Aladdin 4D (A4D) is now in its 4.0 release and it more than rewards us for the wait. It covers all of the expected bases for professional software in its class, and then some. A4D needs an accelerated Amiga, and it is appreciated best appreciated on an AGA Amiga that has a FireCracker24, a Retina, DCTV, or a Resolver board. I use it on an Amiga 4000 with 32 megs of RAM, a large hard drive, and preview my animation work with Play Inc's DCTV box. Anyone who uses A4D and compares it to anything on other platforms comes away with a deep appreciation for Greg Gorby's work (Greg is the author of Aladdin 4D as well as the head of ADSPEC).
The New A4D 4.0 interface
A4D4 pops up on the screen as expected by users of previous versions, with an XYZ axis centered on the origin and with a rotating ground grid in place below. But that's where the familiarity ends, because there's a lot of new and amazing stuff under the hood this go around. For starters, two movable menus appear over A4D4's editing screen, the "Internal Tool List" and the "External Tool List". There is an important distinction between the two. The Internal Tool List represents command processes that are always resident within the program each time you use it, while the External Tool List represents A4D "plug-ins" that can be expanded as availability and development dictate. The Aladdin newsletter, "Aladdin's Lamp" (a quarterly publication that can be subscribed to for $36.00 a year) always contains at least one new external tool, and sometimes several. External Tools can also be added from other developer sources. The previous listing of External Tools developed by Shead Data Processing may or may not work with 4.0, and Shead has moved over to Windows to develop his own software, so don't expect his appearance inside A4D anytime soon (unless Amiga business picks up). A4D also has a full menu bar of processes and tools accessible at the top of the edit screen. Most of these are familiar to previous users, with choices grouped under the following six headings:
Project: For either loading of previous 3D work or starting a new project environment.
Tools: For accessing "primitive" 2D/3D templates, editing polygonal points, adjusting polygons, and toggling a special "trace mode" for tracing around bitmaps to create polygonal or splined shapes.
View: Previewing, rendering, camera, and screen options.
Polygon: Polygonal attributes, textures, and shading. The controls are also here for adding and animating lights, gases, waves, flares, and fountains (particles). In addition, this is the menu that allows you to access and add 2D text shapes that can be extruded into 3D objects.
Paths: Here is where we can create and assign paths and their respective objects. This menu also lists the controls for poly "deforms", Aladdin's special key-frame and morphing possibilities.
Preferences: The place where various default parameters are set and altered.
Where's the Manual ?
It's all under the hood, Charlie, as far as the upgrade info goes. New users will still get the previous manual, but old or new you'll get all tool info in on-screen "About" text files. These handy descriptors are clear and precise as far as how each tool is to be used, including its variable options.
The new Screen Mode requester
Gone is the simplicity of the older A4D Screen Mode requester. In its place is a large user configurable command set that allows you to choose the screen mode, depth, set the ration of horizontal and vertical for your monitor situation, overscan image size, colors, and external boards all at the same time. Operation is very intuitive, so even a new user shouldn't be too overwhelmed by the number of selections. You can also choose to set the rendering in either or both width and height to double or half. Half gives you quick previews, while double is used once all elements are set to your liking for the final quality render. Rendering defaults remain as in previous versions, with toggles for Light, Fill, Textures, Phong and Gouraud shading, Transparency, Background, and other selections.
Creating 3D objects in A4D4
The initial screen that greets the user when Aladdin first emerges is the Edit Screen. It is here that objects can be imported or sculpted from the ground up. Aladdin allows the user to work with both lines and B-Splined (Bezier) curves in designing the initial templates from which 3D objects are formed. Drawing always begins from an "Attach Point", a point in XYZ space that the user determines as the starting point of a drawing. The polygonal shape is commonly drawn in a flat plane, but there is no reason that you couldn't explore the possibility of drawing in 3D space as well. Once a polygonal template is finished, it can be extruded on any axis (including extrusions that are diminished or augmented over the extruded length) or spun (lathed) on any axis (including alterations in the lathing process that effect the degree of "spin" and the dimension of each segment). Aladdin can also import objects in the VideoScape ASCII format, a standard that is used in many 3D libraries of images available on CD Rom.
Full "path extrusion" (sometimes called "rail extrusion") is also supported. Aladdin takes this process to a new depth by allowing the user to path-extrude both 2D and 3D objects, resulting in some very unique creations. It's easy, for instance, to generate rails for a roller coaster or a spiral staircase using this method. Objects can also be scaled and/or rotated as they are extruded, giving the artist even more variations in unique object creation. An added feature in object creation is the new LOSCut tool, meaning "Line Of Sight Cutter". With this tool, any 2D polygon can be cut by another "cookie cutter" shape for instant hole cutting. Windows and holes in any flat plane are easy to generate with this tool. I've even experimented with cutting holes in a 3D solid and achieved notable results.
