Imagine Manual Documentation ============================ Imagine 4.0 Features Rev 1.0 10-15-95 S.Kirvan Copyright 1995 Impulse Inc., Mpls, MN 55444 Features Added or Improved Since the Manual was Printed ======================================================= *New in Version 3.1* 1. About box. Every version of Imagine will has a version number associated with it. If you are unsure about the version that you are using, you can pull down the About option from the Project Editor in the first menu. This about box will tell you the version that you have. If you have any problems, please have this information handy when you call for tech support. 2. States.. Prior to version 3.1 of Imagine, you were not able to morph certain aspects of each state, now you can morph almost everything. 3. DXF... In Imagine 3.0 our DXF handler was, to be blunt, not very robust. We have improved it in several ways. It is much smarter as to what it does with this file format standard. A word of caution, we may not have it right for all the different formats that are out there. DXF is not a standard that even Autodesk follows. There are several forms of DXF or extensions that other vendors add to the file format so that it will make it easier for you to use. There are several new additions to loading and saving objects, if you are unfamiliar with these options please take the time to read about these options. The short answer is that almost any kind of DXF file will now load. 4. Backdrop Images. This feature is especially useful for those who want to make logos and the like in the Spline editor. However you will also find that the backdrop image will be very useful in the creation of animations that have a moving backdrop image, or for the more adventurous will use the backdrop image as a way of doing rotoscoping. The simplest form of Backdrop images is when you simply have Imagine load a, IFF, TIF, TGA or RGBN image into any editor that has a work surface. (This feature does not work in the Project or Action editor or the Preferences Editor.) When you find the image that you want in the backdrop from the file requester that comes up when you use this menu option, Imagine will process down the image to a single bit plane. It has a tolerance so that colors that are very dark will be eliminated from the image. The color that is used will be the same color as the grid color, in most cases this is gray. You can adjust this color in the Preferences editor, the variable know as GRID can be set to whatever color you want. Each person using this feature will find a perfect match for their eyes. It seems that everyone in the office sets the GRID color to a different color, most of them however are rather stark in comparison to the surrounding colors. If you use a scanner to collect different images of various clients logos, it would be to your best interest to reduce the colors of the logo to a matter of white on a black background. If you are in the QUAD view, the image that you load will be placed in the Front view and it will be size reduced to fit into that window. If you want to see a larger backdrop image, simply go to a full screen view and then load in a backdrop image. If you are done with the image you can clear the image with the Clear Backdrop menu item in the Display menu just below the Load Backdrop menu item. NOTE: IF you go from full view to Quad view or from Quad to full after you have loaded an image as a backdrop, Imagine will erase that image from view, and you will have to load it again. Also if you perform a Redraw command the backdrop image will go away and you will have to reload it, as well causing the image to Scroll will make the backdrop image to go away. Because Imagine will now read Anims for the Amiga ad Flc files for the PC, you can load any frame of an animation as a backdrop image, this is how you can do rotoscoping. Once you find the FLC or ANIM file that you want to load, Imagine will prompt you with a small requester that asks for a frame number that you want to use as the image backdrop. It will default to the last frame of the animation, so it is a good idea to know what frame you want to work on. When you have typed the number of the frame that you want, just hit the return key and the image will appear in either the front view or whatever full view you are working on. 5. FLC and ANIM brushes.... In the past you had to make a series of images that you used as a brush for an object, while this method is till supported, you can now map to any object a FLC or ANIM. You can establish the last frame of the anim or flc as the last frame for reference purposes on your rendering or you can type in any number that is smaller than the last frame. In this way you can use a smaller part of an animation or flc. Flc and Anim files can be tacked as all other brushes. The only drawback at the moment is that these files, FLC and ANIMs are generally not made in 24 bit, so if you are doing something where image quality is paramount, you may still want to use the serialized separate images instead of an Anim or Flc file. Another very cool thing is that you can use Anim or Flc files as BACKDROP images or Global Brush in the stage. If you have a video digitizer and can get motion video into your computer in the right format you can make some amazing special effects. Consider that you can could make a huge monstrous robot that is walking down wall street, smashing cars and knocking down buildings as it goes. This might take a while but it is a feature that will make you animations look very upscale. We have been using the Indeo video digitizing card and converting AVI files to Flic files. These files are then imported into the Background Picture requester in the Action editor in the Globals actor bar. We know that once you have this technique down you will be able to do things that you either could not do in the past or just did not have the time to try. 6. SHOW PIC and SHOW FLC/ANIM... Over the years we have always wanted to be able to see a picture that we were going to use as a brush, now with the simple click of a mouse button you can have Imagine show you any image in the formats that it reads. The same is true of Anim files as well as FLC files. Note that you will have to use the ESCAPE key to get out of the shown image or animation. The Show Pic and Show Flic/Anim function is found in the First menu in any work surface editor. Note that once you leave and image or animation with the Escape key, you will be presented with the file requester once more. This is because one of the tech guys said, "HEY I WANT TO LOOK AT MORE THAN ONE PIC", so when you are done looking at pics or anims, hit the cancel button on the file requester and you will be returned to the work surface. 