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2007-12-01
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SCULPT AND RAYTRACING
Ed. note: Some information about 3DSCULPT, RAY TRACING, Copyright,
and various other things from the US BBSs, downloaded by Simon
Blears, Sysop of Lightning BBS in Perth.
I have been happily playing with Sculpt 3D for the last two weeks. It is a
wonderful program (already one of my favorites on the Amiga) and Eric Graham
has done a wonderful job of taking something inherently difficult (3D design
on a 2D display) and made it easy to use, but powerful.
I recommend this program to anyone interested in 3D design and ray-tracing.
It is NOT an animation program, but is meant as a modeling and rendering
package.
A companion animation package may be done "in a few months" (Byte-by-Byte rep
at Siggraph). One of the nice things about Sculpt 3D is that it is easy to
learn, and well-documented. The user interface is very well thought out: it
seems to have a minimal number of tools (some important ones seem to be
missing at first), but with use one finds that almost anything can be
accomplished fairly easily. Colors and surface properties of faces are
selectable. Color is set with sliders (no fixed palette), among the surface
properties are dull, shiny, mirror, transparent. Light sources can be
colored. Viewing is easily set up with a target and observer. "Lenses" are
selected to alter viewing of the scene (normal, wide angle, telephoto and
selectable).
Smoothing of planar facets is selectable on a face by face basis. The imaging
modes include wireframe (no hidden line removal, good for fast scene
setting), paint (flat shaded faces, much faster than ray-tracing), snapshot
(ray-tracing without shadowing, HAM output) and photo (shadowing, HAM
output).
Anti-aliasing is also selectable, as well as interlace and high-res (for
non-HAM modes - HAM is 320 only, right?). There are also several image sizes
for very fast ray-tracing just to get a feel for whether lighting and camera
postion are correct. One nice thing is that rendering is a background process,
you can continue to work on a model while it or another is being rendered.
A couple of warnings though. I have found destructive interference between
Sculpt 3D and Morerows, as well as with Screenblanker (from Charlie Heaths
FastFonts package). Morerows seems to confuse it as to the image size of the
rendered image, to the point where if the image is saved and immediately
reloaded, it is shifted to the right and wraps around to the left, and a
requester tells you "Error loading image". It also does not load correctly
into DigiPaint (a great companion, since it allows you to touch up and/or
work with the results of the ray-tracing, since they are in HAM mode). This
is solved by eliminating morerows. Oh well. The interference caused by
screenblanker is very bizarre. In HAM mode large images take a LONG time (I
have had them go overnight easily, especially with mirrors). At some point
screenblanker kicks in, dimming the colors in the screen used for the
ray-traced image. Apparently the HAM algorithm looks at the brightness of the
preceding "real" pixel, decides how bright it wants this one and sets the
color accordingly. The result is that the HAM colors are fine with the screen
dimmed, but when you move the mouse and the colors go back to full brightness,
there are garish bright streaks across the image emanating from the leftmost
"real" pixels. Its kind of neat to see the HAM interaction, if it didn't take
ten hours to do it! So no more screenblanker either... Thanks to Jim Shook
for warning me about morerows...
It is not copy protected. I hope this doesn't mean it will be heavily pirated,
the guy did a hell of a job. One Meg or more is recommended for complex
scenes.
Speaking of copyrights, I got a real shock today at the NCGA CAD expo in
Boston. While passing the Intergraph booth, a friend said "Hey, that looks
familiar!" There was the Juggler, running in a window on an Intergraph
workstation! Is the workstation really an Amiga?! Is it the first Amiga
clone?! No, actually it seems to be another case of a stunning Amiga demo
finding its way onto other machines, this time a very high end workstation.
Is the juggler copyrighted by Eric Graham? It is certainly as readily
identifiable as Red the unicycle. I get the feeling that Mr. Graham is more
likely to be flattered than to break out the lawyers. I could be wrong...
By the way, many Amigans are taking the wrong tack in the "Mac multitasking"
war. Everyone is pointing out that they can do ray-traces in the background
while accomplishing real work (certainly true). But Mac people will not
comprehend this. Ray traced images are just not very impressive on a tiny
black-and-white display. Tell them they can have multiple copies of the
talking moose arguing with each other. This they will appreciate.
--
Carlos Smith
uucp:...!harvard!umb!ileaf!carlos
Bix:carlosmith
---
in article <1015@pixar.UUCP>, banzai@pixar.UUCP (Eric Herrmann) says:
> Keywords: scoobydoobedoo doo-wap Pixar chakachaka
>
> Ok, you say, but a juggling red unicycle, well, _I_ could have thought of
> that. Ok, I say, you could have thought up a talking mouse, too, and made
> a lot more money/fame/whatever-turns-you-on, but someone beat you to it,
> and now you can't sell MM t-shirts, because you'd be ripping someone off,
> and they have more lawyers.
