cycle editor..finally an
intuitive tool for creating hierarchical motion sequences. Then these
key-framed animated objects can be placed in another scene which is being
keyframe at another level..key frames within key frames. There is ample
opportunity here for an animator to show off plenty of character personality
given this kind of powerful tool.
Another word that seems to be getting a lot of use here in this thread is
"organic". Both folks from Impulse and Hash seem to make amplbe use of this
term. At first it seemed to make sense..but as the discussion progresses
it seems to become more vague..kinda like "low calorie banana bread" (??).
Anyhow I raise the issue as Impulse claims easy "organic" object creation
with their forms editor. I've not seen any 3D editor like forms. Again
very powerful, very intuitive means for creating objects that you would
tend to find more in nature than off a cad system. You can also use it
to quickly create complex mechanical looking objects.
When I think of logo creation, I think of programs like Video Effects 3D
which focused only on this specialty. But to lump imagine in this
category of product..is wrong.
My house-mate is getting the Journeyman product soon and I am very
interested in seeing its capabilites. So much software..so little time
<sigh>..
Ken Baer
>In article <1990Dec21.1...@qiclab.uucp> ba...@qiclab.uucp (Ken Baer) writes:
>>And we should start seeing some JMan animation from CalArts soon, since
>>they are planning to teach a course with it.
>
>Great. CalArts is about *the* school for animation...
You know it! This has even greater significance, since most of the
animation studios in Hollywood (and elsewhere) are grabbing animators
from CalArts these days. They aren't just going to Disney now. Having
the feedback from a productive group of talented animators like this
means great things for the future incarnations of Journeyman.
>
>>We personalize the software for
>>every customer,
>
>What does this mean in reality?
When one of our programs has been personalized, it means that a window
with the user's name and address comes up before the program starts. The
program is then copyable to any device etc. It frees all of us from the
confines of key disk copy protection. It's one of the reasons we sell
Journeyman directly.
> (Here's a chance for free publicity
>on the net. :-) I have a Polaroid Palette and a Mimetics FrameBuffer/Grabber
>for video/hardcopy output. Would I get a copy of Journeyman that would
>write directly to my framebuffer?]
We save in IFF24 now, which currently seems to be the best way to support
everything that's out there (TAD from ASDG should be able to convert to
the older buffers that don't do IFF24).
> I'm kinda pissed since newer products
>are magically bound to the framebuffer their owning company makes.
It's hard to know what to support. The 24bit hardware market on the Amiga
is so chaotic and there just isn't time to support everything. At this
point we would prefer to support the Toaster, since it's what we have,
and it has the best NTSC output of all the buffers. But, so far, NewTek
hasn't provided anything to developers to deal with the hardware directly.
Their approach seems to be to wait till they provide developers with functions
that access all of the Toaster's features, rather than provide some lower
level support (like writing to the buffer) now, and the fancy stuff later.
>Impulse only generates IFF and Firecracker images, for example.
Currently, Imagine doesn't support the Firecracker (suprisingly). I'm
sure they'll add it though.
> I'd be almost
>willing to cough up $500 based on a quickie demo at SIGGRAPH and a
>promise of Mimetics support.
The first version of Journeyman did support the RGB file format that
Sculpt4D uses. But IFF24 seems to be generally accepted as the standard
now, and it compresses much smaller, and we got 5 calls a day asking for it.
My suggestion would be to check out TAD from ASDG. Then you'd get the
best of both.
>
>One more question -- how free are you with the description of the
>object format? I'm trying to decide what format to finalize my raytracer
>on (I use NFF currently, quick and dirty :-). S3D formats don't seem
>to support parametrics or beziers, what about Journeyman?
The Journeyman object format wouldn't be much good for you unless your
ray tracer is patch based (as opposed to polygon based). We convert our
object to bezier patches at rendertime. Before that, they are made up of
3D splines, which are our own mutation of the Catmul-Rom splines. Our
spline is worth some major money, so I don't think we're going to give
our format away for now. It's such a different animal than polygonal objects
that it's not really compatable with them.
>J. Eric Townsend Internet: j...@uh.edu Bitnet: jet@UHOU
>Systems Mangler - UH Dept. of Mathematics - (713) 749-2120
Ken Baer
>
>You state that Journeyman is the only spline based Amiga 3D package. This is
>not true. The new release of Caligari also uses splines.
