Amiga Plus 1995 #5 & #6

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+======================================================================+ | Imagine Mailing List | | FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | Compiled By | | Gabriele Scibilia | | Michael B. Comet | | Steve Mund | | Mark Oldfield | | Dave Wickard | +======================================================================+ This is the Frequently Asked Questions posting for the Imagine Mailing list. This posting is sent every so often to answer general questions that users of the 3D rendering software, Imagine by Impulse Inc. may have. It is aimed toward all users, especially newcomers to the program. If you find any errors or have answers to other frequently asked questions that you would like to have included in this posting, please send e-mail to: imlfaq@email.eag.unisysgsg.com (FAQ List). - Gabriele S. ======================================================================== Last Update : June 24, 1995 Saturday Issue Number : 7 What's New : Section 1, No 1. Added more magazines and archive info, added bulletin boards list, added models and textures libraries. Section 2, No 18. Help with bones Section 2, No 19. Halo around light Section 2, No 20. Reflective object inside a glass tube Section 2, No 21. Slice function tips Section 2, No 22. Undersea fog spotlight Section 2, No 23. How can I create a disco ball? Section 2, No 24. Modeling candle flame Section 6, No 7. Sway FX Section 7, No 15. Fog: the 'cancel' problem Section 8, No 9. Sludge Attribute using default Imagine 2.9 (or higher) textures Section 8, No 10. Marble (Imagine 2.0 or high) Section 8, No 11. Starfield (Imagine 2.9 or high) Section 8, No 12. Photon Torpedo (Imagine 2.9 or high) Section 8, No 13. Spaceship shield Attribute (Imagine 2.9 and higher) Section 9, No 4. Hex edit for high res video change Section 9, No 6. Motion blur Section 9, No 7. 3D stereograms Section 9, No 8. Working with bitmaps ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS: ========= SECTION 1 - Support Products/Sites 1] Imagine related: References/Help Books/Magazines/ftp sites, BBSes, Models/Textures (pics) materials. 2] How do I reach Impulse? 3] What is the Imagine Mailing List and how to get it? SECTION 2 - Modeling and Detail Editor 1] How do I brushmap a ground plane? 2] How do I make glass? 3] The Slice command doesn't work or gives me errors. 4] How can I make a room so that the walls don't have cracks? 5] When I select a group of points in the DETAIL editor, all I can do is drag them...not ROTATE or SCALE interactively. 6] List of common Index of Refractions 7] How do you make mirrors? 8] How do I make "metals" and what are some good gold attributes? 9] Is there a quick way to add faces to my object without using the Slice command? 10] How do I make "wireframe" objects? 11] How can I create seashells? 12] May I use more than four textures in Imagine v2.0? 13] How do I make realistic clouds? 14] How do I create visible light beams? 15] How can I simulate underwater ambient? 16] Does anyone have suggestions for emulating soft shadows? 17] Can I create 2d/3d smoke effects? How? 18] How Bones works (by Lesk and Mark Decker)? 19] Halo around light sources. 20] Can a reflective object inside a glass tube render properly? 21] Help with Slice function, By J. Goldman. 22] Fog object and global fog: undersea fog spotlight. 23] Disco ball effect: how simulate some sort of radiosity. 24] How can I create a candle flame? SECTION 3 - Forms Editor 1] After a Forms Editor object is loaded into the Detail Editor and manipulated, it won't reload into the Forms Editor. SECTION 4 - Cycle Editor 1] I made this animation sequence in the Cycle editor, but when I set it up in the stage/action editors, the motion of the overall object isn't there! SECTION 5 - Spline Editor 1] I tried to import a Postscript font but I got a "Vector not found" error. What does this mean? SECTION 6 - Animation, Stage Editor and Action Editor 1] Even though I move an Object/Camera/Light to a new POSITION/ALIGNMENT/SIZE in the STAGE editor, Imagine seems to 'forget' what I did! 2] How do I use the Grow Effect? 3] How do I use the Tumble Effect? 4] How do you get something to roll (at the right speed!) while following a path? 5] When I move a Tracked Camera in the STAGE editor, it doesn't realign and draw the Perspective view correctly! 6] When I increase the number of frames in an animation I find my scene gets mangled in the first frame. Why? 7] How do I use the Sway Effect? SECTION 7 - Rendering and the Project Editor 1] Why do objects render fine in Scanline, but disappear in Trace? 2] I have a problem with Filtered objects/fog and the Global Backdrop! 3] My animation frames look fine, but when animated, they have the "crawly" effect. 4] What situations, parameters, attribute values, etc. require the most trace rendering time? 5] How do I get rid of the "Jaggies?" 6] How can I figure out pixel aspect for a given resolution? 7] When making a disco ball effect, will a SPHERICAL light set at 255 be bright enough to cause visible spots on the surfaces in a scene? 8] How long should it take to do a full trace picture with perhaps one transparent glass on a Amiga 3000/25? Is 4.5 hrs too much? 9] Is there any particular format that Imagine prefers? Ham? 32 Color? EHB? 24 bit 1000 x 1000? 10] I would like to use conical light sources with my rendering, is there anyway "see"in wireframe where the light will fall? 11] How important is lighting for a rendering, and is there any "preset" method used to get good results? 12] Help with Fog, How do I use it and how does it work? 13] How can I render in Widescreen/Letterbox format? 14] I selected Spheres for my particle object, but all I get is a polygonal shape! 15] Help with Fog: if you place a fog object inside another, they cancel out, why? SECTION 8 - Essence Settings and Other Attributes 1] Electrical Arc (Essence) 2] Veined Marble (Essence) 3] Rough marble/rock (Essence) 4] Soap Bubble (Imagine 2.0 and higher) 5] Spaceship Panels (Imagine 2.9 and higher) 6] Bark, mountain, stone effects (Imagine 2.9 and higher) 7] Solar corona (Essence) 8] Solar corona (Imagine 2.9 and higher) 9] Sludge (Imagine 2.9 and higher) 10] Marble (Imagine 2.0 and higher) 11] Starfield (Imagine 2.9 and higher) 12] Photon Torpedo (Imagine 2.9 and higher) 13] Spaceship shield (Imagine 2.9 and higher) SECTION 9 - Miscellaneous 1] What the heck is BTW, IMO and other weird abbreviations... 2] Rendering and refresh times are MUCH too slow, even with an accelerator. Are there any Basic tricks or hints to help? 3] How long will before my renderings aren't ugly anymore? 4] Hex edit for Imagine - High Res video mode change Amiga only 5] What are Particles? 6] Everything about motion blur, By Mark Allan Fox 7] 3D stereograms, By Gary Beeton 8] Working with bitmaps, By Douglas Smith CLOSING - Closing statements and Disclaimer ======================================================================== SECTION 1 - Support Products/Sites ======================================================================== 1] Imagine related: References/Help Books/Magzines/ftp sites. REFERENCES AND HELP BOOKS: "Imagine 2.0 User Manual", Impulse Inc, 1992. (Yes....read the manual!) "The Imagine Companion", David Duberman, Motion Blur Publishing, 1991 "Understanding Imagine 2.0", Steven Worley, Apex Software Publishing, 1992. "3D Modeling Lab", Philip Shaddock, The Waite Group Press, ISBN 1-878739-52-2, 1994. MAGAZINES: These are some good graphics magazines, most of which focus on the Amiga computer. If anyone has some other suggestions please post them to the FAQ list! "Amazing Computing for the Commodore Amiga" aka "Amazing Amiga" P.O. Box 2140 Fall River, MA 02722-9969 USA (508) 678 - 4200 (800) 345 - 3360 (508) 675 - 6002 (FAX) (A general Amiga computer magazine, focusing more on how to, hints and tips, programming, reviews of software and hardware(less ads and more meat than AW)) "Amiga Video/Graphics Magazine" (formerly AVID) 365 Victor Street Suite "H" Salinas, CA 93907 (408) 758 - 9386 (408) 758 - 1744 (FAX) (A general Amiga computer magazine, focusing on both hardware, software, utilities and graphics) "Amiga World" P.O Box 595 Mt Morris, IL 61054-7900 (800) 827 - 0877 (815) 734 - 1109 (A general Amiga computer magazine, focusing on both hardware, software, utilities and graphics) "AV Video" 701 Westchester Ave White Plains, NY 10604 (800) 800 - 5474 (914) 328 - 9157 (914) 328 - 9093 (FAX) (An audio/video and computer magazine. Has articles about all types of video and graphics applications including the Amiga and Video Toaster) "Computer Artists" P.O. Box 2649 Tulsa, OK 74101-9632 (A magazine specifically for computer artists. Articles on software and methods from Amigas, PC's and MAC's) "Computer Graphics World" P.O Box 122 Tulsa, OK 74101-9845 (800) 443 - 6632 (918) 835 - 3161 ext. 400 (918) 831 - 9497 (FAX) (A general computer graphics magazine focusing on the latest technology from PC's to SGI's) "Video Toaster User" 21611 Stevens Creek Blvd. AVID Pubblications, Cupertino, CA 95014 273 N. Mathilda, Sunnyvale, (800) 322 - 2834 CA 94086, USA (A magazine focusing specifically on NewTeks Video Toaster device. Nothing related to Imagine, but some more neat pictures to look at!) "Computer Gazette" IHT Gruppo Editoriale S.r.l. Via Monte Napoleone, 9 - 20121 Milano (39) 02 - 895921 "Scientific Amigan" Dept AZ, POB 60685, Savannah, GA 31420-0685, USA "Geoffrey William's Computer Artists & Videographer Report" aka "The CAV Report" CBP, 1833 Verdugo Vista Drive, Glendale, CA 90218 USA (818) 2409845 USA (818) 2409845 (FAX) "XPress" aka "The Amiga CAD Newsletter" 8231 NE Paulanna Lane, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110, USA "Nonlinear Nonsense" Cedar Software, PO Box 4495, Wolcott, VT 05680 USA (802) 8885275 USA (802) 8883009 (FAX) "3D Artist" Columbine Inc. PO Box 4787, Santa Fe, NM 87502-4787 USA (505) 9823532 USA (505) 8206929 (FAX) (Magazine for users of 3D Studio, Lightwave 3D, Topas and other popular programs including low-cost programs. Topics includes modeling, lighting, camera work, character animation, sound, and video) "Amigator" PO Box 26026, Nepean, Ontario, Canada K2H 9RO FTP SITES: There is now a new ftp site set up for Imagine related items including pictures, animations, tutorials, objects, and help files such as previous postings from the list, and this FAQ at: wuarchive.wustl.edu in the /systems/amiga/boing/video/imagine Under this directory are the following sub-directories: art archive anims objects Note: New files cannot be sent directly here. Instead send any new files you wish to upload into the same directory: /systems/amiga/boing/incoming/imagine Files here will/should eventually get moved to the proper location by the ftp site administrator. Don't forget to send a text file explaining the data you uploaded, and where it should be placed. The archives are kept by Nik Vukovljak. They can be found in the archive subdirectory listed above, and in the incoming/imagine directory. New archives may also be posted to aminet. Aminet can be reached on the same FTP site (ftp.wustl.edu) under /systems/amiga/aminet. Numerous other sites also have the aminet directories. MODELS/TEXTURES LIBRARY: Imagination Works 644 N. Santa Cruz avenue, Suite 12, Los Gatos, CA 95030 USA (408) 3545067 Antigravity Products 456 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90402 USA (310) 3936650 USA (310) 5766383 (FAX) Visual Inspirations 809 West Hollywood, Tampa, FL 33604 USA (813) 9356410 USA (813) 9356513 (BBS) View Point Data Labs 625 S. State street, Orem, UT 84058 USA (801) 2293000 USA (801) 2293000 (FAX) Micro R&D P.O. Box 130, 721 "O" Street, Loup City, NE 68853 USA (308) 7451246 Syndesis Corporation 235 South Main Street, Jefferson, WI 53549 USA (414) 6745200 USA (414) 6746363 (FAX) syndesis@beta.inc.net Modern Medium 580 West 8th. avenue Eugene, OR 97401 USA (503) 3434281 USA (503) 3434325 AniGraF/X PO Box 1715, Jacksonville, OR 97530 USA (503) 7726525 USA (503) 8570616 VRS Media 7116 SW 47 Street, Miami, FL 33155 USA (305) 6675005 Richard & Esther Shapiro Entertainment Inc. 335, North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210 USA (512) 3281454 USA (512) 3281455 Cybergraf Synthiotics PO Box 5851, Hanover Center, Wilmington, NC 28403-0879 USA (910) 7625776 Digital Wisdom Box 2070, Tappahannock, VA 22560 USA (804) 7580670 USA (804) 7584512 Allegro New Media 387 Passaic Ave Fairfield, NJ. 07004 201-808-1992 BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS: