TIPS AND TRICKS Advice to Home Space(TM) Builders ------------------- * Think Small * Plan Ahead * Save your work * Leave space for the ceiling and floor * Carving is better than adding boxes * Building a multilevel structure * Faces are one-sided surfaces * Select the appropriate tile size for textures * Use brightness to create realistic lighting effects * Resizing pictures * Speed up the preview of images * Drag-and-Drop pictures * Copy textures, pictures, and colors * Linking to URLs * Convert images to compressed formats * Texture rendering in VRML browsers * Publishing your Home Spaces on the Web * Using on-line audio ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Virtual Home Space Builder(TM) 1.1 is the first product on the consumer market for building 3D multimedia environments and 3D multimedia World Wide Web pages. Its easy-to-use and powerful user interface, together with unlimited opportunities to include your own personal art, sound, and video, make VHSB 1.1 the ultimate Internet creativity tool for adults and kids of all ages. In what follows, we provide several recommendations that will make your Home Space Building more efficient and fun. 1. Think small. Start with simple 3D Spaces. Gradually add complexity and new features. Do not attempt to create a big city as your first project. Instead, start by building simple rooms, varying the size and placement of doors and windows. Then you can surround your buildings with walls, and create multilevel constructions. When you feel that you have mastered some simple building skills, start decorating your 3D Spaces. 2. Plan Ahead. We recommend that you first design your 3D Space in your mind. Then, you can decide in advance what sequence of building steps is best. Soon, you will automatically use these basic building patterns and start to really improvise. 3. Save your work. Don't forget to save your work periodically in MUS format. Later, when your 3D Space is complete, use the Copy All option. This saves your MUS file, and all the media files that your MUS file references, to the same directory and creates a Distribution Package for your 3D Space. 4. Leave space for the ceiling and floor. When building a simple room, follow these three steps: (a) Add a Box in Plane Builder (b) Adjust the laths of the Height Scale to leave space for the ceiling and floor (c) Carve-out a smaller box inside the first one, using Remove Box (Scissors) Don't forget the step (b)! Otherwise, your "room" will have neither floor nor ceiling. 5. Carving is better than adding boxes. Carving-out a box to create a room is better than placing four adjacent walls. If you forget to leave space for the floor or/and ceiling of the room, it is better to press the Undo button on the Builder toolbox and repeat your work than to add boxes for the floor and ceiling on the top and bottom. To make a table in your room: (a) Make a box of the needed height (Add Box) (b) Adjust the Height Scale to leave space for the desktop (c) Cut two crosswise boxes in the center (this will create a table with its legs aligned to the corners); make sure that the legs are thick enough (d) Cut four narrow boxes from the edges to "shift" legs to the center 6. Building a multilevel structure. To add a level to your building, click on a wall. Two red marks to the left of Height Scale will show the height of the top and bottom edges of the wall. Adjust the laths of the Height Scale so that the lower lath touches the upper edge of the wall, and the distance between laths fits the height of the new level. Then, add the box of needed size to create the next-higher level of your building. 7. Faces are one-sided surfaces. If you build your room using faces, with the Draw Face tool, don't forget that faces are one-sided surfaces; to make them visible from both sides, you have to draw them two times, clockwise and counter-clockwise. 8. Select the appropriate tile size for textures. By default, textures are tiled with the tile size 0.5 (in the same relative size units as your walls). For some textures with geometric decor, this tile size might be too small for your particular 3D Space. Press the Details button ('D' in the Chooser window) and change texture width and height in the Wallpaper Detail dialog box or suppress tiling by clearing the Tile checkbox. 9. Use brightness to create realistic lighting effects. In order to make your room or gallery look more realistic, you can put the same texture on adjacent walls, changing only its brightness. Here is how you can do this: (a) Hang a texture on the wall as a picture (b) Open the True Image window (click on the Magnifier) (c) Click on the Change Image Attribute tool in the toolbar of the True Image window, then change the brightness of the texture (d) Save the texture under the different name Repeat these steps to prepare as many textures with altered brightness as you need. In order to load new textures in the Chooser window, you will have to reselect the Wallpaper directory, and then to return to the original directory (for faster loading, textures from the current directory are kept in memory and are not reloaded unless the directory is changed). Put the textures with altered brightness on the adjacent walls. 10. Resizing pictures. When resizing a picture with Move/Resize tool (double-sided arrow in the Walker toolbox), you have to grab it on the right upper corner and pull it diagonally. If you are too far from the picture, your "target" might be too small, and resizing could be difficult. In order to quickly resize the picture, click on the picture, then click on the View Object tool (target in the upper toolbar of the 3D Space window) to get close to the picture, then grab it by the upper right corner, and resize. By default, pictures resize proportionally. If you want to change this, clear the Keep Aspect Ratio While Resizing Pictures checkbox in the Advanced Settings dialog box. 11. Speed up the preview of images. When there are many textures and/or pictures in the directories you are using to decorate your Home Space, it takes more time to display images in the Chooser window when switching between these directories. To speed up this process, select Settings in the 3D Space Window Menu, and check the Fast Chooser Preview of Images checkbox. 12. Drag-and-Drop pictures. You can drag-and-drop pictures onto the walls of your Home Spaces not only from the Chooser window, but also directly from the File Manager or Windows 95 File Folders. 