7. Field Rendering... For many this feature will do nothing, except make you feel good that once you really need it you now have it. Field rendering is only worth something if you are going to a single frame recorder, of digital animation system like the Personal Animation Recorder from DPS, in Florence, Kentucky. You simply click on the Field Render button in the subproject requester for the project that you are working on. Notice also that there is a flip fields button. You should make a test render of say 30 frames, if the image is not stable or seems to be blurred or jagged, then simple click on the Flip Field button. Now re-render the animation and everything should be just perfect. Remember that this is the case for your system so that when you set up a render you will always have to click on this button if you needed to do so for this test. We have set this feature to work out of the box with the PAR card, so as you test this feature please let us know what you had to do to make it work with your system so that we can let everyone else know what works best. 8. Stage Attributes.... If you have been putting special lighting in your scenes with various lighting textures applied to them you already know that making changes to these lights is a real pain if you have to go back to the Detail editor every time you want to make a change. Well no problem now, in fact there is no problem making changes to any attribute of a single object. In the Stage editor you can find the new attributes menu item in the Object main menu bar item. Note that once you change the objects attributes you will have to save the object after you accept the new changes that you made in the attributes requester. If you want the new attributes to take effect make sure that you keep the same name for the object, if on the other hand you want to keep the old object around, make sure that you give the object a new name. Remember that you will have to change the object in the Action editor if you have saved the object under a new name. 9. Light Source and Object Views.... Several people have asked for us to give Imagine the ability to view what other objects or lights would be seeing if they were the camera. This new feature works as requested. From the objects Y axis or the Lights Y axis a view is shown so that you can visualize what the object or light is going to effect when the scene is rendered. You choose this function from the Display menu. You have two choices, Light source view and Object view. When you choose one of these menu items you will see a requester will all of the objects and lights that are in the scene. Click on the object or light name for the new view that you want to see. Note that the Spherical light that you add in the Stage is not for the purposes of this feature considered a light it is considered an object. When you are done with this view click on the camera view and you will be back looking at what the camera is going to see. A nifty idea for those who want to see what things might look like, keep an axis around that you can use as a fake camera. Place it where you might position the camera, choose its view and now you have a way of seeing things from many different view. If you like the new view from the fake camera, simply move the camera to the position of the axis either with the mouse or the Transformation requester. 10. The last new feature is called SMART BONES... Undoubtedly you like the new bones feature, but if you are like us at all, you get real tired making the bones subgroups and then going back to object mode, assigning the subgroups to the bone and then starting all over. While we would like to make it actually figure out what to do with each bone automatically, we have come up with something that will take away much of the tedium that you might have already experienced. SO, here is how you will use this new feature. Make your object, and add the bones to it as you would have done before. However when you would have gone to face mode to set some subgroups, simply pick the small group of faces for any bone and then under the Functions menu in the Make sub-menu choose the MK. Sm. Bone Subgroup item. Then click on the axis that you want to assign that set of triangles as the Small Bone Subgroup, Now pick the Large group of triangles that you will use for that bone and use the MK. Big Bone Subgroup. Keep doing this for all of the bones that you have associated to the object that you have made. Now when you go back and check out the small and big subgroup names that are associated to the various bone axis, you will see that Imagine has picked up the name of the axes and added the big and small suffix to the name so that all you had to do what pick the triangles and click on the axis that it is associated to. In this way you can bone an entire object in a very short time. We have noticed that it might be a good idea to move the axis (bones) of the object of center until all things are set. This is because the axis lines can become confused with other lines when doing this. *New in Version 3.2* 11. Hi-Res graphics workspace: Over the years people have wanted a way to increase the size of the workspace or to take more advantage of the higher resolutions that the computer can display. If you are using a PC and have a vesa compliant card, or an AGA compatible Amiga, you can now set Imagine to run in several different modes, and as an added bonus you can now run Imagine in 256 color mode. There is one drawback, however, unless your computer is a speedy one, you will find that the new modes slow things down a bit. This is understandable due to the increase in memory usage and the shear fact that there is much more to keep track of. 12. 