There are lots of animated and/or talking mice (Jerry, Speedy, the Nimh mice,
etc.), in Disney's case, Mickey (or Willy) was maybe the first, and certainly
the most lasting. Like the difference between a DaVinci portrait and others,
maybe. No one has a copyright on talking mice, but there are lots of
copyrights
on SPECIFIC talking mice. That's where the creativity come in. Similarly,
Pixar holds a copyright on Red, but certainly not ALL juggling unicycles.
If it looks like Red, you've violated their copyright. If you've got a
juggling unicycle that's obviously a different character (like Speedy vs.
Mickey), there's no copyright infringement, on the character at least.
> George Benson, apparently, won't allow unapproved pictures of his face to
> be published. His face is copyrighted, and all instances of his face must
> have the (C) stamped on his forehead.
It's generally true that you can't use anyone's face, whether Mickey Mouse,
George Benson, or Jimmy Buffet for that matter, in print, movie, etc. that's
a strictly for-profit deal. Photographers have a form called a "model
release" they have you sign if your face is identifiable in a photo they
take. I'm sure movie folks have a similar thing. However, in a
journalistic context, like an auto accident, I could photograph any of the
above crawling from the burning wreckage without a model release (well, it
might be difficult to get Mickey in such a situation, though you could
certainly get a human in a Mickey costume); that's a feature of the first
amendment that (to my knowledge at least) hasn't been challenged by anyone
other than maybe Sean Penn's fist for quite some time.
>>Time to break down and do the recumbent bike juggling balls before Pixar
>> can move in and get the exclusive copyright on that eh? 1/2 :)
> Oh, incidentally, Pixar is starting a library of ALL POSSIBLE 3 minute
> animations on videotape (VHS and BETA, don't worry). We will generate,
> in sequence, all possible patterns on a screen and then combine all of
> those frames into all possible movies. We then will claim copyright
> on all of this work. Anything you produce thereafter will be OUR
> PROPERTY, and you will never work again. Even the static on your TV
> between stations will be OURS, and we will claim royalties on their
> transmission.
Now come on. Leo's already released the TV static thing to the public domain.
Unless ViaCom's copyrighted it....
> That doesn't follow from our discussion. We were discussing whether or not
> Pixar had a right to keep Leo from distributing his work. Apparently, his
> work falls under our copyright. So, he can't distribute without our
> permission, which it happens that we don't want to give out, so that we
> can exercise our right to distribute through normal channels. Ergo,
> he won't distribute his work. In a few months, you'll see RD with the FOA,
> and in a year or so you can buy it on video tape. Simple enough?
In actuality, no one really knows if Leo's work falls under the Pixar
copyright, as it's never been defended in court. Pixar feels that it does,
and to Leo's credit, he's willing to admit that his work did derive from the
Pixar demo and to voluntarily abide by what Pixar requests without going to
court. As pointed out before, reguardless of any violation, Pixar would
outlast Leo in any court battle.
> I suspect that as a company name, the name Pixar is trademarked, but I
> don't see little (tm)'s anywhere, neither have I heard of any policy
> telling us to use them. I think it would only matter if another
> company put out a machine called a Pixar. Hey, maybe we can sue
> AT&T(tm) for putting out their Pixel machine, which is obviously so
> similar to ours. Then, we can go on to sue Epyx games. This is great!
And I guess whoever first coined the term "Pixel" will go after Pixar.
Gee, only IBM is safe, since they use PELs, not Pixels. Maybe that's
why IBM uses "Fixed Disks" and "30mm Floppies". No kidding here, with
all the goofy copyright claims I've heard going around, maybe IBM thinks
only they have free use of that name. I think maybe the next Amiga will
have TEBLs (Tiny Electronic Blips of Light) instead of Pixels, 3.0 cm
PSEDMs (Plastic Shelled Electro-magnetic Data Medium) instead of 3.5"
floppy disks, and Mongo Disks instead of Hard or Fixed disks....
> Just say YES!Eric Herrmann ucbvax!pixar!banzai
--
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga Usenet: {ihnp4|caip|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh
"The A2000 Guy" PLINK : D-DAVE H BIX : hazy
"God, I wish I was sailing again"-Jimmy Buffett, Dave Haynie
END OF 3DSCULPT.USENET