Caligari is NOT patch based modeling. The subructure is polygons. I am not
familiar with any spline features in Caligari, but I would assume it's one
of two things. Either they have some spline path creation (all they had
were text scripts for animation the last time I looked), or they have some
spline curve options in their modeler, which are then converted to polygons
when they save (many CAD programs do this).
> Granted, there is a
>quantum leap in price from Journeyman ($500 ?) to Caligari (>$2500), but we mustbe accurate. Since you are obviously familar with Journeyman, tell me about
>it's interface, it's ease of object creation, it's ablity to import objects
>created else where, it's rendering scheme(s) (ray tracing, phong shading, etc.)
Journeyman uses an interface designed for an artist to create 3D organic and
mechanical objects and characters for animation. Building objects out of
3D splines hardly compares to building them out of polygons, it's a different
world. And since it renders real patches, a curve stays a curve no matter
how close you get the camera to it.
I started writing the code to import Sculpt4D objects into Journeyman, but
there's a fundamental problem doing that. Complex objects are best served
using true patches, not polygons (unless that object has NO curves). You
would end up with an object where 8 out of 10 control points were
unnecessary, which would slow down all of the interfaces, and especially
the rendering. As hard as it is for people who spent 3 weeks making one
object out of polygons hate to hear this, it's easier to start over, and
whip out a new patch based object in a couple of hours.
>I basically know nothing about Journeyman. It sounds very interesting. Is the
>format in which the objects and scenes are saved documented by Hash? In other
>words, if I have polygonal objects and want to convert them to spline based
>objects, a) will Journeyman do this? b)does Hash provide a utility program
>that does this? c) does Hash provide the format the data must be stored in if I
>wanted to write my own converter?
You could call and ask Martin about it, but as I stated above, it's not
as useful as it seems. Polygons and patches are 2 different beasts.
> Lastly, what exactly is the price? And it is
>my understanding that Journeyman can only be ordered directly from Hash. Is
>this correct?
Animation:Journeyman is $500, and is only available direct from us. But,
you get a copy with your name and address imbedded in the program, instead
of key disk copy protection.
Journeyman also requires either an A2500 or an A3000 with 3Meg minimum.
It comes with a full featured patch based modeler, medium featured paint
program, relative motion editor (Action) which supports armature motion,
muscle motion, and spine motion (these last 2 would be REAL hard with
polygons!), armature modeler (Character) with algorithmic texture interface,
absolute animation editor (Direction) with channel based motion and
lighting attributes (animation can be ptted over time rather than
key framed), and finally a ray tracer and a z-buffer renderer.
Look for a Usenet review from Sean Cunningham in the near future, I hope
he can give you more detail.
>
>Mike G.
Ken Baer
>mechanical object creation" (contrasting it with fluid character animation
>abilities in Journeyman). ..I wish we had some of the folks from Impulse
>posting here. I have to say that Imagine is hardly limited to being a
>"flying logo" generator. Take for example their cycle editor..finally an
>intuitive tool for creating hierarchical motion sequences. Then these
>key-framed animated objects can be placed in another scene which is being
>keyframe at another level..key frames within key frames. There is ample
>opportunity here for an animator to show off plenty of character personality
>given this kind of powerful tool.
The character animation features of the two programs are quite different.
Journeyman is designed primarily for character animation (which was my
point in the previous message). It is our second character animation
program, our first was Animation:Apprentice (which was the first 3D
animation program for Amiga, it predated Videoscape). Apprentice used
key frame based armature motion on characters, much the same way Imagine
does. Our objects used a topological modeling method called Voxels, and
we used stick figures for reference. We call the motion you put on a
character, like a walk, a relative motion, and what direction he's walking
an absolute motion. Apprentice had both.
Journeyman takes a major leap beyond that. You have much finer control
over the motion using channel graphs. You start by making the key frame
poses, then you can go into the channel editor and change the transition
with a spline curve over time. This gives the motion a much more natural
feel that cannot be achieve with simple key framing. But beyond that,
Journeyman has 2 other kinds of relative motion; muscle morphing and
spine morphing. Muscle morphing allows you to the modify the object's
spline control points (you can bend and stretch the curves that make up
the object). You even have channel control over this (don't ask me
how this works). Spine motion is my favorite, you can build a spine
in the object, and then bend the spine on its control points and the rest
of the object bends around it. It works just like a human spine. You
couldn't do that with a polygon based system.
I think you will see a big difference when you have both programs
side by side. We've been doing character animation for 4 years now, and
Journeyman is an attempt to fulfil our own personal (and out customer's)
wish list.