256 Color Graphics Workspace Imagine now supports Higher screen resolutions and 256 color displays. This works with both VESA compliant display modes on the PC and with AA chipset and Retina compatible displays on the Amiga. All the settings for enabling these display modes can be found in the preferences editor (see USAA, S256, and SMOD). MONITORS AND HIGHER RESOLUTIONS If you like you can now make Imagine work in a higher resolution. One BIG caution, the increase in resolution will in most cases slow your machines redraw don't by at least 50%. There is also an aberration in certain preview methods where the bottom of the animation window will look as though it is tearing or going on the fritz. These problems are related to the manner in which Imagine works with the Vesa standard, and most video cards. If you have Pentium computer you will most likely not see any major slowdown, you will notice it is slower, but, its just not that bad. To set things differently you must make some changes in the Preferences Editor. SMOD 0 # imagine screen width: 0=640,1=800,2=1024,3=1280 Setting the SMOD variable to a value of 0 which is the default of 640, if you use the value of 1 it will set the Horizontal res to 800 pixels, a value of 2 makes it 1024 and a value of 3 will make the screen 1280 pixels wide. The vertical res of these different settings are as follows, 800 by 600, 1024 by 768 and 1280 by 960 or 1024 depending on what your video card is capable of. The ( S256 F # run 640x480 Imagine in a 256 color display (if possible)) function in the preferences editor will tell Imagine that you want to use the 256 color mode of the display card, if the card is capable of doing 256 SVGA colors. By default this value is set to F (false), if you change it to TRUE (T) then you will be running your video card and the Imagine interface in 256 color mode. You won't notice much of a change because Imagine still only uses 16 colors for the interface, the biggest change will come when you view an image as a backdrop picture, you will see the picture in 32 levels of gray, much better to look at than the single color of Imagine 3.1. 13. QUICK ATTRIBUTES Over the years of Imagine and previously Turbo Silver, we have been asked to add "PRESETS" for the attributes files. The process of adding some function that would make things like glass, or chrome or gold or any other attribute seemed like a waste of time. From the attributes requester, you can save the attribute only, using the save button, simple give the attribute that you have created a name that means something to you and then when you wanted that exact attribute again all you had to do was click on the load button in the attribute requester, like magic there you had the attribute that you were looking for. Well it all sounds simple enough but it does require that you must go through several different requesters, and of course this takes more time that you wanted to spend finding things. OK, so after all this time we have implemented Quick Attributes, you will find this new function under the functions menu. Click on it and you will be presented with 25 pre-set attributes. To use it, simply select an object, then choose the Quick Attributes menu item, click on one of the buttons that describes what you are looking for in an attribute, i.e. glass, or chrome etc. Once the attribute is loaded, the object has all of the properties that you were looking for. In the event that you want to make your own attribute presets we considered this as a viable alternative to the 25 that we have made as presets. You will note that once you have installed Imagine 3.2 there is a new directory named, Attribs. In this directory are the 25 presets that we made. They are named, 01.atr through 25.atr. These correspond to the boxes reading from left to right and from top to bottom just like the words on this page. So if you want GOLD to be in Attribute place holder 5, it would be named 05.atr and would be saved under that name. The easiest way to do this is to add an axis to the work surface, change the attributes as they would need to be changed to meet the needs that you have set forth. Now save the axis in the attribs drawer under the corresponding button number. Its that simple. Finally you should go to the preset settings in the preferences editor, find the 05.atr placeholder and edit that holder so that the text of that holder reads GOLD. or what ever you made. You are limited to 8 characters so your descriptions must be short and to the point. As you can see from the presets, this should not limit you all that much. A final note, you can set the quickattributes to include brushes as well as textures, we have omitted these due to the fact that during installation we do not create a new textures or brush drawer,. Once you get the hang of this feature, you will be able to set your own powerfull presets. Share them with your friends, and most of all enjoy. 