home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- INTRODUCTION
- ~~~~~~~~~~~~
- This disk contains everything you need to begin experimenting with Genesis.
- It contains both the Genesis program and a seperate program called Flexiparse
- which allows you to define models in a more natural and intuitive way. It
- must be remembered that neither Genesis or Flexiparse where never completed
- and therefore are incomplete and contain some bugs. For instance Genesis
- does not have a screen save facility so I have supplied on this disk a public
- domain program called ScreenX which captures and saves screens to disk. There
- are no instructions with ScreenX but it is very simple and straight forward
- to use.
- Also supplied are three public domain animation utilities called, Dilbm,
- Pilbm and Movie for which instructions are provided. These utilities make
- animations from sequences of images in the Ilbm format. Although this is
- the format supposedly used by the ScreenX program, I found that I tended
- to get garbage results unless I first loaded each of the images into a
- program such as DPaint and re-saved them (This leads me to believe that maybe
- ScreenX doesn't follow the Ilbm standard precisely).
- Genesis is very straight forward to use in itself. The instructions supplied
- on this disk is little more than a command reference, which is really all that
- is required. However the view and perspective control commands can be very
- confusing and are best described by the use of diagrams, however for the
- beginner these can be ingored.
- Flexiparse instructions are also provided. Basically Flexiparse reads in
- an input model file in a Winsom type format and outputs a second model file
- in Genesis format (which is much more basic and more difficult to understand).
- I recommend any beginner should try using both Genesis and Flexiparse.
- Flexiparse however does have a few problems that you should be aware of,
- which are pointed out in the instructions.
- Probably the easiest way to get the hang of writing model files is to
- look at the examples in the models directory. The .CSG files are flexiparse
- files, and the .MODEL files are Genesis files. There are also a number of
- example images on the disk of things I have done on Genesis.
- A note of warning - Some of the example models can take a very long time
- to render, obviously the bigger the file the longer it is likely to take.
- To avoid unwantedly locking up your machine for long periods of time
- (unfortunatley you cant break into Genesis in the middle of rendering), I
- recommend that you stick with low resolution rendering (eg. 256x256 or
- Size 8). Most of the simpler model files at this resolution should only
- take a few minutes. What is more I cannot vouch that all of the example
- model files will produce interesting results as I'm not sure if they were
- all finished.
-