>Another word that seems to be getting a lot of use here in this thread is
>"organic". Both folks from Impulse and Hash seem to make amplbe use of this
>term.
We've used this term from te beginning in 1987. What we mean by "organic"
is natural, as one would find in nature, and non-mechanical. A dolphin
is organic, and F-18 is mechanical. You CAN make organic shapes out of
polygons, but, in my opinion, 8 cubic patches beat out 10,000 polygons
anyday! Even with phong shading, polgonal objects have a faceted edge
when you move the camera close.
> At first it seemed to make sense..but as the discussion progresses
>it seems to become more vague..kinda like "low calorie banana bread" (??).
>Anyhow I raise the issue as Impulse claims easy "organic" object creation
>with their forms editor. I've not seen any 3D editor like forms. Again
>very powerful, very intuitive means for creating objects that you would
>tend to find more in nature than off a cad system. You can also use it
>to quickly create complex mechanical looking objects.
Again, with polygons, you trade curves for object size and render time.
Polygons by their nature are great for mechanical stuff and logos and
a pain for natural organic shapes.
>When I think of logo creation, I think of programs like Video Effects 3D
>which focused only on this specialty. But to lump imagine in this
>category of product..is wrong.
Let me rephrase. I think it's closer to the mechanical and 3D logo world
than the 3D character animation world, mainly because it's tools are
geared more for that.
>My house-mate is getting the Journeyman product soon and I am very
>interested in seeing its capabilites.
I look forward to hearing your impressions (please not Jimmy Cagney! :-)
> So much software..so little time
><sigh>..
So much programming, so little time!
Bob Lindabury, SysAdmin
Well, that article was quite informative Mark. Thanks. Now that I just
purchased Imagine, I'm drooling for Journeyman...ah, the trials and
tribulations of 3D. <grin>
The biggest problem I'm having now is that I constantly run out of memory when
trying to slice my extruded continents object in Imagine. I have 5 megs and I
don't load anything but Imagine and it still chokes on it..ARGH! Jman sounds
like the ticket if you don't want to go to the poorhouse purchasing RAM.
One thing you don't find out about products such as Imagine are the memory
constraints until AFTER you purchase it and try doing a real project. I
thought it would be a simple matter to take a flat hi-res dpaintIII image of
the continents, convert it to an ILBM, extrude it and face it with Imagine. I
find that 5 megs of memory doesn't cut it however. If and when I ever get
faces on my object, I will then conform it to a sphere, add a blue sphere
inside of the continents and spin the sucker! Of course my project involves
quite a bit more than that. I am somewhat stuck at this point until I can
beg, borrow or steal another couple of megs. I suppose I can just fill up my
8-up with 1-meg simms and go but it seems odd that I can't do the above with 5
megs of memory.
I also wonder why more developers do not have connections to the Internet. I
don't see that it is very difficult to do at all. The developers have all
the required equipment if they can be online with such services as Plink or
C$erve. I hate having to subscribe to every $$$ service in the world to get
to talk to developers. The latest craze seems to be PLINK. Now this may be a
great service but that means I have to join another one and pay more $$$.
Why can't these developers setup a single machine with AmigaUUCP and get on
the net? It baffles me. If Plink at least supported a gateway as C$erve
does, then we could at least exchange mail with some of these developers.
Kudos to Ken Baer who seems to keep up with the talk here and Allan Hastings
who occaisionally makes an appearance. How about you guys talking to some of
the others to get setup on the net so that we may all pass information, tips
and ideas with a free flow (Yeah, I pay for my connection, dearly!).
Stephen Menzies
>In-Reply-To: message from mark@calvin..westford.ccur.com
>One thing you don't find out about products such as Imagine are the memory
>constraints until AFTER you purchase it and try doing a real project. I
>thought it would be a simple matter to take a flat hi-res dpaintIII image of
>the continents, convert it to an ILBM, extrude it and face it with Imagine. I
>find that 5 megs of memory doesn't cut it however. If and when I ever get
>faces on my object, I will then conform it to a sphere, add a blue sphere
>inside of the continents and spin the sucker! Of course my project involves
>quite a bit more than that. I am somewhat stuck at this point until I can
>beg, borrow or steal another couple of megs. I suppose I can just fill up my
>8-up with 1-meg simms and go but it seems odd that I can't do the above with 5
>megs of memory.
When does the problem arise? When you're converting or when
you use the boolean function? I would assume it's when you
use the booleans. 5megs isn't alot and until you can beg
borrow or steal more, why not start with a lower resolution
DPIII pic?