14. SET EDGE LINE, FILL EDGE LINE...This new menu item under the Functions menu will save you lots of time and help you do something that has been very time consuming in the past. Consider that you have two objects, or even a open seam in a single object. In the past you had to add faces to the two objects after joining them or you had to add the triangles by hand to the open seam in a single object. This just takes too much time and if you are real proficient you can make facing mistakes that leave holes in the object or cause the triangles to lap over each other, creating a Phong shading problem. In order to use this new feature, we suggest that you add to planes to the work surface, move them apart a bit so that they are sitting side by side. Now join the two objects together, select them both in multi mode, use the Right A/J hot key and they are now one object. The area between the two planes could be filled with the add face command and you would click on the various trios of triangles to add those faces. Not any more. Now all you have to do is, while in Pick Edge mode, select one complete set of edges along the side that is closest to the other plane, use the Set Edge Line command after you have multi picked the edge set that you want to fill in with triangles, now click anywhere to de-select the picked edges, now multi pick the corresponding set of edges from the other plane. Use the Fill To Edge Line command, the area between the two sets of picked edges will automatically be filled with triangles. This function works on open or closed sets of edges, so if you cause a tube to cut from a sphere, you could join the two objects, set the Set Edge line and then the Fill Edge Line function, the area between these two closed areas would be filled with triangles. Another caveat is to do this function first when joining two objects. Consider that we want to join an arm to a chest object. We first pick all of the faces of the arm in Face mode, make this a subgroup and call it ARM. Now go back to object mode and select the chest object, select all of its faces in face mode and name that subgroup chest. Now Join the two objects to make one using the Join command. Now use the hide points command, enter the Hide points function and also choose the hide command. Now select the pick subgroup function, when the requester comes up, choose the Hide Interior points from the requester. All of the points on the inside of the object are hidden and all that is left is the area that could be called the perimeter of the object. You would do this hide function until, in this example all you would have left is the perimeter of the chest and arm object, you could then finally hide all of the other points that you don't need, and be left with only the area at the end of the arm that meets with the chest object. Now enter Pick Edge mode, notice that the points still stay hidden, now choose one or the other of the final edge are form either the arm or the chest and use the Set Edge Line command, now use the Fill To Edge Line tool to define the other set of edges, in the blinking of n eye, the two objects will be joined together to make a new "SEAMLESS" object. Using this command will make creating Contiguous objects from several object very easy and will aid in the creation of some great objects that will lend themselves to being given bones. 15. PICK MORE... As you create more and more elaborate objects, you will become very aware that selecting a series of triangles that share the same basic areas, can be much harder than it appears to be. With the PICK MORE command you can select the next row of faces directly connected to the area that you are working on. Remember this however, if you were working on a tube and wanted to use the PICK MORE command, that the command selects more faces from both directions, so as you pick some in one direction they will be picked on the other end of the tube. 16. Pick More, Hide Unpicked, Unhide All, Unhide Subgroup. Just what it sounds like, when you are heavy into editing and have hidden several points of an object, in order to get back the points you had to exit to Object mode and then start all over. This made us just as mad as it made you so now we have fixed it. From point, edge or face mode you can after hiding some points, simply invoke the Unhide All command, all the points that were hidden will now be reshown without ever leaving the mode that you were in. The same is true of the other command, Unhide Subgoup, except that it works only on subgroups of faces, edges and points. Conversely, you may find that you want to hide the unpicked sets of points and faces or edges that you are working on, not to worry, Just use the Hide unpicked menu item, then all of the points, edges or faces that are not currently picked will be hidden from view. 17. SMOOTH EDGE LINE... No matter how hard you try, you will most likely never make a st of points perfectly smooth in an arc. Making points adhere to a more rectangular situation is easy when you are adding points under the snap to grid function. If you use the Spline editor you will notice that it makes perfect curves, this is due to two things mostly however it is due to the fact that the lines that have points on them are splines instead of just raw points connected by a line. If you select a line of points that looks to be irregular or after making the outline of a lightbulb that you are going to spin, you would use the Smooth Edge line function to make sure that the arc of the line that you have created is as smooth as it can get. When you do invoke this function you will see small requester that has the number 3 in it. Above the number 3 is says in the requester Complexity, actually the programmer used to have the name Polynomial Value. To those of us in the office that have no idea what a polynomial is, we cried our eyes out and they changed the name. The function of Line smoothing is much easier to use than the name implies. If you have a line of points connected by edges, you multi pick the edges, then you invoke the Smooth Line command and hit return when the small requester comes up just hit the return key. The value of 3 will cause the line of points to be smoothed. If you don't like the results, simply use the UNDO command and try a different figure. From our experience the lower the number the more sever the arc that is created, the higher the number the lower the effect on the line. There are a few things to know, first, the number can be no lower than the amount of edges that you are trying to smooth. The larger the number can at some point eliminate the effect to the line smoothing. The edges must be contiguous, they must connect one to the other, and as of yet it only works in edge mode, possibly in the future, we will have a object smoother, we worked on it this time but the problem was very difficult to make reliable. 