This window is like the Draw Knot window, but you get to choose how hard or soft the edges of the icon appear.
The edge controls let you tune your icon so that it looks best against the desktop pattern you plan to use it with. Icons with half-soft grey edges will look okay against most patterns; completely soft white edges look best when icons are used on white background inside folder windows. Completely hard edges look bad always.
Your settings for backdrop and picture size are ignored, and there is no 3-D option for icons.
Click Make, and the program will create a file whose custom icon is a tiny little knot. If it doesn't appear immediately, go to the Finder and do a Get Info on the file.
How do I make tiles?
The Tile window
This window is like the Draw Knot window, but you get to choose the size of the tile, and the softness of the blended edge of the background.
There is a control that allows you to set the size of the tile. This can be any size, but if you intend to make a pattern for your Desktop, try to make the tile square, with each side being 16, 32, 64 ,128, or 256 pixels.
The tile size is size of the resulting graphic. The ‘pictures’s size’ in the Environment window is a larger space into which the knot is drawn, and then folded over into the tile size.
To get good results, then, the ‘pictures’s size’ should be about twice the tile size, and the knot should fit entirely within the ‘pictures’s size’.
The other controls work as in the Draw Knot window.
Click Make, and the program will create a graphic which will tile seamlessly.
Use your favorite utility to convert this to a Desktop pattern, or convert it to a GIF and use it as a Web page background. Two good utilities available online are are Texture Installer and GIFConverter.
How do I make QuickTime VR objects?
The Make VR Object window
This window is something like the Animate Knot window minus the motion controls.
A QuickTime Virtual Reality object is a movie whose every frame is a view of the same object from a different angle. When you view this movie with a program like QTVRPlayer, you can spin and turn the object any way you please.
The smoothness of the motion depends on how many individual views of the object are in the movie. The window has two sliders, which let you say how many longitudinal views and how many latitudinal views the object contains. The gridded ball shows where these views will be. Think of your knot at the center of the gridded ball; every white spot is a place from which the knot will be seen in the object-movie.
There is also a display of the total number of views that will result. Apple recommends drawing views every 10°, which is 36 latitude and 19 longitude increments, or 684 views in total.
Since object movies can be large, try using the Apple graphics compressor set to 256 colors, and use a dark, blank background; this will result in a smaller movie file than otherwise.
QTVR objects are drawn much faster when Knot's cache is turned on.
Click Make, and Knot will draw your object. You'll need to view it with a program that understands objects; try using QTVRPlayer, available online at http://www.qtvr.quicktime.apple.com.
I’m having trouble.
• Not enough memory: Quit the program, open Knot’s Get Info window in the Finder, and give Knot more memory. If you’re running on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM, it may help to actually decrease Knot’s allocation to about 2000K. (This gives the rest of the computer more room to breathe.) If neither of these tactics work, try drawing smaller pictures, or open up the Memory control panel and turn virtual memory on. You can also try restarting with all the extensions turned off: hold down the shift key as the computer starts up.
• It just beeps a lot and won’t draw anything: You’ve mistyped or left out a number somewhere. Choose Find Typos from the Edit menu, and that will, naturally enough, find the typos. Keep finding and fixing until there are no more left.
• Strands appear as only tiny dots in the very center of the picture: Increase the strands’ diameters; try changing the strands’ radii to 150; turn off the ‘Fit’ item in the Environment Window.
• Strands mysteriously refuse to appear in movies: Knot needs more memory but is too bashful to tell you. Give the program more memory (with the Finder’s Get Info command) or turn on Virtual Memory (with the Memory control panel). You could also make the drawing smaller.
• The two strands in a ribbon are tilted differently, making a skewed ribbon: control-clicking on the first strand makes the next strand align with it.
• Can’t make movies: Knot relies on the QuickTime system extension to make its movies. If you don’t have it installed, you can edit Knot documents but you cannot actually render the movies. QuickTime can be downloaded from http://www.apple.com; it also comes free with new Macintoshes, and with some multimedia programs.
• QuickTime VR object movies seem to be just ordinary movies of a spinning knot: Object movies need to be viewed with a program that understands them. Try using QTVRPlayer, available online at http://www.qtvr.quicktime.apple.com.
• Movies play back jerkily.