I remember speaking to Mike Halvorson some time back. I was
begging for more powerful features similar to these and
he expressed concern at that time that most users wouldn't
be able to use them as they didn't have loads of ram and
fpu's.(at that time I, myself, only had 3megs and no fpu).
But times have changed. Loads of ram, 030's and fpu's are
becoming the norm. If you want to work with the more
powerful features you really, really need ram.
cya -steve
>-- Bob
>______ Pro-Graphics BBS "It's better than a sharp stick in the eye!" ________
> UUCP: crash!pro-graphics!bobl | Pro-Graphics: 908/469-0049
>ARPA/DDN: pro-graphics!bo...@nosc.mil | America Online: Graphics3d
>Internet: bo...@pro-graphics.cts.com | CompuServe: RIP
>_________ ___________
> Raven Enterprises 25 Raven Avenue Piscataway, NJ 08854
--
Stephen Menzies
Email: S.Me...@CAM.ORG
Stephen Menzies
>In a previous post Ken Baer states "Imagine concentrated more on logo and
>mechanical object creation" (contrasting it with fluid character animation
>abilities in Journeyman). ..I wish we had some of the folks from Impulse
>posting here. I have to say that Imagine is hardly limited to being a
>"flying logo" generator. Take for example their cycle editor..finally an
>intuitive tool for creating hierarchical motion sequences. Then these
>key-framed animated objects can be placed in another scene which is being
B
>keyframe at another level..key frames within key frames. There is ample
>opportunity here for an animator to show off plenty of character personality
>given this kind of powerful tool.
>Another word that seems to be getting a lot of use here in this thread is
>"organic". Both folks from Impulse and Hash seem to make amplbe use of this
>term. At first it seemed to make sense..but as the discussion progresses
>it seems to become more vague..kinda like "low calorie banana bread" (??).
>Anyhow I raise the issue as Impulse claims easy "organic" object creation
>with their forms editor. I've not seen any 3D editor like forms. Again
>very powerful, very intuitive means for creating objects that you would
>tend to find more in nature than off a cad system. You can also use it
>to quickly create complex mechanical looking objects.
>When I think of logo creation, I think of programs like Video Effects 3D
>which focused only on this specialty. But to lump imagine in this
>category of product..is wrong.
>My house-mate is getting the Journeyman product soon and I am very
>interested in seeing its capabilites. So much software..so little time
><sigh>..
Here! Here! well put. I would like to add to the list
Imagine's "organic" special effects like *Grow, Explode
and Ripple" as well the ability to give "organic" looking
surfaces with it's very powerful Altitude Mapping and
Solid textures. I have not seen any 3D editor like "Forms"
either nor it's simplicity and ease of use. Let's not
forget to mention Imagine's ability to morph or transform
any object or attribute. All those combinations! Well, it'll
all come out in the wash, won't it.
cya -steve
Wes Plouff
In article <1990Dec21.1...@qiclab.uucp>, ba...@qiclab.uucp (Ken Baer) writes...
>We personalize the software for
>copy protection (and we really don't want to do that).
>
another piece of excellent software sold with the assumption that
customers are willing to pay good money to be treated with suspicion and
distrust.
Best wishes as daylight waxes,
Wes Plouff
plouff%kali.e...@decwrl.dec.com
Sean Cunningham
Does Caligari support splines for objects, or motion files like most other
packages?
The data sent to me by Octree doesn't jive with this, but they might have
added this since I inquired (about 4-5 months ago), but their most recent
advertisements didn't speak of anything new.
The rest of your questions would probubly be best answered by Ken Baer. I'm
pretty sure Hash would cooperate with anyone writing JMan supporting code.
And I don't see why a utility couldn't be written to turn a vector/polygon
based object from another package into PEAKED (straight and flat-faced) Jman
segments. But I'm no programmer :)
Sean
PS> I got behind gearing up for Christmas this week, but I hope to have a
JMan article for the net written soon.
Sean Cunningham
Ken didn't slight Imagine. In addition to logo type animations, he mentioned
mechanical animations (cars, planes, etc.). I'm sure that organic shapes can
be created and animated. Louis Markoya can attest to this ("Whale
Trace","Woodland II").
But no polygonal rendering package can get the type of smoothly flowing curves
that splines afford. And the closer you get to an edge, or the higher the
resolution of your output device (be it framebuffer or film), the more
pronounced its faceted profile becomes.
Sean
Jamie Purdon
> > I'm kinda pissed since newer products
> >are magically bound to the framebuffer their owning company makes.