18. BACKDROP Images can now be loaded independently into each of the quad view windows, this will allow for up to four images at a time in the quad view. All you need do is click in the window where you want the image to show, then choose the load backdrop image function. 19. Fracture has been changed so that you can now put in an amount to fracture that is smaller than the number one. If you choose fracture and then input the number .5 (point 5) the triangles will be decreased in size to one half their initial value and the object will maintain the general size with the separated triangles. 20. "Scrub" slider in anim previewer. Classic hand drawn animators use a technique called page flipping, this is where as they draw the animation they keep several pages of the animation secured between each finger of the hand that they don't draw with. This allows them to flip back and forth to see the flow of the animation as well as the timing of the animation. While we don't have real pages to put in-between your fingers, we have added a slider at the bottom of the animation requester that comes up in the detail and stage editor, after you have made an animation and want to preview the animation before you commit to rendering it. If you grab the small black box and move it left to right you will see that it moves the animation backwards and forwards. This should make your timing work much smoother and the animation process in general much easier. *New in Version 3.3* 21. Smooth fracture. Smooth fracture works very similar to Smooth Edge Line as it is explained above only this function does the smoothing at the same time it fractures up a line of edges. Try this function by picking a string of edges, on a 10x10 primative plane, that form a "V" shape. This function should fracture the edges and turn the original "V" shape into more of a "U" shape. 22. Variable Brightness. Imagine's Brightness attribute has been expanded. It used to be only used as bright or not bright. Now the brightness of an object can be set to something more like halfway bright. This can be used to morph objects to bright and not bright, bring up the color of distant ground objects, or to simulate the ambient lighting of an object that is rendered with only a single light source, etc. 23. Randomize Colors. Randomize Face colors has been moved from the attributes requester to the Functions Menu. It still works the same. Rand Colors has always been a one pass, function oriented operation. Moving it to the functions menu puts it in a more appropriate place. 24. Mix/Morph control for intensity on ALL textures and brushes. Historically, any intensity control for textures has been up to each individual texture to control. Now in Version 3.3 this option has been taken over by Imagine. This greatly expands the usefullness of the textures that didn't offer intensity control and now also allows blending of brushmaps onto objects. To see how this works, Randomize the face colors of an object, and then apply a texture, like Checks, with it's Mix/Morph Value set to .5. You will see the Texture is blended onto the object at 50% of it's original intensity. Remeber that textures and brushes are applied one at a time, in the order that they are on the object. So to get a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 blend, you need to apply the first brush at Mix=1.0, the second at Mix=.5, and the third at Mix=.333. 25-32. Specular Mapping, Hardness Mapping, Shininess Mapping, Brightness Mapping, Fog Length Mapping, Index Of Refraction Mapping, Ambient Light Mapping, Roughness Mapping. These 8 new brush mapping type have been added to the attributes that are controllable with Imagine's texturing controls. With these new brush types the variablilty of "looks" for object surfaces in nearly unlimited. Specular mapping changes the colors of the specular spot depending upon where the specular spot is relative to the brush. Hardness mapping changes the size and shape of the specular spot depending upon where the specular spot is relative to the brush. Shininess mapping changes the object's Shininess attribute depending upon the brush is applied to the object. To easily see the results of a Shininess brush, Set the objects filter value to full red, it's index of refraction to 3.55 and apply a brush as a Shininess Map. You will see that where the brush is affecting the object, the object will have a reddish, waxy appearance. Remember that Shininess always uses the object's filter and Index of Refraction values. Brightness mapping changes the object's Brightness attribute based upon how the brush is applied to the object. This map type used the Red component in the brush map to set the objects brightness. Using A brightness map will make areas on the object appear to glow. Fog Length mapping allows you to control the Fog Length of a fog object with a brush map. You have to set a high and low fog value and the brush controls where these values are tweened onto the object. To use this map type, you MUST have the object's base attributes set with a fog value. Index of refraction mapping allows you to control the index of refraction on a transparent object with a brush map. This can give an effect that looks like ice. To see the effect that index of refraction has on looking at other objects in the scene, you have to Trace the image. Ambient Light Mapping is a new attribute effect that has never before been available in Imagine. This mapping applies light to the object as if it had come from a light