Textures
A4D4 has the most extensive texture mapping capabilities of any package on any platform, and unless you have tried all of the other packages as I have, you can't argue me out of this position. You can map any bitmapped texture to any object any number of times with different textures each time, and the A4D library also contains thirty-three separate and infinitely variable "procedural" textures, algorithmic textures that can be altered as to size and palette. Procedural and bitmapped textures can be altered over time by adjusting their parameters, resulting in organic waves and swatches of intriguing color and form. Any texture can be placed on an object in A4D as a standard map, a bump map, a reflection map, a genlocked map, opacity, hardness, illumination maps, or an alpha channel. If that isn't enough, any or all of these options can be combined in any manner over the length of an animated sequence, and can be projected onto the surface as if from a slide projector or wrapped in a number of ways. Textures can also be mapped so that they slide on and off of a selected object over time. Both Phong and Gouraud shading are supported, as well as all needed attribute definitions (reflectivity, wave sensitivity, color, self illumination, hardness, transparency, and more).
Text
A4D accepts all PostScript shapes as polygons, so all PostScripted drawing you might do in a vector drawing program can be imported and extruded in 3D, given texture, and animated. This obviously includes lines of text in any PS font. There is a collection of font libraries on board, with more added from time to time in the newsletter. But now comes the fun. Any shapes you create can be saved as keyboard characters in a font set, so the way is open to have a "font set" that has, for instance, architectural objects or anything else. Font sets can be created and saved according to any customizable need you have now or in the future. The greatest new feature in version 4.0 is that of interactive beveling of 2D text polys that results in the creation of an infinite number of beveled text looks. No other software anywhere offers this possibility, but watch for it to make an appearance in other software when developers get wind of it. This tool also works with input values in an extrusion table, but it is in the interactive domain that the real explorative fun lies. The menu selections work in cooperation with interactive mouse movements so that various constraints can be set beforehand to achieve certain beveled looks. To top it all off, you can create a C-Spline that represents a "router bit", and then apply this to your text.
Animation, Animation, Animation
A4D4 allows you to animate objects as well as the textures mapped to them. Objects generally move along a set "Path", a polygonal shape that determines their movement and position over time. All animation movements in A4D are controlled with C-Splines, Bezier curves that tell an object when to do what and how many times to do it. Coming in a future version will be extensive key-frame animation capabilities in addition to path movement, though the present "deform" routines already give you extensive key-framing options in the present version. A polygonal path is set with its own rotations and scaling potentials, so that any object assigned to it takes on those same parameters. The paths various parameters can be set to specific animation sequences of frames, and "cyclic" (one way animation) or "periodic" (back and forth animations, sometimes called "ping-ponging") are both supported. Movements can be timed from point to point of the polygonal path or set to move evenly according to the overall shape, allowing you to time certain transitions according to the number of points a polygonal path contains, or to negate this altogether. Creating a number of points in one area of a path poly, for instance, can slow down the movement of the object assigned to the path, or this can be handled entire through C-Spline intervention. C-Splines are used in almost every part of A4D4 to fine tune all of the possible movements of an animated object.
The Path Control Requester also allows for another high-end animation capability: Instancing. Instancing might be described as patterned cloning without the penalty of needing extensive disk space to store multiple objects. If you designed a bird and instanced it along a path, you could wind up with an animation that showed a whole flock of cloned individuals. "Deforms" are a unique A4D utility and represent yet another way that 3D objects are set in motion. They can be used to act as standard key frame controls and to contort (morph) the object into a new shape. This can be set to occur over a definitive time period so that an animated "mouth" on a 3D head can be set to open and close.
And Even More New Magic in A4D version 4.0
There are more tools and processes in Aladdin 4D than any single article can touch upon, which is the reason that our continuing series of A4D tutorials remains a vital introduction to the software. Gas objects, for instance, allow for full user specification as to the density, animated components, and colorization (including the application of bitmapped textures and animated sequences of still frames). Brand new to A4D4 is the ability to actually fly through a gas, with all of the visual excitement that you might suppose happens on the way. A4D also contains one of the most complete particle systems available as a resident part of the software, not as an expensive add on utility. Particles are called "Fountains", and the Fountain requester that is used to set up a particle animation may be a bit daunting to the novice animator, but determined exploration leads to mastery. Clouds, smoke, sprays of sparks and lava, water and rain, and many more organic phenomena wait for your touch. Waves, both bump-map like and true 3D contortions, can be applied at will.
And So...
All rendering and computation intensive routines show at least a 200% increase in speed over previous versions. At a price that belies its exhaustive power, Aladdin-4D 4.0 remains an Amiga artists and animators miracle package. I can't believe any serious Amiga artist could deny themselves the opportunity to get lost in the swirls of its seductive pathways. Give yourself a gift. Run, fly, transport yourself to the nearest star station and purchase one of the most wondrous art and animation packages that exists on any digital platform. This is an investment in creativity that you'll never regret.
Aladdin4D 4.0
MSLP: $399.00 (call for upgrade pricing)
ADPEC Programming
PO Box 13
Salem, Ohio 44460
(216) 223-2255
Captions:
Figure 1. The new Screen Mode requester is extremely full featured.
Figure 2. All of these letter "A's" started from the same font. Each was beveled with different settings with the A4D interactive beveling tool.
Figure 3. There is no limits on your creative 3D pursuits with A4D4.
Figure 4. Aladdin 4D has loads of texture mapping capabilities, from its on-board procedural libraries to your choice of imported bitmaps.