Your computer is too puny to to play back all the frames at the proper speed. There are some things you can to to fix this:
- Use the Movie’s Size control in the Animation window to reduce the size of the movie. It’ll be smaller, but it will play back better.
- Reduce the frame rate.
- Be sure you're using movie compression. A good choice is Video, 80%. You can choose this in the dialog box that appears after you click “Go”. Cinepak is good too, except that it works very slowly. If you don't use any compression, the movie file is vastly larger and slower than otherwise.
- Ideally, play your movie back with the monitor's color depth set the same as the movie’s. Use your Monitors control panel to make this adjustment. (Video-compressed movies have ‘16-bit color’.)
- If virtual memory is on, turn it off.
- Play your movies on the fastest computer you can lay hands on.
• Your movie, with the ‘Loop’ option chosen, does not loop smoothly: Go to the Animation Window and check the number-of-spins display. If it’s not an integer (there’s something besides zero after the decimal point) then it should be. Change the spin rate to make that happen.
• Long animations with dozens of keyframes and thousands of movie frames don’t work properly - early keyframes repeat, and late one's don't seem to get used.
This is a known bug, and a repair is coming. In the meantime, there is a tedious workaround.
In essence, you can split the animation up into N smaller pieces that the program will not gag on. Take your knot document, reduce the "frames to draw" by a factor of N, and create N copies of the document. Then remove most keyframes from them - this is the tedious part - leaving only a short sequence in each one. Make sure to overlap the end keyframe of each document with the first keyframe of the next:
doc A: 1 2 3 4 5
doc B: 5 6 7 8 9 10
doc C: 10 11 12 13 14 15
doc D: 15 16 17 18 19 20
Now render each movie separately, and use any movie editor to splice them together. These short movies will abut properly with no duplicated frames.
• Drawing suddenly becomes slow for no particular reason: Have you started using a gobo? Gobos take time to do.
• Custom icons fail to appear: This can happen when the icon is visible at the moment it's created. Go to the Finder and do a Get Info on the icon.
• No matter how much memory you give the program, it still isn't enough to make a big, high-resolution drawing: Knot's RAM hunger can be fierce, since the whole image is held in memory during drawing. Turn on your virtual memory using the Memory control panel.
• Mysterious failure when trying to make a movie: the program probably wants more memory.
• Error -108 when trying to launch a viewing program: The computer’s memory is getting full. Try quitting other programs.
• Knot can't find the viewer programs: You have to tell it where they are. Use the Preferences submenu, under TIFFs or Movies.
• Trouble with the Preferences file: Rare, but you may be trying to run Knot from a locked disk. Try copying the program to a different disk, and running it from there.
• Previews don’t work: It could be that there’s not enough memory: try the fixes listed for that above. Also, try copying a strand and then pasting it.
• Drawing fails after it’s finished: It may be that Knot thought it had enough space on the disk to draw its picture when it began, but during drawing some other program ate up disk space, until there wasn’t enough for the picture. Try running Knot alone, or free up more space on your disk.
• Can’t select more than one strand at a time: This version of Knot can’t do that at all. Maybe in the next version.
I can’t remember all those funny keys.
Clicking in the strand list:
With no keys: selects a strand
Command: toggles bonds
Option: toggles placeholders
Control: aligns the tilt of the next strand with this strand
Option+command: toggles the triangular Cartesian Interpolation mark
Control+option: toggles the circular Discontinuous Interpolation mark
Clicking on the strand-tilt control:
With no keys: tilts a strand
Option: tilts, and makes the preview change as you tilt
Control: tilts, and aligns the tilt of the next strand with this strand
Clicking in the strand preview:
With no keys: previews selected strands
Control: change the selected strand’s buckling
Dragging across preview: reposition the view
Command: restore the preview to normal centering
What’s new in version 3.7?
Version 3.7
October 1996
• The program can now make repeating graphic tiles.
• Masks are available for all forms of video.
• With a linear movie, you have the option of rendering all or just part of it.
• Command-keys for the going to the next & last keyframes.
• New strand modifiers offer better control over morphing in animations.
• The strand preview can be dragged to a new position.
• The extent to which the program monoplizes the computer during rendering is now tied to the system clock, producing consistent reuslts on different machines.
• Many bugs fixed: no more “Do you want to save” when nothing has changed; edges of icons are no longer tinged with red; high-rez movies work correctly; ugly disturbances of color on 256-color displays have been banished; and the program will tell you the name of a helper program it wants to launch but cannot find.