source, but the light is added only to the object on which the brush is applied. The colors in the brush are interpreted as lighting values that are added to the object as if they had come from colored lights. Use this very subtly by setting the Mix/Morph value to a very small number. Careful use of ambient maps can fake the same effects that radiosity images have. Note: Ambient maps are additive - multiple maps will add up rather than cancel each other out. Roughness mapping was added just because we could. Roughness, if used, should be used very sparingly if not avoided altogether. The effect that roughness has can be simulated with textures, like bump noise, and where as roughness will not animate properly, the texture bumping will. 33. Previous/Next buttons in the texture and brush requesters. These buttons were added to speed up the editing and viewing of texture and brush data. They will be un-ghosted if available for use. These are here to save the older steps of highlighting a texture, clicking info, clicking ok, highlighting the next texture, clicking info, etc. 34. Browse buttons in the texture and brush requesters. Browse buttons have been added to the texture and brush requesters to aid in renaming textures (or resetting the correct path), finding Lock states and finding subgroups. 35. 256 Color real-time texture/brush/attributes preview. The texture, brush, and attributes requesters now all have 256 color previews of the object's attributes. The preview in the attributes requester will show all the textures and brushes currently applied, but in the texture or brush requester you only see the texture or brush you are currently working with. The preview has several buttons around it so that you can change the preview object, add a backdrop, add something for reflective objects to see, and control the scaling of the object. The most confusing part of the preview is the directional controls along the bottom the the rendered image. Textures and brushes have their own alignment axes that is independant of the alignment of the object. The three buttons, front, top, and right, are used to view the texture or brush along it's own axes. The "obj" button lets you view the texture or brush aligned as it is applied to the object. With the "obj" button selected, the other three buttons control which angle you are looking at the object from. These buttons will start up aligned to the texture's top (X,Y) alignment because a large number of the texture have a default alignment that lets them be put on a ground. The default object alignment, however is from the front because objects are usually render from something near the front view. This preview is only available if you are running Imagine in an available 256 color display mode and have enough extra memory to allocate all the extra data required. 36. 256 color color pickers in texture requester. Many people have asked for sliders to use when picking colors in the texture requester. For several reasons, we didn't add these. What we did add is a new color picker. This is not a slider, but while you are working with a color, the area to the right of the color value displays all the current color options available by changing this particular value. You can click into this color bar to change the value of the current color parameter. As you pick or change colors, all the color boxes are updated to the available colors. We have found this to be a very good way to do color matching and a great way to find usually hard to find colors like flesh tones. Play with it, you'll get it. 37. View Brush in brush requester. View Brush has been added to the brush requester to display the currently selected brush. This way you don't have to go to "Show Pic" to see if you have the right brush. 38. QRender - QuickRender directly from all attrib/txtr requesters. Ok, so you're working on the textures, brushes, and attributes of your object. You've got a preview of all the texture and color data, but you don't know what it looks like on you object. No problem. Select "QRender" from any of these requesters and you can see how the current data looks on you object. All camera settings come from the current settings of the perspective window. 39. User defined Texture/brush labels. A new text field has been added to the texture and brush requesters. With textures (if the texture was built following all the rules) this field will show the internal name of the texture. With brushes it will contain the file name of the brush. This new text field is the label that is displayed in the texture/brush list on the attributes requester. This way you can re-name textures and brushes to give you a better idea of what each item is doing. 40-42. Dup, Drop, Disable/Enable in attribs requester These new buttons have been added to the attributes requester and are used to quickly modify the texture/brush list on the object. "Dup" is used to duplicate (or copy) any item in the texture/brush list. This is of particular use when you want to use the same brush repeatedly to control differnt object attributes but you want to brushes size/position/alignment to stay exactly the same. "Drop" allows you to quickly drop (or delete) items out of the object's texture/brush list without having to edit the texture or brush to get at the drop button. "Disable/Enable" allow you to quickly "turn off" a texture or brush in the object's texture/brush list without having to drop the item or set the item's Mix/Morph value to 0. A disabled item's text will be drawn in gray (the editor background color), but can still be edited. Enabling an item will turn it back on so that it will be rendered onto the object at render time. These Disabled/Enabled textures/brushes can be smoothly morphed. 