New Horizons Stefano Epifani ITA (39) 06-88640190 ITA (39) 06-8862660 3000+ Amiga BBS William Molducci ITA (39) 0544-451764 Digital Pixel USA (001) 416-2981487 Studio Amiga BBS USA (001) 817-5572111 USA (001) 817-5572112 Toaster BBS USA (001) 616-7912109 The Graphics Alternative USA (001) 510-5242780 The Intersection BBS USA (001) 410-7425452 Lightwaved BBS USA (001) 510-2280886 Vertech Design's Graphic Connection USA (001) 503-5918412 You Can Call Me Ray USA (001) 708-358611 Pisquare USA (001) 301-7259080 The New Graphics BBS USA (001) 908-4690049 GraFX Haus BBS USA (001) 805-6831388 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2] How do I reach Impulse? Impulse Inc. 8416 Xerxes ave. North Brooklyn Park, Minnesota 55444 USA (612) 425-0557 (800) 328-0184 FAX: (612) 425-0701 Compuserve: 76004,1767 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3] What is the Imagine Mailing List and how to get it (From the Imagine Mailing List Sysop, Dave Wickard) The Imagine Mailing List is a wide variety of Amiga computer artists sharing friendship and knowledge. The main thrust of the List is the Imagine renderer. Subjects discussed though have varied widely. There are discussions of Imagine and it's competitors, Imagine wish lists for future versions, 3D rendering principles in general, single frame recording techniques and many more. With first day users thru battled scarred veterans :-) there is someone at your level of knowledge on the List. We are always glad to see questions from every level of user. So often a simple and seemingly embarrassingly easy question will lead to an interesting comment on a related topic. New products, both hardware AND software, are discussed as to their relationship with Imagine and Amiga 3D rendering. Names of Amiga luminaries dot the list, and often join in to lend their insights without the usual "noise" of a USENET newsgroup. There are over 300 individual sites receiving the Imagine Mailing List, and they include many networks, BBS systems, user groups, and individual computer artists from literally around the globe. We share one thing. Interest in each other's work with Imagine. YOU can get the Imagine Mailing List. All you need is access to Internet mail. Simply mail to the following address: imagine-request@email.eag.unisysgsg.com and in your subject line, enter the word "subscribe". If you are reading this from a Commercial System, ask the Amiga Coordinator to set up an Imagine Mailing List area that everyone can read. ======================================================================== SECTION 2 - Modeling and Detail Editor ======================================================================== 1] How do I brushmap a ground plane? The problem with brushmapping a ground plane is that the ground itself is off 90 degrees in relation to its' axis for proper brush placement. (Add a primitive plane, a ground and compare them). The following will properly set a ground wrap: 1) Add a ground object, select it, go into attributes, select a brush to use. 2) You will now be in a requestor for the type of brushmap and placement etc... 3) Select TRANSFORM AXIS 4) Click on ALIGNMENT and set X = -90. Leave Y and Z at 0 5) Click on SIZE and leave X = +640. Set Y = +2, Z = +400 6) Click on POSITION and Leave X = -320, Y = -200. Set Z = +1 7) Click on PERFORM. 8) If you want the brushmap to repeat forever click REPEAT. 9) Click OKAY. Your brushmap will now be placed correctly. You can of course resize it on the X/Z axis if you wish for scaling purposes. Basically step 4 re-rotated the brush axis properly and 5 and 6 fixed the size and position which Imagine screws up since it thinks it's brushmapping on the other axis. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2] How do I make glass? You can use the following Attribute setting for a default glass: RED GREEN BLUE VALUE COLOR 0 0 0 * REFLECT 0 0 0 * FILTER 255 255 255 * SPECULAR 255 255 255 * DITHERING * * * 255 HARDNESS * * * 255 ROUGHNESS * * * 0 SHININESS * * * 0 (Very important see below!) PHONG = ON INDEX = 1.50 FOG LENGTH = 0.00 This should give you glass. One thing many people get confused by is: 1) Shininess must be set to ZERO. If you set this to anything but 0, the FILTER setting will not work. This is just the way Imagine works since FILTER usage assumes shininess automatically. 2) No background. To get glass, you need surroundings. If you render a glass cup on a pure black screen, you'll probably just see the highlights. Adding global colors for Scanline and Ray Trace will give your object something to refract. 3) Ray Trace. To get refraction of surrounding objects exactly, you need to Trace, though scanline WILL approximate refractivity. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3] The Slice command doesn't work or gives me errors. Due to the complexity of doing a 3D slice, sometimes Imagine gives errors, or actually crashes during this operation. Things to do if you plan on using this function are: 1) Save _ALL_ currently loaded object BEFORE trying to slice. 2) If you get an error, move one of the objects slightly and try again. Moving one of them may yield a working slice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4] I'm making a house which has many rooms and thus many walls, what is the best way of adding walls to the house so that they leave no cracks in the corners ? Three possible methods --- 1. You can design your walls to be nice dimensions like 100 or 1024 instead of 383.38. Place your axis at the corner of each wall. Then, to get seamless joints, use "snap to grid" in the project editor which will instantly adjust your walls to a perfect fit (If wall lengths are multiples of the grid line spacing). 2. Create a 2D outline of the floorplan and extrude it up. Then simply pop a ceiling and floor on it. The floorplan could be created either in Imagine or even a paint program and then auto-traced. This means you will have to bust up a few polygons to add the windows and doors, but that is a minor task if you have a complex floorplan. 3. A cheesy option is to make your walls too big. Then INTERSECT them. You get a mess BEHIND the wall, but if you don't look there, you'll never see it. wall 1 | ------------------+-- \|/ | bug-eyed O.O | wall 2 monster v | | camera X ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5] When I select a group of points in the DETAIL editor, all I can do is drag them... it doesn't let me ROTATE or SCALE that clump of selected points. Imagine will let you move selected points, as well as rotate and scale them. The limitation is that you cannot do this interactively in Version 1.1 or earlier by using the mouse: The Transform command does the manipulation. The picked points can be translated, scaled, rotated, and positioned INDEPENDENTLY of the rest of the object. Rotations and scalings all use the object's axis a reference point. Absolute positioning will move the FIRST point you pick to the location you choose, and the rest of the picked points will be translated an equal amount. Interactive dragging is accomplished using the "drag points" mode. Note: Versions 2.0 and later support interactive point editing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6] List of common Index of Refractions (and not so common too!) (All items except Vacuum are in alphabetical order) (STP = Standard Temperature and Pressure) MATERIAL Index ------------------------------------- Vacuum ...................... 1.00000 (exactly) Air (STP).................... 1.00029 Acetone ..................... 1.36 Alcohol ..................... 1.329 Amorphous Selenium .......... 2.92 Calspar1 .................... 1.66 Calspar2 .................... 1.486 Carbon Disulfide ............ 1.63 Chromium Oxide .............. 2.705 Copper Oxide ................ 2.705 Crown Glass ................. 1.52 Crystal ..................... 2.00 Diamond ..................... 2.417 Emerald ..................... 1.57 Ethyl Alcohol ............... 1.36 Flourite .................... 1.434 Fused Quartz ................ 1.46 Heaviest Flint Glass ........ 1.89 Heavy Flint Glass ........... 1.65 Glass ....................... 1.5 Ice ......................... 1.309 Iodine Crystal .............. 3.34 Lapis Lazuli ................ 1.61 Light Flint Glass ........... 1.575 Liquid Carbon Dioxide ....... 1.20 Polystyrene ................. 1.55 Quartz 1 .................... 1.644 Quartz 2 .................... 1.553 Ruby ........................ 1.77 Sapphire .................... 1.77 Sodium Chloride (Salt) 1 .... 1.544 Sodium Chloride (Salt) 2 .... 1.644 Sugar Solution (30%) ........ 1.38 Sugar Solution (80%) ........ 1.49 Topaz ....................... 1.61 Water (20 C) ................ 1.333 Zinc Crown Glass ............ 1.517 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7] How do you make mirrors? The trick with mirrors (or especially chrome-like objects) is not setting the attributes of the mirror correctly, but making sure that the environment is set up so something will be reflected into the camera. If a mirror is TOO reflective, the mirror can actually become invisible! This is because the mirror's own flat glass/metal flat coloring is overwhelmed by all the reflected light. You see a PERFECT reflected image, so the object itself isn't shown. This is especially true with flat mirrors. Some attributes that give a nice mirror polish: RED GREEN BLUE VALUE COLOR 150 150 150 * REFLECT 200 200 210 * (a bit of a blue tint) FILTER 0 0 0 * SPECULAR 255 255 255 * DITHERING * * * 255 HARDNESS * * * 255 ROUGHNESS * * * 0 SHININESS * * * 0 PHONG = ON INDEX = 1.00 FOG LENGTH = 0.00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8] How do I make "metals" and what are some good gold attributes? One thing you can do to make your objects look more like metal is to give them a specular setting close to the main color of the object, but higher in intensity. One mistake is to often make the specular a pure white. This makes objects look more like plastic than metal. For example, if you are trying to make gold, don't make the specular pure white, but try a bright yellow or yellow/orange creame color. Another problem is that many metals reflect the world. For example a chrome ball is pretty much just a shiny mirror. Thus, if you want to make realistic metals you will need to at least simulate reflection. This can be done by adding a global reflect map, doing a true ray trace or even just setting sky colors in the stage editor. You can use the following Attribute setting for a default gold: RED GREEN BLUE VALUE COLOR 205 205 80 * REFLECT 180 160 125 * FILTER 0 0 0 * SPECULAR 255 255 160 * DITHERING * * * 255 HARDNESS * * * 255 ROUGHNESS * * * 0 SHININESS * * * 0 PHONG = ON INDEX = 1.00 FOG LENGTH = 0.00 This should give you something close to gold. Note that the reflect values are fairly high. You may wish to lower them to see how it would look if you don't have anything to reflect etc... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9] Is there a quick way to add faces to my object without using the Slice command? Here is a neat trick to add faces. This method works best with an object that is basially concave (such as a circle). 1] Make the outline of your object, i.e.: points and edges. 2] Extrude the object a distance away. 3] Pick all the points that were just made...i.e.: The ones that now comprise the back face. Using Bounding box selection would probably be helpful. 4] Choose Join! 5] Translate the now 1 pt back on the Y axis by the distance you extruded from, and position the point somewhere in the center of the object. The object is now a solid faced object with all faces connected to one point on the center, just like the primitive disk object. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 10] How do I make "wireframe" objects? There are at least two methods to simulate wireframe objects using Imagine (version 2.9 or higher), the first is memory expensive, it uses the Latticize function, the second uses new Death Star textures family (again, only 2.9 or higher): - Use the Latticize function and enter a value of about -0.05 in the requester. This will turn your entire object into a wire- frame, made up form narrow tubes. If you just want part of the object wireframed, then select the edges you want in Pick Edges mode and perform the Lattice from there. This adds a lot of extra polygons though, a sample primitive sphere (24x12 sections) needs 14,608 bytes before, 92,224 bytes after the Latticize function. Here's another way for creating the wireframe with square or rectangular wireframe openings: - Set the objects filter values to 255, 255, 255. Apply one of the Death Star family of textures to the object. Set the Bevel Filter value to 0 (zero). What you get is the bevel portion of the texture showing only. Voila! "Wireframe". Of course, you may or may not want to adjust the bevel width and the bevel slope. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 11] How can I create seashells? Tutorial by Gabriele Scibilia: The following 10 steps show how obtain a scallop sea-shell (or something similar to it!): - Add axis - Add lines like this (use front view): z __ ... | ... __ .__| |__| +---x |__| |__. -130 .... 0 .... 130 - Invoke the extrude req: to length 200 scale x 0.5 sections 10 - Add a primitive tube: radius 120 - Scale down the tube: 70% only y (shift-y) - Adjust the tube position to cut the extruded shape like this: _________ / \ /\ /\ top view /__\_______/__\ | | cutted cutted - Select extruded shape then tube and slice them - Delete resulting objs except the 2 'planes' ('planes' should be part.2 and part.3): _________ part.2 /---------\ and this top view _________ / \ part.3 / \ \_ _/ --------- - Select first part.2 and then part.3, join them - Invoke mold req and conform to sphere: sphere radius 100 object radius 320 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 12] May I use more than four textures in Imagine v2.0? Yes and no, to use more than four textures using Imagine v2.0 You can use 'Add axis' function, define texture/s (the axis one/s) with 'Apply to children' gadget on. Now You can group the axis to the object to avoid four textures limit, just one note: this little tip has some side effects with layered textures, just try it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 13] How do I make realistic clouds? There was several way to simulate 2d "non-realistic" clouds to use as background, You can: a. map some digitized pictures on a plane or a semisphere (or use a so called scenery generator and/or a mandelbrot generator utility like FractInt); b. use a mix of textures like filter noize and color noize (i.e filnoiz2, colrnoiz2, Imagine v2.9+) on two planes, the nearest to camera with white shades, the second with gray ones (isnt it overcast?). How about realistic 3d clouds? I can advise You to map (with flat color map and flat filter map) or to use textures (the ones above) on many planes or shapes one behind the other, it can be a little tip. Tips by Mike McCool: This may be a long shot, as I've only tried this technique for a cloud cover. That is, a blanket of clouds over a landscape I'm looking down on from only a couple of miles up--not from outer space. For this effect, I use a plane, and two Essence Textures. But I see no reason why it might not work using a sphere, slightly larger than the diameter of your planet, to simulate an atmosphere. (This idea for a cloudcover was first posted, BTW, back in Oct of 1994, and I hope the generous fellow who shared it with us will forgive my deleting his name from the end of his post. Who cares about the author, right? Just use him, suck him dry, and discard him, like TopGun Vampire). Make your slightly larger sphere, make it a cloudy color, near white on all the color guns, and with transparency values all at about 40. Apply the CLUSTERBUMP texture: clump scale: 5000 cluster scale: 3.3676 clump coverage: 1 edge color fade: 0.6 clump bump: 0.3 cluster bump: 0.6 cluster red: 200 cluster green: 200 cluster blue: 200 all other settings at 0, to make a nice puffy cloudcover. To tear holes in this layer, so your planet's visible through the clouds, apply the BLOBF texture: initial scale: 120 #of scales: 4 scale ratio: 0.4 amplitude ratio: 0.4 time ratio: 0.4 time: 0 T1 start: 0.2 T1 end: 0.4 T2 start: 0.8 T2 end: 0.96 Filter red: 255 Filter green: 255 Filter blue: 255 Raytrace (sorry) and shadows should be on, and the textures are animatable, for a nice kind of cyclonic disturbance effect. This is all in my head for anything but planes over flat ground; I haven't tried it for spheres. Again, thanks to that author who first posted this idea back in October. I've used it with great fun ever since, and can't wait to try it on a planetary scale. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 14] How do I create visible light beams? Here it is an extract from a discussion between Charles Blaquiere and P.Sauvageau: PS> I have find that the best way to make visible light is to use PS> conical shaped bright objects. I use linear texture to augment PS> transparency along the y axis, so the cone is semi-transparent PS> (160-160-160) at the source and full transparent (255) at the end. CB> In addition, you could use the Ghost or Fakely textures; they CB> would give you more control over the transparency falloff. This is CB> off the top of my head, BTW; I haven't actually tried it to see if CB> it gives better/worse results than plain ole fog. PS> One thing that I have done is to use FilterNoize applied on a PS> parent axis, with "Apply to children". When I rotate the light PS> cone, I do not move the parent axis. This way, you will see the PS> light beem moving in an immobile cloud of irregular smoke or fog. PS> One of the problem I encoutered is that Filter Noise seem to PS> override the linear transparency setting, so the beem do not appear PS> to vanish as it come farther from the light source. PS> A conical lightsource is cast in the Y axis direction and the PS> linear texture extend in the Z direction, so you will have to rotate PS> the texture axis to have it's Z pointing in the same direction as PS> the light source Y axis. The transition lenght of the texture must PS> be a little shorter than the lenght of the object or the edge of the PS> cone will be visible. Make the cone object transparency to 150, and PS> the texture 255. Make the cone object bright. PS> A very interesting effect can be made with this kind of light PS> beem in an animation: I wanted the light beem to appear to be casted PS> through smoke or fog. I applied a pastella texture on the cone to PS> make it appear to be more irregular, but when the light move, the PS> effect look verry artificial. So I added a parent axis to the light. PS> This axis have the pastella texture with "apply to children" PS> property. To animate the light beam, I moved it in the cycle editor, PS> while keeping the parent axis untouched. When animated, the light PS> beem seem to move in an immobile cloud. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 15] How can I simulate underwater ambient? (little tip by Curcio Nicholas) Enter the detail editor and follow these six steps: 1. Take a sphere and make it a blue color; 2. Remove approx. the top 2/3 of the sphere; 3. Apply the "crumpled" texture (3.x); 4. Apply the "transpar" texture (3.x); 5. Add an axis, and make it white light source; 6. Place the axis above the piece of sphere and group them. Enter the stage editor, place this object high above your scene; the light coming through the crumpled spots makes a great underwater effect. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 16] Does anyone have suggestions for emulating soft shadows? Again, there are many working methods to simulate soft shadows using Imagine, try these: - Place two lights in the exact same location. One will have the normal intensity that You want to illuminate Your scene & cast shadows. The 2nd light is less intense and doesn't cast shadows. - Create a ring of about 10 lights each at 10 percent intensity in a ring. These will create soft shadows as if from 1 100% intensity light source. It does slow down rendering a little to have that many more light sources to have to calculate. - Simulate soft shadows by using a bunch of lights closely placed on a plane (not a plane object, just a mathmatical plane) perpendicular to the stuff You want rendered. You may get some banding doing this, but with enough tweeking, the results are pretty good. Note: The total amount of light coming out of this light-pack should add up to no more than 255 in any one color if You're using non-diminishing light sources. For example, if You are using 10 light sources and you want a white light, set all the color params to 25.5. It's easiest to build all the lights by using axes in the detail editor and them group them (don't forget to make them all shadow casting). Tips by Martin Keitel: There is a trick that might work at least for rather simple objects (like spheres). Add the fakely-texture on your object so that it affects the filter. Adjust the parameters so that the object is fully transparent in the edges (255, 255, 255) and just a little in the middle (or not at all, if you want a dark shadow). Remove all the other textures to speed up rendering. Render in ray trace and you get a soft shadow. Oops! The object seems a little fuzzy. No problem. Now render the scene again so that there is only the object (or objects) that was changed. This time use the original object with it's proper textures. It will replace the fuzzy object, but the soft shadow will remain. It might be convinient to use layers in this... Oh, I forgot to mention that when you render the scene again with only the shadow casting object, you must of course use the previous picture as backdrop image. Maybe you figured out this yourself. One more thing: Fakely-texture uses the angle between the object's surface and the viewpoint to determine the effect. So it really works fine for soft shadows only on round objects. Is there a texture that changes filter simply according to the distance from the object's axis? Ghost won't do, because it needs a fog object, and fog objects don't cast shadows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 17] Can I create 2d/3d smoke effects? How? Tips by Andrew Andrew McDonald: I've just been playing with the Nebular texture to create a little animated smoke. Works great, and I just thought some of you with 3.0 might make some use of this info. Remember to render fog objects in front of a background object, and that this texture will apply to the area bounded by the texture axis, not the entire object. Scale the texture axis to affect the shape of the fog. General Notes: Noise 1 seems to affect the quality of the swirls. Higher numbers adjust the thickness and reduce the transparency. Noise 2 affects color transitions, color intensity of nebular color as set in texture requester, and color mixture, or grain. Grain appears as a very pointillated surface, as if there are thousands of dots of color rather than a smooth gradation or defined boundaries between object and nebula colors. Higher numbers of Noise 2 intensify the nebular color and increase grain. Fog length and the 'T' value work together to determine amount and density of the fog appearing on the object. For stills I would set the 'T' value between .6 and .8, object fog length at .1, and adjust the 'Fog Length at T' to get the right density of fog. I would use the 'T' value combined with some of the noise values to create a fluctuating fog, or even to morph from a dense fog to one very nearly dissipated. A nice, swirly smoke might use the following attributes in the nebular texture requester. I used these on a sphere primitive with diameter of 300, so use that number as a reference to fog length. Object color: R:150 G:150 B:175 Object Fog length: .1 Nebular attributes: Fog Length at T:500 T:.8 Noise 1 Magnitude:5.0 Noise 1 Velocity:1.0 Noise 2 Magnitude:.2 Noise 2 Velocity:10.0 R:150 G:100 B:225 The texture axis forms a square completely inside the sphere object, whose corners touch the inside surface of the sphere. Tutorial by Massimiliano Marras: - Detail editor - Add primitives: sphere - Attributes: color 255,255,255 fog 140 clrnoiz texture: color 140,140,140 r,g,b,color vary 0 - Particles: cube random align interpolated dimension 150 units - Save obj - Action editor: - Add particle effect to loaded sphere (to all anim frames) emission travel dista 200 units scaling 1 time to terminal h 2 elasticity 50 time to terminal z TOT/2 velocity .5 min angle x -5 max angle x 5 wind velocity 5 wind angle 33 wind start TOT*(-1) wind stop TOT emission 95% SET ALL OTHER VALUES TO 0 TOT = number of tot frames ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 18] How bones work (by Lesk and Mark Decker)? Tutorial by Lesk: - Detail editor: - Add primitives: tube Radius = 30 Height = 300 Circolar sections = 12 Vertical sections = 3 close both bottom and top Looking the front view You should have a similar shape: ...... |||||| top section ...... |||||| mid section ...... |||||| base section ...... Note that when we refer to a section that means the points above and below are selected. For example, the top section is: ...... |||||| ...... The last row of points is used twice, once for top section and once for mid one. - Select tube - Mode, pick faces - Pick method, drag box - Shift select top section (points above and below) - Functions, make subgroup, tip1 - Deselect faces - Shift select mid (all pts above and below mid faces) - Functions, make subgroup mid1 - Deselect faces - Shift select base section - Functions, make subgroup base1 - Deselect faces - Shift select top and mid section - Functions, make subgroup midall - Deselect faces - Shift select top, mid, and base - Functions, make subgroup baseall - Deselect faces If you think about this for a minute it will all make sense especially concerning how this thing is going to bend. - Mode, pick groups - Pick method, points - Object, add axis - Select this axis - Move axis to center of tip1 (top section) - Deselect axis - Object, add axis - Select axis - Move axis to center of mid1 (mid section) - Deselect axis - Object, add axis - Select axis - Move axis to center of base1 (mid section) - Deselect axis Now comes the tricky part the order here is very important and You may have to try this a few times until it works just right. Use the find requester and choose the axis in the base section, doing it this way should make the order correct. - Mode, pick object - Select axis for object - Shift select axis in base1 - States, group - Deselect - Select axis in base1 - Shift select axis in mid1 - States, group - Deselect - Select axis in mid1 - Shift select axis in tip1 - States, group - Deselect What You have done here is simply grouped your axis. You now want to make certain that these axis are in the proper order so that when You bend say Your finger, they move just like Your finger would top to bottom. If they are out of order it will still work but it would look like some double jointed contortionist... Go back to group mode and check this out, and make very certain that the order is right. Click on the tip axis and it should be the only one blue. Deselect it and click on the axis in the mid section, both it and tip axis should be highlighted. Deselect them and click on the axis in base1 and all three axis should turn blue. Now the hard part: go back to pick object mode and then click on the object axis, it should be blue with a yellow line connecting it to the base1 axis. If none of the above is correct all progress is at a halt, go back, remove all the groups and try it again this order is important! So either clear it all out and start the project over or go back to group mode, select an axis and ungroup, repeating until everthing is ungrouped. Make sure there are no groupings at all! Then go back to object mode pick and sadly start again. You will get this, it just takes a little practice. Also this is not a replacement for the manual read through it so You have the concepts, believe me it will really help. Now having that done correctly we can move on make sure nothing is selected and go back to pick group mode. - Select axis in tip1 - States, bones subgroups bigsub: browse tip1 smallsub: browse tip1 - Select axis in mid1 - States, bones subgroups bigsub: browse midall smallsub: browse mid1 - Select axis in base1 - States, bones subgroups bigsub: browse baseall smallsub: browse base1 - Save entire object/group now If you think about this it really makes sense what has happened at this point. - States, create default state - Select buttons shape and grouping - States, create start state - Deselect all - Select axis tip1 and rotate in the x 30 degrees - Select entire object - States, bones update - States, create bendtip1 - Select axis in tip1 and rotate another 30 degrees in x - Deselect all - Select axis in mid1 and rotate it in x 30 degrees - Select entire object - States, bones update - States, states create midbend - Deselect all - Select axis in tip and rotate 30 degrees in x - Select axis in mid and rotate 30 degrees in x - Select axis in base and rotate 30 degrees in x - Select entire object - States, bones update - States, create basebend - Save entire group again - States, make stateanim start 15 bendtip 15 midbend 15 basebend 15 start 0 - States, play stateanim I sure hope this works for You and if You find any errors or things that just don't work feel free to let me know. Tips by Mark Decker: I learned a few things that might help somebody else along: 1. Once you are in Pick Objects, pick first the parent axis, then the child axis. In Lesk's tube example, if the axes are numbered from top to bottom, first pick axis number two, then hold down shift and pick axis number one and group. Next pick axis number three, then hold down shift and pick axis number 2, and so on down selecting the object itself followed by the "root" bone and grouping them last. When I first tried this I was using the bounding box to pick both axes at once, and I think it may have been picking them in the wrong order. 2. It helps immensely to move any axes out of the way (shift M moves the axis of an object but leaves the object in place) so that they do not overlap while grouping. Once the grouping is correct, you can move the axis back into place without affecting the grouping. 3. Subgroup assignment is probably the trickiest procedure and was at the start the hardest part for me to grasp. It has not been well explained to date, but I'll see if I can help without muddying the waters any further. Each axis gets two subgroups assigned to it, helpfully referred to as "Big" and "Small". To the best of my understanding, the Big subgroup is the set of all faces which will be affected by motion of the axis. If a face is not in the Big subgroup, its never going to change no matter what that particular axis does. The Small subgroup is a subset of the Big subgroup, which means it can only contain faces which are also in the Big subgroup, but usually won't contain all of them. The Small subgroup moves and rotates with the axis, but all of its faces keep their shape and orientation with respect to each other. So if the faces outside the Big subgroup don't change, and the faces inside the Small subgroup don't change shape, all that's left is the faces which _ARE_ in the Big subgroup, but _ARE NOT_ in the Small subgroup. These faces form the actual joint, and actually stretch and deform to keep the other two sets (the outside and the Small subgroup) smoothly connected. Maybe an example will help. Think of a robotoid arm with no fingers, no wrist. It has two parts, a forearm and an upper arm, and hence two bones (axes). The parent axis (bone) sits at the center of the shoulder, with its Z axis pointing at the elbow. The child axis sits at the center of the elbow, with its Z axis pointing at what in a more highly evolved robotoid would be the hand. You need two subgroups for each bone. Lets start with the forearm. The Big subgroup for the forearm will include all of the forearm and just a little of the upper arm above the elbow, enough to allow the joint to stretch to maintain a smooth connection. The Small subgroup will contain most of the forearm, up to just below the elbow. The faces around the elbow which are in the Big subgroup but are not in the Small subgroup will be the ones which stretch and deform to allow the joint to connect smoothly. On the upper arm, the Big subgroup will contain all of the forearm, all of the upper arm, and a little of the shoulder it is attached to. The Small subgroup contains all of the forearm, and most of the upper arm up to just below the shoulder. Again, it is the faces between these two where all of the deformation takes place. 4. Once your grouping is all set up, go back to Pick Groups and pick the actual object which is the parent of all these bones. All the axes should be turn blue (in the default color scheme) to indicate that they have been picked as well. Then create your "DEFAULT" state, being sure to select both Shape and Groups. You may need to select properties as well if you want to do brush or texture tacking, but I'm still having problems with this myself, so I'm not sure. 5. In order to manipulate the bones, you need to be in Pick Groups mode. You have to pick the axis you want to manipulate, rotate (or move) it, and accept the change. To see the result you have to pick the base object again (still in Group mode) and select Update Bones and it will then warp your object to conform to the new bone positions. This has gotten a lot more long winded than I intended, but I hope it helps clarify a few things for someone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 19] Halo around light sources. There are several ways of doing this. The first method works under version 2.0 and 3.0, it takes the most work, but looks terrific if done correctly. The second method works under 2.0 and 3.0, and is easier, 3.0's version looks better due to the textures involved. The third method use Lens Flare and works only under 3.0. You can refer to an easy example, a simple lightbulb. Think 2D for a bit, remember that the visible lightsource described is the type you'd see on film. What's a light look like? Well, there's a central disk of light that seems to be a constant brightness, the bulb itself. As you go further outward a secondary disk of light surrounds the central disk: this is the first halo, it is roughly twice twice the size of the central disk. It fades out rather quicky, it's, essentially, the part of the light that "burns" the film. Go further outward. There's a second halo, it's very dim and eventually fades out. This halo varies in size, but can usually be set to eight times the size of the original disk. This is the halo that is create when the light is dispersed by atmospheric conditions. So with that in mind: Radial texture method: - Create a disk using Imagine's standard disk parameters. - Copy the disk and scale the new one by a factor of two. - Copy the larger disk and scale the new one by a factor of four. You should now have three disks of varying size. - Position the disks so that the smallest is in front of the middlesized. The middlesized is in front of the largest. - Make the smallest disk Bright with a Color of 255, 255, 255. Also, make it a lightsource. - Apply Radial textures to the middlesized and largest disks. - The middlesized disk should be Bright and have a Color of 150, 150, 255. The Radial texture should be set so that the disk's transparency is set to 0, 0, 0 at the center. Create a transition distance over the radius of the disk so that transparency is 255, 255, 255 at the disk's edge. You want the disk's color to fade as it moves toward the edge of the disk. - The larger disk should be Bright and have a Color of 255, 255, 255 and a Transparency of 170, 170, 170. Set the Radial texture so that the color fades to total transparency (255, 255, 255) at the disk's edge. - Transform the smallest disk's axis ONLY. Bring up the Transformation Requester, Rotate the Z axis 180 degree. Select the Transform Axis Only button and Perform. The disk's Y axis should be pointing exactly opposite the other disks' Y axis. - Group the three disks together using the smallest disk as the Parent. This is a basic "Light w/halo" object. When rendering it be sure to always point the Y axis at the camera. It's easy to do: just Align Y axis to Track to Object Camera. Render that, and see what you get. In this example the smallest disk acts like the bright lightbulb, the second disk acts like the film burn area, and the third disk acts like the atmospheric dispersion area. The object, being 2D, has some limitations. A primary limitation is that this object only works well in Scanline situations, this is because in Trace Mode the two larger Radial mapped spheres block the smaller disk's light travelling backwards. To work around it create an axis, make it a Lightsource, place it behind the larger disk, group it to the smallest disk. It isn't infallible, however... Experiment with values. The Color values given above were for a standard high intesity lightsource. Always remember what your lightsource would look like in the real world. Fog method: - Create a primitive sphere. - Make it Bright with the Color values 255, 255, 255. - Copy the sphere and scale it slightly larger than the original sphere primitive. - Make this sphere a Fog object by experimenting with Fog Length values. Color it as necessary. - For those with Imagine v3.0 assign the Ghost texture to the foggy sphere, experiment with values. If you're using Imagine 3.0 you can use the Sparkle texture. If you've downloaded Milan's textures (BTW, Thanx, Milan!) there is one itx in there that is useful, but my memory fails me as to the name. I don't have essence, so I don't know what there might be in there. Hope this helps... Lens flare: You could use the Lens Flare effect that comes with Imagine 3.0, just disable the flaring and have only the halo turned on. Easy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 20] Can a reflective object inside a glass tube render properly? You have discovered one of the famous "behind glass" raytrace bugs that have ALWAYS plagued Imagine. You also cannot get a glass attribute inside a glass attribute object to render! There is NOTHING you can do but try to fake the effect (i.e. wrap a brushmap around your sphere to imitate the sourroundings,maybe a global brushmap would work?) A possibly solution is to copy your glass tube and scale it slightly smaller or larger so you get a double-walled tube. You have to use a global map and an animated chrome spheres going up the tube. They all reflected the global map correctly. So, what you should do is to make the glass-tube have both an inner AND an outer wall (make two tubes, one slightly smaller than the other and join them to a single object). Then put your chrome ball inside. The secret is that the ray has to travel trough two (2) faces with glass-attribute-settings (or any other transparent material for that matter). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 21] Help with Slice function, By J. Goldman. Slice is so weird. Here are a few things I've discovered about Slicing. Interestingly, you can Slice anything. You do not have to have multiple objects to perform a slice. So what? Well, most of the slice problems I've run into arise from messed up object geometry. For instance, say you want to use boolean functions to create a complex object, *NEVER* Join and Merge objects you want to later Slice. It doesn't create sliceable geometry, always Slice objects together and then Merge, this usually insures good geometry. To find out whether an object will perform well under a Slice, perform Slice on the single object itself, if you get errors the object will not Slice well in the future. If that single object actually separates into multiple parts it means the object didn't have continuous geometry to begin with. Usually because of duplicate points. It probably won't slice well in the future. Here's an example. Slice a primitive sphere, it should result in one sphere. Now take two spheres, Join and Merge them and Slice. You'd think it would act like a single object. It should Slice to itself. If you do not get an error you'll get multiple objects proving that the object geometry was bad. In any case you must fix the geometry. If your object errors you are fairly screwed unless you have a saved copy of the object with good geometry (i.e. an object saved before a function messed with its geometry). If your object splits into multiple objects you must Merge those objects to create continuous geometry. Here's where I'm not sure what is really true. Can someone confirm this? If you Merge an object duplicate points are not erradicated, if you Merge an object in Points Mode duplicate points WILL be erradicated. Is this true? If so, then to Join Sliced objects you should Merge objects AND points. So, as advice try Slicing each individual object to be sliced. Make sure those are okay. If they are, Slice 'em. Merge (or Join and Merge) the resulting objects/parts the way you want (deleting unneccesary parts), and Slice the new object. If THAT'S okay then the next Slice should work. I've gotten into the habit of testing the 'Sliceability' of every object I will Slice and every object I have Sliced. I rarely run into problems. The one downside to Slicing everything (as opposed to just Joining) is that your poly count goes way up. Imagine does need a better Slice/Boolean function... Of course, if it's an edge to close to an edge problem you could just offset one of the objects to be sliced slightly... Hope some of this helps... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 22] Fog object and global fog: undersea fog spotlight. Tips by Dylan Neill: I was reading through an old IML archive and saw that someone said that fog objects didn't work in global fog. Well I got news for you! It does! So I've made a little underwater scene with low rolling hills along the ocean floor and a submarine that appears from out of the fog. Ok so heres how you make a cool fog spotlight... - Add a primative cone (and leave it OPEN at the bottom for the best effect) - Press F1 to select it - Go into attributes - Set the fog length to 50 - Make it bright - Add the ghost texture with these settings: 150 fog length at T 1 T - Hit OK and OK to get back to the detail editor - Add an axis - Select it with F1 - Go into the transformation requester - Click position and type 100 in the Z box. Then OK The axis should be sitting on the top of the cone. - Rotate it -90 degrees around the X axis so that the Y axis points down into the cone. - Press s and scale the whole axis object by a factor of 1.56 and press space - Press s then l then shift Y to and scale it by a factor of 2. The Y axis should now reach all the way down the cone. - Go into attributes - Click light - Click on point source, round shape, cast shadows - Click OK - Add the light texture 'softedge' with default settings - Click OK to go back to detail editor. - Select both the axis and the cone and select group - Save it And now you have a fog spot light to rival those of Lightwave. One thing to note though is that you must keep the wide end of the object hidden in what ever you're lighting up. eg. if you are pointing it at the ground, scale it so that the wide end is underground. You can make another one which has a closed bottom but it doesn't look rounded like this one. Render two, side by side and find out. Notes by Randy R. Wall: Well, I can tell you why you think the fog object is working and that's because you have the ghost texture added to it, but I can tell you if you take this texture off the object it will not render the fog thicker for the object. In fact even with the Ghost texture it still doesn't look completly correct at the edges. Try using it with a thick global fog and you will see what I'm talking about. It does produce an effect similar to what one would expect, and in a light fog would probably work just fine. But I wouldn't go so far as to say fog objects do render correctly. Try a fog object with a nebula, fogtop or fogpaint textures and you will see that the fog object becomes clear in spots. Anyways, I'm not knocking your fog spotlight. It probably works great. It looks familar to something I posted a tutorial on for 2.0 a long while back. But modified a bit for 3.0. Not that thats what you did. I'm just saying it looks familar, but then many effects do. But Fog objects by themself still do not make the fog thicker. But on the other side this can produce a nice shield effect for something. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 23] Disco ball effect: how simulate some sort of radiosity. Alan Gordie: Last night I was trying to do a disco ball effect, you know like saturday night fever:) I made a primitive sphere and scaled and rotated selected points to make angular patches on the sphere then made it reflective 90% and put it inside of a box (extruded plane) then aimed two lights from 2 angles. Ok so far, but... ...when I render, I can see the reflection of the light on the wall in the sphere, but the light shining off the sphere is not hitting any of the walls...argh Is this something which Imagine cannot do or am I doing something wrong? Curcio Nicholas: No raytracer (that I know of) can do this. To reflect lights you need a radiosity raytracer. These aren't too common and take forever to render scenes. What you could do is make some sort of transparency map (or use the transpar.itx texture with something else as I did with the underwater lighting) and put a light source inside the disco ball so that the light shines out from the ball. Goldman: Actually, it's something ray-tracers in general can't do. Scenes are rendered opposite to convention. That is, a ray is traced from the camera to a light, not from the light to the camera. Therefore, light reflecting off of objects, bouncing, and in turn hitting other objects is not possible. A technique exists, called Radiosity, that attempts to simulate "real-world" lighting effects. Unfortunately, Imagine (as well as the majority of commercial software on the market) does not have this rendering capability. It's just as well since the process is extremely processor intensive (read: takes a loooong amount of time), though the results can be stunning.. Since 3D visualization is just a simulation anyway, you can fake the effects with several well placed lights or textures. I suppose you could make an inner sphere with lots of holes in it. Stick a point lightsource in this and have the whole thing rotate. It wouldn't be the best method (points of light would be sharp), but it would do. Anyone know what would happen if you made a sphere totally transparent, but totally reflective? Would a lightsource (with shadows enabled) pass through it? Would the object look like glass from the outside (because of the high reflectancy) at the same time? If so, then take your orignal sphere object, give it 255, 255, 255 filter, and 255, 255, 255 reflect values. Hopefully, the inner sphere will act as a gobo/cookie thing while the outer sphere gives the impression of the disco-ball glass. Craigh: Sorry, ray tracing doesn't work that way (usually)...You need radiosity. The portion of the wall will check to see if lights are pointed at it when it is being shaded, but will NOT check to see if REFLECTED light is impinging upon it. One way to do this: Use Scanline rendering (or ray-tracing, but make sure the new lights are outside the disco ball if using ray-tracing). Set up a cluster of multi-colored blinking spotlights inside the disco ball that rotate with it and point outward. The original lights will illuminate the disco ball and the new lights will illuminate the wall with the spinning/blinking effect seen in your favorite disco-theque! This will also allow you to use a nice lens flare since the new spinning spot-lights will occasionally point directly at the camera! Randy R. Wall: No Imagine won't bounce light off of objects (yet). But you could probably make a good fake for it using a Sphere with the RadWind and Transpar textures. And an axis set to a point source light inside of the sphere. I haven't tried this but am sure with some work it would shoot little squares all over your walls as you rotate your disco ball. One problem I can think of is you may not be able to have the nice reflective look that the object you have already tried. But then with the correct setting it might be possible. Maybe the metal texture set to chrome on the sphere as well might help? I'm only gueussing with all of this but do believe the Transpar texture will be the key to success. Randy R. Wall: Well, sense I had nothing else to do I thought I'd give a quick try at that Disco Ball and see if what I thought would work would. I think it works pretty nice, but there were a few things I did not try sense I wanted to post something for you before I hit the sack. Anyways, heres what I did for a fairly simple Disco Ball, but one that still looks and works nice. - Add a Sphere - Load the Chrome Attribute - Add the RadWind texture and set it to: Radial Scale -1.0 Color 1 R 255.0 Z Scaling 3.0 Color 1 G 0.0 Sweep Division 20.0 Color 1 B 0.0 Fraction 'On' 1.0 Color 2 R 255.0 Dist Travelled 0.0 Color 2 G 255.0 Min Spacing 0.4 Color 2 B 255.0 Max Spacing 0.4 Reflect Adj 1.0 Transparancy 0.0 The colors can be changed to what you like, but its a good idea to have one a darker color so that when the Transpar texure lights the walls with the little squares some of them will be darker than others.. It maybe a good idea if you are going to have a couple of colored lights hitting the Disco Ball to use a grey color like 100,100,100 for the dark color and 255, 255, 255 for the lighter color. Anyways on to the rest of the Disco Ball. - Now Add the Transpar texture and leave it at the defaults - Now Add an Axis to the center of the ball and set it to a Point Source Light and Cast Shodows. Now your ready to render it.. If you don't have a lot of things to reflect or lots of glass objects you maybe able to speed things up by setting the RSDP in prefs to 2. If you do have a lot of things to render than set it to what need be. But if you want to test out the Disco ball so you can set it up how YOU like it then I would recomend putting it in a box with an open end for viewing and set RSDP to 2. This should work fine for these test. The only thing I found I didn't like about it is the squares are all the same distance apart, but the dark and light colors help break this up a bit as well as having the windows Min & Max Spacing fairly large. You could make these smaller to make the Ball look a bit better but I didn't like the sqaures on the walls so close together when I did this. But then I was testing it in a fairly small box.. I think in a larger box it might look quite good. Especially if there were other things in the room for the squares to interact with.. Anyways something for you to play with.. Well I hope you like the looks of it. I tried the Mosaic texture on it and that looked pretty cool too, but not quite right. I think these Disc Ball actually have many different shapes on them so the produce different shapes on the ground. But the Mosaic texture was a bit to much. I was going to try a combination of a couple of texture, but thought it would take a while to play around with this and really only wanted to see how my suggestion would work sense I was only guessing about it. And sense it did work I figured I'll leave the playing around with the textures for you.