Version 3.6.5
August 1996
• This is a maintenance upgrade that fixes some bugs, including a freeze that can occur with the tie-dye background.
Version 3.6
June 1996
• Strands can be bonded together to make ribbons.
• QuickTime VR objects and icons.
• 288 dpi resolution.
• Auto-viewing of knots.
• An image cache speeds repetitive drawing.
• Fixed bugs with the Fit and tilt controls, the frame progress indicator, and long animations.
Version 3.5
March 1996
• The program is now ‘fat’ - meaning that on Power Macintosh machines it will run native at about 2 to 3.3 times the speed of the previous version.
• Added a wetness slider; now strands can be more than just wet or dry, they can be moist.
• Fixed bugs. Gone are the “error while deleting cache” message, mystery crashes in animations containing glowing strands, and pearly glowing strands that are too-dim at high resolution.
Version 3.4.1
February 1996
• Fixed a bug in 3.3 – strands would sometimes appear flat and rough, usually in animations.
• Added a new background called Twizzles.
Version 3.3
January 1996
• High resolution - you can draw knots at 144 dots per inch.
• Gobo lighting effects.
• Side-by-side stereograms.
• The ability to use the green channel in red/blue sterograms.
• Speed.
• Fixed a bug that could make Knot crash when a document was
double-clicked in the Finder.
• Fixed a bug that made wet strands look wrong in animations.
It works with all your documents from older versions of Knot too.
Version 3.2
November 1995
This release fixes a problem with the 3-D pictures, which were far too dim in 3.1. There are also some cosmetic improvements.
Version 3.1
November 1995
This release adds speed, and presents new options for strands that look wet and have variable iridescence. Each light can range from harsh to soft, and the program offers faster substance previews and drawing. The backgrounds are also smoother - check ‘Endpapers’.
Version 3.0
September 1995
This release adds animation with motion tests and stereograms, multiple colored lights, and strands that can be bigger, glowing, segmented, buckled, and divided into spheres. You can generate masks that aid compositing knots onto your own backgrounds. There are new, more colorful backgrounds, animated previews, a way to automatically create entire animations, and smoother-moving tilt controllers. Drawing speed has increased again, and you can specify what paint programs will open your knot graphics and movies.
Version 2.1
January 1995
This release increased drawing speed about 20%, added a new backdrop, fixed some display bugs and a memory problem, as well as a problem with the ‘blank’ backdrop’s color, which would sometimes be incorrect. The TIFF file problem in version 2.0 is fixed too.
Version 2.0
January 1995
The first release with controls to let the user change the modeling and rendering of knots. Knots are no longer hardcoded, but are editable and can be saved as documents. This release is shareware.
Sometimes 2.0 would create unreadable TIFF files.
Version 1.0
September 1994
The first public release. This version draws a single, unchangeable knot.
Future Versions
…Will have 3D file exportation in the VRML format. There are no plans to make Knot work under Windows, or on SGI machines.
Also on the planning board: a larger preview window; textured and flaming strands; and batch drawing,
What else is there to know?
If you register the program, I’ll send you the Flaming Pear Omnibus Disk, full of more example knots, power-user documentation, assorted software goodies, and fun. The one registration you get is good for all future version of Knot.
If you’ve designed a knot that you’d like to be in the package, you can e-mail it to me at lloyd@kagi.com. I’ll also send you a code word to banish those reminders and the 30-day timeout: see the About Knot… item under the apple menu for details.
There’s a Knot page on the Web at http://ccn.cs.dal.ca/~aa731/knot.html. It has news, downloadable knots, and links to related sites.
An excellent source of everything 3D - glasses, books, and photographic equipment - is Reel 3D Enterprises, Inc., P.O. Box 2368, Culver City, CA, 90231 USA. They have a free catalog.
You can also mail me your questions, comments, and complaints. If you have difficulty running Knot on your computer, I’d like to know about that: please describe the problem, your machine, how much memory it has, which version of the Mac OS you’re using, and if you can, all your active control panels, extensions, and startup items – that’s a lot of detail, but subtle conflicts can arise among these and cause problems.
Programmers interested in getting pieces of source code can write me; those wanting to know about Kee Nethery’s Kagi Shareware service can write him at kee@kagi.com.