43. Interactive texture/brush list. The texture/brush list displayed in the attributes requester now works directly with the mouse. Clicking on an item in the list will highlight it. Clicking on a highlighted item will pull up that item's data requester. Clicking on "" will call up a load texture/brush requester. Highlighting an item and then selecting "" will load the new texture/brush before the highlighted item. If nothing is highlighted and "" is clicked, the new item will be added at the end of the list. 44. Real time previewing of renders on 256 col displays. QuickRenders and project renders can now be viewed as they happen. The render is displayed on the screen in grayscale because there is no palette information available until the render is done. This option is turned on in the preferences editor by setting the RTGS option to True. This preview is only available if you are running Imagine in an available 256 color display mode. 45. Support for unfinished FLC's Prior to Version 3.3, Imagine would not display improperly made FLC files that did not have the finished bit set. Imagine now plays them, but may also try to play corrupted FLC's that may not work properly. 47. Default object attributes. Imagine's object have historically always loaded in new as fully white, with 0 in all the other attributes. Now you can set the defaults for new object attributes by setting the attributes values in the preferences editor. The preferences items that affect object attributes are DCLR, DREF, DFIL, DSPC, DHRD, DRGH, DSHI, DBRI, DIOR, and DFOG. 48. Shaded View Edge drawing. (PC only) In Imagine's 256 color shaded perspective view, you can get a real good idea about object shape and contours, but sometimes the brightness of the edges of an object will drown out the shading on the faces. This option in the preferences editor (SPED) can be set to False to turn off the edges and help in clarifying the image in the perspective view. This was a very quick and simple change to make in the PC version - that is the only reason it was done. On the Amiga the change would be considerably more difficult so it was not. 49. Replaced "Reflection Mapping" with "Environment Mapping." This was just a matter of changing the text on the brush requester. The difference between "reflectivity" and "reflection" maps was confusing so "reflection" was changed to "environment." The environment map is what is seen by rays off a reflective object. The environment map's alignment is locked to the world coordinate system and therefore is not modified by editing it's axes. 50. startup editor. In Imagine's preferences editor, you can now select the editor you would like Imagine to start up in. For example you can start Imagine directly into the detail editor instead of first starting the project editor and then going to the detail editor. The preferences item that must be changed is STRT. 51. set number of points in scanline CSG sphere. Imagine's perfect (constructive Solid Geometry) sphere has always been very simple and quick to use in trace mode, but in scanline, the sphere is oftentimes too chunky to be used. This is because the perfect mathmatical sphere that can be used in trace mode has to be converted to faces for scanline mode. Now with this preferences option, you can set the number of points in the csg sphere. This number is actually the number of verticle slices in a primative sphere. The number of circle sections is set to twice this number. This value defaults to 8 points which is what Imagine has used historically. Setting it to anything less than 8 will result in Imagine using it's default of 8. A value of 24 gives real good spheres, but be warned, these spheres take up a lot more memory than the original 8 point CSG spheres do. The preferences item that must be set is SPHP. *New in Version 4.0* 52. Soft Shadows added to detail editor shadow light sources. Soft Shadows. In the object's light attributes, there is a Soft shadows flag now. You have to be using a shadow casting lightsource. The size of the light is determined by the light's X axis. The number of lighting elements used to represent the Light is set in the preferences editor (SSLE). For best results, keep the penumbra small in your images. The more light elements you use, the better the final image will look, but large numbers greatly slow down the rendering. It is probably best to use the soft shadows as a subtlety in your images rather than the point of the image. Use lighting textures to help hide the artifacting that can occur with shaped light sources and use of colored/textured objects will also help to disguise any artifacting that can occur. These should animate fine without ever shimmering like you may see from some renderers that use more stochastic ray casting methods. 53. Motion Blur in Project Images. Motion Blur - this is set in the sub-project requester. The number of frames is the number of extra frames to make the blur with. The shutter speed sets the duty cycle of the blurring (I think that typically, a film motion picture camera has a duty cycle of about 50%). 54. Blob Modelling with both faceted and animatable soft object output. All of the menu items pertaining directly to blobs are found under the object menu, in the detail editor, in the blobs sub-menu. In a nutshell, to use Imagine's blobs, add several spheres, group them, and tell Imagine that you want this group treated as a blob. Now when the group is rendered or explicitly meshed, the object will be converted into a blob object. To create a blob object, add several CSG spheres in the detail editor (use "Add Sphere" not "Add Primitive"), and group them. Tell Imagine that you want this group treated as a sphere by picking any of the spheres and selecting "Blob Attributes" from the blob menu. For starters, just accept the default value(s). Once Imagine knows you are working with a blob object, the group will automatically mesh (look like the blob object) in the prespective view and when you go to render it. Depending on the speed of your computer and the complexity of the blob object, it may take a few seconds to see the blob in the perspective view. If you want to shut off the