13. Copy textures, pictures, and colors. You can easily copy textures, pictures, and colors already present in your Home Space from one location to another using Ctrl-Click/Shift-Click operations. Point the cursor in the 3D Space on a wall, and press the Ctrl key. The basket icon with an incoming arrow will appear indicating the copy mode. Holding the Ctrl key, locate the texture/picture you need and click with the mouse. Your texture/picture/color is copied to the clipboard. Move cursor to the surface where you want to have a copy of the texture (picture, color), and press Shift-Left Mouse to paste from the clipboard. 14. Linking to URLs. You can attach Web links (URLs) to any picture, album or movie. Double click on the picture to link to the attached URL. This attachment works only with Netscape Navigator(TM) 1.1 and 2.0. With Netscape 1.1, the browser window pops up on the screen and displays the Web page with the appropriate URL. With Netscape 2.0, the browser window remains under the VHSB windows, unless it was previously minimized. With Windows, versions 3.1, 3.11, 95, you do not need to launch Netscape before you link to the URL from your Home Space, this happens automatically; with Windows NT, you need to do this. You can even include the Link to URL function in the Multifunction list attached to a picture. In this case, linking to the URL will occur synchronously, and execution of the Multifunction list will be continued whether or not the link was successful. 15. Convert images to compressed formats. When building your 3D Web page in VRML format, keep in mind that some VRML browsers understand only GIF and JPEG formats. Make sure that all the textures and pictures used in your Home Space are converted to these formats (use graphics packages such as LView or Paint Shop or converters such as Alchemy) before you export it to VRML. Using compressed graphics formats, such as JPEG, you can save much space on the server and download time for your Web visitors. 16. Texture rendering in VRML browsers. Some popular VRML browsers have problems with rendering textures. If textures on the walls/ceilings of your VRML scene are distorted, the error is probably not in VRML export, but, more likely, with the browser itself. If the height of your texture exceeds its width, some VRML browsers consider this as an indication that the texture is animated; this may result in the unexpected "blinking" of textures. The easiest way to cope with this is to resize the texture (make it square) and put it on the same walls before exporting to VRML. 17. Publishing your Home Spaces on the Web. You can publish your Home Spaces on the Web in VRML format or in MUS format. The difference is both in features and in the way Web surfers can download your space. With VRML publishing, we advise that you: (a) Create a new directory (b) Use Copy All with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (*.WRL) option to save your VRML file and all its media files into this directory. (c) Do NOT rewrite this file when exiting VHSB (respond "NO" to the corresponding VHSB message) (d) Upload the whole directory to a Web site (HTTP server) If a VRML browser is pointed to your .WRL file, it will download it together with textures, but it will not understand any other media files, so your albums, movies, video and sound files cannot be accessed in VRML format (however, you can retain sound by using RealAudio(TM), see below). Floor plans, sliding textures, walking shows and most of attachments, including text attachments, are also not supported by the VRML 1.0 standard. With publishing in the MUS format, you can either - provide a compressed file for your clients to download and view scenes with a standalone VHSB Viewer(TM) or - publish MUS file on the Web to view it with Virtual Space Viewer Plug-in for Netscape 2.0. To publish a compressed file, please do the following: (a) Copy All your Home Space into a new directory (b) Do NOT rewrite this file when exiting VHSB (respond "NO" to the corresponding VHSB message) (c) Compress all files in the directory into a single archive file (we recommend creating a self-extracting archive) (d) Upload the self-extracting archive to a Web site When a Web browser (non-VRML) is pointed to such an archive, it downloads the archive to the user's computer. Then the user decompresses the file simply by double-clicking it, launches a Viewer, and loads MUS file. The VHSB Viewer is free for unlimited redistribution: you can add the VHSB Viewer to your archive, put it separately on your Web page or link to ParaGraph's or any other Web site that mirrors this viewer for free distribution. To publish MUS files to view them with Virtual Space Viewer Plug- in for Netscape 2.0, you need to: (a) Create a new directory (b) Copy All your MUS file and its media files into this directory. (c) Do NOT rewrite this file when exiting VHSB (respond "NO" to the corresponding VHSB message) (d) Upload the whole directory to a Web site (HTTP server) (e) Contact your Web site administrator to add new MIME type x-worlds/x-d96 with extensions d96,mus to the server (otherwise, MUS files will come up to your clients as text) When Netscape 2.0 is pointed to such MUS file, it launches the Virtual Space Viewer Plug-in and loads the scene. The Virtual Space Viewer Plug-in can be downloaded for free from ParaGraph's Web site and is free for unlimited redistribution. With Netscape 2.0, you can also embed Home Spaces both in VRML and in MUS formats, inside HTML documents. 18. Using on-line audio. Unlike WAV sound files that can be recorded and played by VHSB 1.0, on-line audio formats such as RealAudio(TM), TrueSpeech(R), ToolVox, IWave are helpful: (a) To decrease bandwidth requirements (b) To add sound to VRML Home Spaces In order to attach on-line audio files located on the Web to your pictures, you have to use the Link to URL function with the URLs of remote audio files. In this case, you need not transfer audio files with the Distribution Copy of your Home Space. To actually listen to the sound, one needs to download free audio player from the corresponding Web site: - http://www.realaudio.com - RealAudio(TM), - http://www.dspg.com/allplyr.htm - TrueSpeech(R), - http://www.voxware.com/download.htm - ToolVox - http://www.vocaltec.com - IWave, and to install the Player. In this case, double clicking on a picture with the attached URL of an on-line audio file will launch the Player and play the "streamed" sound file. Taking into account that WAV files are very big and have to be downloaded completely, this can save a lot of downloading time. To convert your own WAV files to on-line audio formats, you have to download and install the corresponding audio recorder. Note: In order for your RealAudio files to be "visible" on the Web, you have to put them in the domain of some RealAudio Server (currently, this server is not free).