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 24] How can I create a candle flame? Tips by Torgeir Holm: Take your basic candle-flame ellipsoid shape and add the following attributes: Fog Length: 0.10 Texture: Ghost Fog length at T: 400 T: 0.8 Texture: FogTop Fog length at T: 200 T: 0.5 Noise Magnitude: 0 Place the axis so that the origin is in the tip of the flame and the bottom of the bounding box is 2/3 towards the bottom of the flame. With the Z axis pointing up. Texture: Fireball Color1: 255,255,100 Color2: 200,030,000 Noise: 0 Reflect&Filter 1&2: 0 Place the axis so that the origin is in the bottom of the flame and the end of the Y axis is in the tip. BTW: my object was about 60 units wide, and 150 units tall. You can now add a child axis in the middle of your flame and make it a lightsource. To animate this, make sure the Y axis points upward (do this before adding textures, as their placement is relative to the axis), and move the the object up along a wavy path with conform to path. Then move the path back dovn a mirror copy of itself, so that the flame stays in the same position. Makes a really nice and realistic candle-flame. Tips by Mike Rivers: If you have version 3.0 or higher, here's a free candle tip: - Make a brushmap with a vertical gadient from the white (top) to black (bottom). - Then make another brushmap that is solid white. Apply the gradient map to the candle as a 'reflectivity' map and appy the solid white map as a 'reflection' map. This makes the candle stick glow like a real lit candle. ======================================================================== SECTION 3 - Forms Editor ======================================================================== 1] I was working in the forms editor on an object, and loaded it into the detail editor for modification. However, I can't seem to be able to get it back into the forms editor! Help! Simply put, you cannot load objects saved from the detail editor back into the forms editor. The reason is the forms editor requires a specified object structure which the detail does not. Thus, saving an object in the detail editor loses that information. When you work with the forms editor is recommended that you keep a spare copy of the FORMS OBJECT saved separately from any detail object. In this way you can then go back and make modifications in the forms editor. ======================================================================== SECTION 4 - Cycle Editor ======================================================================== 1] I made this really great animation sequence in the cycle editor, but when I set it up in the stage/action editors, the motion of the overall object isn't there! When using the cycle editor, Imagine only remembers changes in size, position, and so on in relation to the main parent. Thus, if you make a change to the parent object, it gets forgotten. What this means is if you make a nifty robot jumping cycle, and make it in the cycle editor so the robot actually move up etc... all that will be remembered is the changes to the legs, arms and anything OFF of the PARENT. The overall rotations and movements to the main object will be gone. Two solutions exist. One is to simply make those changes in the stage editor each time you need to. The second is to group a plain axis before you start to your object. (ie: Make the parent have a Null link). Then, you can rotate everything by rotating the main child grouped right under this null axis. This way you aren't moving the "parent", and everything will be remembered. ======================================================================== SECTION 5 - Spline Editor ======================================================================== 1] I tried to import a Postscript font but I got a "Vector not found" error. What does this mean? There are a couple of different formats of Postscript files. If Imagine doesn't like one, it will pop up this or other errors. In that case you will either have to use another Postscript file, or find a software package that will convert it from that format to one Imagine will load. ======================================================================== SECTION 6 - Animation, Stage Editor and Action Editor ======================================================================== 1] Even though I move an Object/Camera/Light to a new POSITION/ALIGNMENT/SIZE in the STAGE editor, Imagine seems to 'forget' what I did! All objects must have timelines split wherever there is a change in position, alignment or size. If you do not set this up, Imagine will forget the changes no matter what. Rather than going back and forth to the ACTION editor and adding timelines, you can have Imagine automatically create the timelines properly so everything tweens as normal. There are the "Position Bar", "Alignment Bar" and "Size Bar" commands under the OBJECT menu in the STAGE editor. So, if you have just gone to a frame and are making a new POSITION, ALIGNMENT or SIZE for an object (or camera or light) to tween to, press RIGHT AMIGA and 7/8/9 respectively. Or use the respective bar commands from the OBJECT menu. This will extend or put a 'split' in the timeline for you (you can check this in the ACTION editor). Also, don't forget to "Save Changes"if you want to keep the motion! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2] How do I use the Grow Effect? To use the grow effect, create an object in the DETAIL editor that you wish to have 'extrude' over time. Create a spline path as normal in the detail editor. This will be the path the object extrudes along during the animation. GROUP (not join) the object with the PATH AS THE PARENT. If you do not make the path the parent, it will not work. To do this, select the path, then hold shift and select the object, then select group. Save your GROUP for loading in the animation. Finally, add the effect in the ACTION editor for the grouped object. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3] How do I use the Tumble Effect? The tumble effect is used to tumble 1 or more objects during an animation. To tumble an object, create your object or objects in the DETAIL editor. Still in the detail editor add an axis. Group (not join) the AXIS to all the objects you want to tumble with the AXIS AS THE PARENT. Then load the GROUP into the STAGE/ACTION editor and add the effect as normal. NOTE: The reason for the null object (axis) as parent is that Imagine does not TUMBLE the PARENT, just the children. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4] How do you get something to roll (at the right speed!) while following a path? Getting an object to spin (like a plane doing a barrel roll) is easy- you align to path, then set Y rotation to be from 0 to 360 and it will do a complete spin. This is not in the right direction for a rolling ball, though. [Annoying feature- you can't say from 0 to 720 for two spins, or 0 to 3600 for ten.] To get it to roll I created a second path, which was basically a larger copy of the first, so the first path was just inside of the second path. I had an axis (a track) follow this new, outside path, then used "align to object" to make the sphere point to the axis. Thus, as the ball moved along its path, one end (the positive Y axis direction) was always pointed at right angles to the direction of motion. Is this clear? Now using the "initial Y angle" and "final Y angle" I set them to 0 and 360 and it rotated as it rolled. As a special effect, I raised the "track path" a little in the Z direction so the sphere looks a little bit like a top rolling around, since the spin axis was not horizontal anymore. An alternative would be to make a cycle object, rolling around the X axis. This is equally valid, but I did it this way first. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5] When I move a tracked Camera in the STAGE editor, it doesn't realign and draw the Perspective view correctly! If you have Imagine 2.0 or higher, press RIGHT AMIGA and the K key together, or select "Camera (Re)track" from the OBJECT menu. This will make the camera repoint to the track from the new position and will redraw the perspective view. If you have an older version of Imagine (or if you just want to) you can press RIGHT AMIGA and the C key or select "Goto" from the FRAME menu. Go to the current frame you are already on which will cause imagine to redraw everything. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6] I have found that after creating a scene in the Stage editor, and then deciding that I want an animation and adjusting the highest frame count, my scene gets mangled in the first frame. Why? Well, it seems to me that this will happen if you don't split your channel bar from the first frame (where you want stuff to be exactly) to the second frame. I usually setup my scenes so that I have the first frame all set as it should be and then I do my transformation from frames 2-whatever. In this way, the first frame is ALWAYS where it's suppose to be no matter what changes I make in the remaining animation. If you look at your channel it should have a break between frames 1 and 2 and then be continuous (if that's the way your animation works out) from 2 on. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7] How do I use the Sway Effect? Sway is used to make several objects oscillate back and forth on their own axis. You can use it to create underwater grass, or an army of those obnoxious red liquid-filled glass birds! Just create all the objects you want to animate, then group them to a parent axis, load the group in the Stage editor, then add the Sway FX bar in the Action editor. Sway will make all children of a parent object oscillate; the parent is unaffected. The key is in the grouping: using Sway on a single object will do nothing, since the parent is never affected and in this case, there would be no children to affect. ======================================================================== SECTION 7 - Rendering and the Project Editor ======================================================================== 1] Why do objects render fine in Scanline, but disappear in Trace? There are 2 possible causes for this. 1) You are running out of RAM 2) You objects are outside of the World Boundary To check #1 (for the Amiga), pull down The Project editor after you start a render during the initialization phase. Click once on the Workbench backdrop and you should see how much RAM you have on the top of the screen. As Imagine starts to render, this will decrease. If it becomes close to 0, chances are, that's your problem. To solve that, buy more RAM. The other possibility is that the objects are outside of the world boundary. The world boundary is basically a box in which your objects are placed. When you enter the STAGE editor, you are placing objects in this "virtual box" whose center is 0,0,0. When you Trace, Imagine clips ALL objects that fall outside of the box. The size of the world boundary is set in the ACTION editor. In this editor, there should be an item named GLOBALS. Whatever numbers are set in the SIZE timeline becomes the size of the box so that it lies from +/- Value for X,Y and Z. The default is no information present, which Imagine assumes is +/- 1024 units for all 3 coordinates. Thus to fix this problem you can: 1) Scale your entire scene to fit inside the +/- 1024 size boundary 2) Add a size line and set the X,Y,Z to the values you need (This can be found by using "coordinates" in the STAGE editor and moving the cursor around to find the values) 3) Add a size line and set the X,Y,Z sizes to 0,0,0. This will force Imagine to calculate the world size for ALL frames based on where objects are for the FIRST frame. This is important since if your objects move farther out during subsequent frames, you will have to set the size manually (see 2 above) since it will now be outside the computed boundary, and thus clipped. Note: The world boundary has no effect in Scanline rendering. Note: Setting the World Size to 0,0,0 regardless of problems will usually DECREASE Trace times! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2] I have a problem with Filtered objects and the Global Backdrop! For some reason, clear or glass like objects will not be clear when used with a backdrop. To get around this render with "genlock sky" and then use an image processing program to composite the rendered image onto the background pic for each frame. Fog objects have a similar problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3] I have created an animation (Hurrah!) and when I look at each of the individual frames, they look just as I thought they might. However, when I animate them, anywhere I have applied the "roughness" parameter, surfaces look animated...with lots of "crawling" effect on them. What gives? Roughness should NOT be used on objects that will be animated. (Unless of course, the "crawley" effect is what you're after). This is caused by a bug in the roughness algorithm. One of the main work-arounds suggested, is by using a very small or fine bump-map. Another work- around is to create a DPaint (or for that matter ANY IFF) multi-gray shaded screen and apply it as an altitude map. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4] What situations, parameters, attribute values, etc. require the most trace rendering time? The list is long: reflections and refractions increase rendering time significantly, anti-aliasing (0 longest)-BTW this you must edit in the .config file and resolve depth (also in .config file), number of polygons, camera position (obliqueness), size of brush maps and even the numerical entries of solid textures, resolution, display and render modes etc etc. The big ones are refraction, edge level(antialiasing, reflection (along with "depth") and #of polygons. Pretty well in that order too. Remember that a higher refraction index is longer rendering time also. And yes the scale of the object means a LOT. Imagine uses something called an *Octree* to calculate the scene. This is related to the world size setting which is also discussed here in article number 1 above. The difference can go from *hours* to minutes, so scale your scene by the size you make your world. You can select everything in the scene (including camera and lights) and scale it interactively. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5] How do I get rid of the "Jaggies?" The .config file for anti-aliasing defaults to 30. This is ok, but not great. The best is 0 and final rendering should always be 0. So you must edit this file every so often (before opening Im) or build a front end on the work bench (requires programming knowledge, though). BTW, the anti-aliasing is EDLE in .config file. {for those unfamiliar with the term jaggies - they refer to the way lines drawn by computers tend to haved a jagged or stair stepped appearance, instead of a smooth continuous line. This is usually found more in low resolution images.} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6] How do I figure out the pixel aspect for a certain resolution display? I am rendering a picture to be displayed on a macII at 1024x768. Does anyone know the formula or is it device dependent? Pixel aspect ratio depends both on the aspect ratio of the display device (your monitor) and the resolution that fits onto that screen. Most monitors use a 4 x 3 aspect ratio so that to achieve square 1:1 pixels, the resolution must also be 4:3. 1024 x 768 will achieve this as well as 640 x 480. The Amiga typically uses a non-square aspect ratio of about 1.2:1 such as 320 x 200, 640 x 400, 768 x 480, etc. So the pixel ratio can be found using... (horiz res. / horiz display size) : (vert res. / vert display size) If your monitor has a 4:3 aspect, you should have 1:1 pixels. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7] When making a disco ball effect, will a SPHERICAL light set at 255 be bright enough to cause visible spots on the surfaces in a scene? No, I bet that a light of 255 won't work too well. So crank it up to 2000! Lights are not limited to 255 (It is logical that lights can be as bright as they want). Values above 500 or so are pretty severe; they cast strong shadows, like a very sunny day. Above 3000 or so and it looks like you're world is lit by nuclear weapons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8] I have a Amiga 3000/25. How long should it take to do a full trace picture with perhaps one transparent (nearly) glass? Does 4.5 hours sound reasonable to you? I am running the floating Point version of Imagine. The floating point version of Imagine uses inline floating point code for maximum speed. It does not use the libraries. I suspect that the non-FP version uses the libraries, just in case. You can probably SPEED UP your trace time SIGNIFICANTLY by scaling up the whole scene in the stage editor (see question 4 above!). A trace time of 4.5 hours on a 3000/25 definitely a "wee bit" on the high side for a scene as simple as you describe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9] Is there any particular format that Imagine prefers? Ham? 32 Color? EHB? 24 bit 1000 x 1000? The best is a 24-bit image, of course. Anything works, but the color range of a 24-bit will beat the tar out of a 16 color any day. Exceptions would be objects with a few discrete colors, like a red, white, and blue flag. Then a 24-bit and a 4 color image are equal in quality. Note that Imagine converts them all to 24-bit internally, though- the memory goes down equally for a 100 by 100 4-color as it does for a 100 by 100 24-bit. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 10] I would like to use conical light sources with my rendering, is there anyway "see" in wireframe where the light will fall? Note: In imagine 2.9, the ability to turn on 'Light Lines' was added in the Stage editor. The following describes another way to 'see' the light in the Stage editor before this feature was implemented. Of course you can still use this in 2.9 and above. For conical lights, the X-axis size determines the radius of the light beam at the distance set at the Y-axis. This if a light has a X size of 50, and a Y-size of 200, the light would have a circle with the diameter of 100 units at a distance of 200 units from the light's axis itself. You can use this information to create a conical light object in the detail editor. By creating a wireframe light, you can then load the light in and actually "see" and resize it to get an idea for the lights size. Add a primitive cone object. Then position the axis of the cone such that it is at the exact tip op the cone object. Finally rotate and resize the cone's axis so the Y axis extendes to the end of the cone and the x-axis (which should allready be set okay) has the diameter of the cone. The above can be done in 4 steps using the transformation requestor, make sure that the "transform axis only" box is checked in steps 2,3 and 4: 1] Add a primitive cone with default values. 2] Set the Position on the axis -100 on the Z-axis. 3] Set the axis alignment to -90 on the X-axis. 4] Set the axis size to X=50, Y=100, Z=50. Front or side view of cone: Z---X /|\ / | \ / | \ / | \ / | \ +-----|-----+ Y Once this is done you will now have a cone object with the axis set correctly to be a light. It is not yet however a light source. Go into the attributes requestor for the object and click on the box labeled "light". In here is a standard light box just like those in the action editor. Click on conical, and set the color and other options as you wish. At this point you must remove any faces from the object. If you do not do this, when you render the object will will have a white cone. Simply go into "Pick Faces" mode and then "Select All" of the faces and finally "Delete" or "Cut" them. You will now have a wireframe cone light. Save this object. From now on, you can load this as a normal object into you renderings and resize, scale and move the light around as you wish. The only drawback to this method is that to change light parameters such as color or shadows, you must re-edit the object in the detail editor and then resave it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 11] How important is lighting for a rendering, and is there any "preset" method used to get good results? Lighting in computer graphics is a very important element in creating images. It takes a while of experimenting with different types of lights and settings to get good results, but there is one basic setup that can also be used as a starting point. The basic approach is one used for lighting real world video scenes. It is known as a "3 point" light setup since it involves 3 light sources. The first light source named the "key" light is the main light for the scene. It is usually placed about 45 degress above and to the side of the camera. This provides overall light so you can see your objects etc... The second light is known as the "back" or "top" light. Place this light above and slightly behind the center of your scene. In video this is used to show highlights on a persons hair so you can tell where the back of their head is. In this case, it provides a similar function so that you can see the back parts of objects. This is typically set at about 2 times the key lights intensity, though for computer graphics a setting equal to or less than that of the key is usually enough. The final light is the "fill" light. This is usually placed at a 45 degress angle below and to the side of the camera so that it is on the opposite side of the "key" light. This light should be dim and possible colored and diffused to give some illumination to any part of the scene not covered fromt the other lights. For rendering this means lowering the intensity and or making the light "diminish in intensity". With this setup there should be an improvement over any rendering using just one light. As a test setup a ground and a stationary object. (The typical chrome ball with cool highlights on a checkered ground works well here) Render once scene with just one light (the key light only). Then add the other 2 or more fill lights and re- render it. There should be a big difference. Also, don't forget that lights can be colored, can cast shadows and can be "conical spotlights". All this can be used to give greater value to your scene. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 12] Help with Fog, By J. Koszarsky Fog isn't too bad once you get the hang of it. There are a couple problems to be aware of though. Overlapping fogs will cancel each other out wherever they overlap. Fog objects should be closed objects. If you have a tube be sure to close the ends up. And when you scale your object up or down you should be aware that the fog length will not scale with your object, I found this very annoying. Imagine you have a 100x100x100 cube and you make it a fog object. What does the fog length mean? If you make your fog length 50 units and then move a non-fog object into the fog, once it goes beyond 50 units you won't be able to see it anymore. 