automatic mesh generation in the perspective view, set the perspective mesh density (in the objects/blobs menu) to zero. This may be useful if the meshing process gets to be too slow. Each blob group has its own blob mesh density that is used when the object is explicitly meshed or when the blob is rendered. The mesh density can be set and adjusted by setting the blob attributes on the parent sphere. With the mesh densities, higher numbers create finer meshes that look good rendered, but they take a while to generate and can exceed Imagine's maximun edge count. If the max edge count is exceeded, the blob object will be split into multple objects and the seam between the objects will render as a hard, jagged, edge. The Blobs/Create Mesh menu item generates a standard, faced, Imagine object that can then have textures tacked to it and be animated with tools like bones or states. The "Strength" value of the blobs is set with "Blob Attribs", and can be thought of as representing the hardness or squishiness of the components of the blob group. The strength can be set independantly on each component of the blob group. A good range for the Strength is from about three to negative three. Posative values will add to the blob object, and negative values will subtract or push the surface of the blob away. A component with a value between 0 and about .65 will not show up on it's own, but will still add to the overall blob surface. High strength values, like three, will make the components more or less maintain their spherical shape when near other components as opposed to looking like the components have melted together. A note on the missing threshold value: If you are familiar with other blobs editors, you may notice that there is no threshold parameter, here's why: The spheres you see in the orthogonal views of the detail editor are representative of the isosurface of each element. By looking at the blob this way, the threshold/strength parameters just become a ratio - therefore, in Imagine, the "Strength" just represents the magnitude of the strength relative to the threshold. Also, in imagine, there is no way to see the absolute sphere of influence of each blob component as you can in other blob modellers, but since the process of modelling with imagine's blobs is so interactive, it is easier to just experiment and get a feel for the blobs rather than having all the extraneous data cluttering the editing screens. If you don't get what this last paragraph has been about, don't worry, none of it really matters to how Imagine's blobs works. Also notice about the blobs: In the perspective view, if the perspective mesh density is set to be very fine, and Imagine's maximum edge count is exceeded, rather than splitting into a new object, the object meshing will just stop - This is to give you some clue about the number of edges your meshed object will have and to give you some guidance when setting the blob object's final mesh density. 55. Cascade Object Heirarchy Grouping. Under the "States" menu in the detail editor, a new grouping function has been added. Whereas the "Group" function that you are familiar with groups all the picked objects to the first object picked, "Cascade Group" groups them, one to the next, in the order that they were picked. For example, if you group several objects, A to D, using the old group function, the objects are grouped A to B, A to C, and A to D. If you use the cascade grouping, they are grouped A to B, B to C, and C to D. 56. Delete File in the Detail Editor for deleting temporary work files. Delete File is found under the Projects menu in the Detail Editor. While working in the detail editor it is typical to accumulate a lot of temporary, progressive, object files as you edit and manipulate an object. This function is here so you don't have to exit Imagine in order to get rid of all those extra files. WARNING: this is a real file delete - it will delete anything on your drive that you tell it to and the deleted file can not be retrieved. 57. Stage Effects in Detail Editor. You can now use Imagine's stage FX in the Detail editor. This funciton lets you load an FX module and apply it to an object in the detail editor. The idea behind this is to begin to open up Imagine's interface to procedural modelling. Now you can use FX like Spike as a tool in the detail editor and you don't have to create a project, load the object, apply an FX in the Action editor and than do a snapshot from the stage. This feature may also make it easier to set up and experiment with some of the more complex FX modules. 58. Smoothing Tool for smoothing objects. Alfonso Hermida (of the Blob Sculptor team), along with advice and help with Imagine's blob editing, sent Impulse some smoothing code that has been implemented as a smoothing tool in the Functions menu of the Detail Editor. The Smoothing parameters allow you to set the number of smoothing iterations (the more iterations, the smoother the result) and to lock perimeter points so that the outside edges of smoothed objects don't distort. The smoothing tool will work in Group, Object, and Point mode. 59. Auto-Load Backdrop Images in Stage (for rotoscoping). This function, in the Stage Editor's Display menu, will automatically load backdrop images (as set in the Action Editor's globals bar) into the perspective view as you change frames. 60. Automatic Picking of Pasted Objects in Detail Editor. The behavior of Copy/Paste in the Detail Editor has been changed so that the pasted object is automatically picked. (it used to be selected). This was added because it seems more logical to want to imediately modify the pasted object rather the the object you were already working with. 61. Improved Imagine's Starfield. Imagine's Starfield has been changed so that the stars have variable brightnesses. This means that in a palettted image the stars may not be the correct color, but it does generate much more convincing 24 bit starfield images. -end-