>
> It's hard to know what to support. The 24bit hardware market on the
> Amiga is so chaotic and there just isn't time to support everything.
> At this point we would prefer to support the Toaster, since it's what
> we have, and it has the best NTSC output of all the buffers. But, so
> far, NewTek hasn't provided anything to developers to deal with the
> hardware directly. Their approach seems to be to wait till they
> provide developers with functions that access all of the Toaster's
> features, rather than provide some lower level support (like writing
> to the buffer) now, and the fancy stuff later.
ARexx lets you access the hardware through ToasterPaint.
ToasterPaint (software, which is bundled with the Toaster,) can be
very easily used for Toaster rendering, through it's ARexx interface.
ToasterPaint lets you use ARexx (or just a DOS script) to write to the
Toaster's framebuffers. This interface is handled by low-level code
that executes very quickly. The "Dlvb" ToasterPaint/ARexx command
(action code) puts an entire scan line of pixels into ToasterPaint's
rgb buffers. Another command renders the (changed lines in the) rgb
buffers "out" to a Toaster framebuffer.
The ToasterPaint/Arexx interface is an extended version of the
DigiPaint3.0/Arexx interface. The "Dlvb" action code functions
identically in both programs. You can use DigiPaint3.0 to test
ToasterPaint/Arexx scripts. DigiView software uses this interface to
send it's working image into DigiPaint's (ham) buffer.
Anybody can make use of both (Toaster) frame buffers in a similar
manner. The ToasterPaint/ARexx interface is documented in an appendix
to the ToasterPaint section of the Toaster manual.
--
Jamie Purdon, Author of DigiPaint1/3.0, ToasterPaint
bix: jamiep
quote: "Immediate neccessity makes many thing convenient,
which if continued would grow into oppressions."
- Thomas Paine, writing anonymously in "Common Sense", 1776
"If they don't understand English, talk louder." - Common Sense ;-)
Ken Baer
Purdon) writes:
|| | I'm kinda pissed since newer products
|| |are magically bound to the framebuffer their owning company makes.
|| At this point we would prefer to support the Toaster, since it's what
|| we have, and it has the best NTSC output of all the buffers. But, so
|| far, NewTek hasn't provided anything to developers to deal with the
|| hardware directly. Their approach seems to be to wait till they
|| provide developers with functions that access all of the Toaster's
|| features, rather than provide some lower level support (like writing
|| to the buffer) now, and the fancy stuff later.
|"Writing to a buffer" is available, now, to every Toaster owner.
|ARexx lets you access the hardware through ToasterPaint.
|
|ToasterPaint (software, which is bundled with the Toaster,) can be
|very easily used for Toaster rendering, through it's ARexx interface.
Sounds good in theory, but there are major problems with this. The big
one is memory! I takes 7Megs just to run ToasterPaint. Add on top of that
the memory it takes for a renderer to do it's thing (for us it's 3 to 5 Megs,
and it's a LOT more for polygon based systems). I'm sorry, but going through
ToasterPaint is not a solution. NewTek needs to provide a more direct path
to the hardware if they want any other developers to support the Toaster (which
we very much want to do!).
>Jamie Purdon, Author of DigiPaint1/3.0, ToasterPaint
>bix: jamiep
Jamie Purdon
||"Writing to a buffer" is available, now, to every Toaster owner.
||ARexx lets you access the hardware through ToasterPaint.
|Sounds good in theory, but there are major problems with this. The big
|one is memory! I takes 7Megs just to run ToasterPaint. Add on top of that
|the memory it takes for a renderer to do it's thing (for us it's 3 to 5 Megs,
|and it's a LOT more for polygon based systems).
7Megs) of free memory. This "minimal memory" setup is not the default.
You need to ensure that the CG and LIGHTWAVE "slices" are not "loaded", and
that you're using the Switcher's "GetSmall" (1 effect) project.
Also, you can force ToasterPaint to free up (approx.) an additional 1Meg by
sending the "Clsc" Arexx command (action code). This effectively kills the
"rgb undo" buffer....which is not used for "scan line rendering" and saving
of files.
In a "low memory" situation, not many features are available to 'Paint.
However, the basic features that an "outside application" (renderer)
would use are operable: writing to a framebuffer and saving (both formats,
framestore and 24bit rgb iff) files.
--
Jamie Purdon, (bix: jamiep) author of DigiPaint, ToasterPaint
quote: "Immediate neccessity makes many things convenient,