50 units is the point at which an object inside the fog will be totally obscured by that fog. If you shorten the length to say 25 then the fog will become more dense. Making the length larger creates a less dense fog. If the length is greater than 100 then you will be able to see objects on the other side of the cube. Using global fog in the Stage/Action editors is similar but it is applied everywhere, like an infinite plane. You can however control the heights(Z) where the fog begins & ends. So if you wanted fog in a grave yard you could tell it to start at the ground level and end as high as you want, depending upon what your are looking for in your scene. The fog length works the same as with objects. If it is set to 100 units then any object in your scene that is beyond 100 units will be hidden in the fog. For a very subtle fog I sometimes set my length to 2048 or greater, this is very thin. There is another annoying feature of fogs. It looks great when used for making atmosphere on a planet but it will illuminate the entire planet, no matter where the light source is placed. So you can't get a dark side if you have the fog around the entire planet. You can get around this by using a half sphere fog for the atmosphere and aligning it to your lightsource. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 13] How can I render in Widescreen/Letterbox format? Besides making for some neat looking animations, this will also lower rendering times. For a render that would normally be 768x482 or so, make it 768x380. Leave the ratio just as it is (6:7). Any where from 380-330 or so will look pretty good. Remember though that Imagine will still show the entire normal view of the animation in the Stage editor's preview window. This means that while you can see objects at the top of the screen here, they might actually be cropped in the final rendering. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 14] I selected Spheres for my particle object, but all I get is a polygonal shape! In order for you to get spheres in the particle object you will have to render in Ray Trace, not Scanline. Otherwise you end up with a faceted sphere of only a few polygons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 15] Help with Fog: if you place a fog object inside another, they cancel out, why? (By Ian Smith) I was looking over an older list of bugs that were still not fixed when I came across the fog canceling out other fog objects. Remembering previous messages about transparent objects I wondered if it would work for fog. It does, sorta. Imagine only renders flat, one sided triangles. To make a solid object, Imagine keeps track of if it is inside or outside of an imaginary solid. When a ray hits a face with fog or transparency, the ray is considered 'inside' until it hits another edge. That is why if you place a fog object inside another, they cancel out. When the ray hits the second fog object, Imagine considers the ray having exited the fog object. This is actually a good thing, albet tricky at times. The solution to both problems as noted before on the list, is to make sure all objects are solid entities with no common or open edges. Picture trying to make a yellow sphere of fog with a second red fog sphere inside. If you try this, what happens is you get a sphere of yellow fog, but it has a hole in it where the red should have been. This is the canceling effect. What you do now is to set the inner sphere to the same attributes as the outer one. You now have created a true hollow fog object. The trick is to now use a third sphere, make it a red fog, and put it inside the hole. You have to be careful to make sure it is just a little smaller than the hole. Try to make it about 0.001 units smaller. An easy way is to duplicate the inner surface of the sphere and then scale it down slightly. I included a uuencoded object you can test render (please refer to IMLarc61.lha at IML landfill for these uuencode objs). It contains 8 CSG spheres... RIGHT.LARGE - Large yellow fog. RIGHT.UPPER - Small yellow fog inside. RIGHT.LOWER - Small red fog inside. LEFT.LARGE - Large yellow fog. LEFT.UPPER - Small yellow fog inside. LEFT.LOWER - Small red fog inside. LEFT.UPPER.OUTER - Inner surface of LEFT.LARGE surrounding LEFT.UPPER LEFT.LOWER.OUTER - Inner surface of LEFT.LARGE surrounding LEFT.LOWER When rendered, the object on the left renders correctly, showing a yellow fog sphere with a red splotch of fog in the bottom corner. The top yellow fog does not show up because it is the same color and density as the larger sphere. The right sphere however, renders incorrectly. It shows a solid, shaded red sphere in the bottom, and at the top is a hole where the smaller yellow sphere should be. Now Imagine is still not doing for quite correct. For one, this trick does not work for global fog! I tried surrounding a fog object with a shell that was the same density and color as the global fog, but it simply caused the fog object to vanish completely! I was hoping this would allow the use of fog objects with global fog, but no luck. Secondly, and more important, the above example with red fog inside is still not what shoudl happen. The object on the right SHOULD render correctly. In reality, you do not chop holes in fog and stick other peices of fog inside. The two fogs should add their fog properties together. I have no idea what goes on inside Imagine, but I can take a guess that each ray has a fog/transparency flag that gets toggled when a ray hits a surface. What they need is not a flag, but an array of flags to keep track of how many layers of fog they have penetrated. Perhaps link this to the reflection resolve paramater in preferences. Then we could have true additive fog. You can fake it by manually adding the attributes together and settign the inner fog object to that. BTW, I tried a negative fog length and it resulted in a totally invisible object. I wasn't sure WHAT I expected, but figured it was worth a try. :-) I also ran these tests in Imagine 2.0 and 3.2 to test for diffrences. Other than 3.2 being about 25% slower to render than 2.0 they worked the same. ======================================================================== SECTION 8 - Essence Settings and Other Attributes ======================================================================== 1] Electrical Arc (Essence) Here's how to make an electrical arc between two rods, like something out of Frankenstien's lab. 1] Start with a plane with 255 R,G,B on Color and a light blue (or whatever color you want the arc to be) in Filter. 2] Use Ringfract as follows: Set the Z axis to point out of the plane, (rotate 90 on X) Low Trans Start=30 Low Trans Width=5 Hi Trans Start =40 Hi Trans Width =5 Set the color to 0,0,0 for RGB. Leave other settings at defaults Place the axis of Ringfract in the middle of the bottom edge of the plane. 3] Now use Swapcrf to swap the color and filter values. Do this by setting all parameters to 0, and then setting the following values to 1: Filt -> N Color = 1 Refl -> N Refl = 1 Color -> N Filt = 1 Now when rendered, there should be something similar to an electrical arc (or maybe some sort of plasma). To have the arc grow, rotate the Ringfract axis on X up or down so that the plane and cylinder do not intersect at 90 degrees. If you animate this it looks like the arc gets taller until the arc breaks (i.e. the plane no longer intersects Ringfract's cylinder in a curve, but instead in two lines). Also setting the plane to bright will make it look correct in dim scenes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2] Veined Marble (Essence) The veinedmarble texture is used twice, once for large, widely spaced veins. The second use is for finer, closely spaced veins. For veined green marble set the object color to 40,80,40 for Red Green and Blue respectively. The texture veins are a gray-green color. Text#1 Text#2 Parameter Text#1 Text#2 Parameter 800.0 300.0 Initial Scale 4.0 5.0 Turbidity 7.0 7.0 # of Scales 0.9 0.98 Color Level 0.4 0.4 Scale Ratio 120.0 120.0 Color Red 0.6 0.6 Amp Ratio 150.0 150.0 Color Green 0.4 0.4 Time Ratio 120.0 120.0 Color Blue 0.0 0.0 Time 0.0 0.0 Fade 0..1 1.0 1.0 Sharpness 0.0 0.0 20.0 10.0 Vein Spacing 0.0 0.0 Rotate the second texture 45 degrees around the X and Y axes with respect to the first texture. You may want to rotate the first texture as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3] Rough marble/rock (Essence) This uses 2 textures, one for a main color variation, and the other for the bump/roughness. This is very effective for creating stone surfaces. Try these settings on a primitive plane. Object Attribs R G B Value Color = 136 118 128 Specular = 153 134 132 Dithering = 255 Phong = On All others at 0. Texture 1: fractalcolor Texture 2: bump Parameter Value Parameter Value Initial Scale 15 Initial Scale 5 # of scales 5 # of scales 4 Scale Ratio 0.4 Scale Ratio 0.5 Amplitude Ratio 0.4 Amplitude Ratio 0.5 Time Ratio 0.4 Alt. Adjust 3 Time 0 Fade 0..1 0 Base->1 Trans 0.3 Axis placement left at default 1->2 Trans 0.6 Color 1 End 1 Color 1 Red 70 Color 1 Green 60 Color 1 Blue 60 Color 2 Red 255 Color 2 Green 240 Color 2 Blue 240 Fade 0..1 0 Axis placement left at default When rendered an off gray stone will be created. Great for caverns, dungeons and so on. Just slap it onto the walls or columns to give it good-ol' natural look. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4] Soap Bubble (Imagine 2.0 and higher) COLOR REFLECT FILTER SPECULAR R 250 10 192 255 G 215 10 162 245 B 225 10 133 238 Dithering Hardness Roughness Shiniess Index of refraction 0 245 (Or less) 0 0 1.08 Then Add a Pastella Texture with the following data in each column: 102.333374 100.00 0.0 0.0 255.0 255 0.0 180 100.0 80 0.0 110 255.0 0.0 100.0 0.0 Now, try render it, and remember to put a object behind, and try to make several copies, and make a complete bubble bath! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5] Spaceship Panels (Imagine 2.9 and higher) This uses the RADWIND, TUBEWIND, or RECTWIND textures to create multicolored spaceship panels: - Add a primitive sphere with it's default values. - Apply the RADWIND texture (or other 2 textures depending on the shape of your object) - Make these adjustments to the texture variables: Column One Two ____ ____ 1 210 *These params will will give you panels that 3 210 are randomly colored from the two color ranges 60 210 defined in column two. 0 190 *Play around with some of the variables to get 1 190 the effect right for you. 0 190 0 -1 0 0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6] Bark, mountain, stone effects (Imagine 2.9 and higher) This uses the WRINKLE texture. - Add default cylinder and CLOSE the TOP - Select the top edges of the cylinder and MAKE SHARP - Apply the WRINKLE texture and render. This will look like bark around the cylinder....play with the noise functions to adjust the look of the bark. Now make these changes to the Texture: Column One Two ___ ___ 0.5 150 * This will look like the sides of a mountain 0.5 150 around the Cylinder. On the top of the 10.0 150 cylinder it will look like granite. 1.0 20 * When applied to organic objects the vertical 0.5 50 faces will have the rivulets, the horizontal 0.0 20 faces will be granite-like. 0.0 0 * Try changing the first three variables in 1.0 0 Column one to 10,10,1 respectively. The resulting look will make the cylinder look like a core sample around the cylinder, while the top of the cylinder will have a marble like quality. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7] Solar Corona, By Cyrus J.Kalbrener (Essence) This uses 1 sphere, 3 disks and 2 Essence textures. - First use varyabsrgb to create changes subtle changes on the suns surface between white hot and light yellow. - Then use a disk for the corona, rotate the oject axis so that the y axis was perpendicular to the surface of the disk and add the cylindturb texture with the z axis extending perpendicular from the surface of the disk. We used cylindturb because we could translate the texture along it's z axis to create the illusion of movement much more effectively than radialturb. - Then add another disk and place it less than 1 unit behind the first, apply the radial Impulse texture to create the glare around the sun. - Now apply radial to another disk, this time making it black to blot out the stars behind the corona that would show through the glare (it looks pretty unrealistic without it). - Make sure all objects are bright, and parent the second and third disks to the first. We can save the sun itself as one object, and the corona group as a second object. In the stage editor track the corona to the camera so that it would always be perpendicular to the camera (only good if the camera is moving a little bit). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8] Solar Corona, By Scott Kirvan (Imagine 2.9 and higher) This uses the FIREBALL, NEBULA and GHOST textures to create. - Add a primitive sphere with it's default values, turn on bright. - Apply the FIREBALL texture. - Make these adjustments to the texture variables: Column One Two ____ ____ 0 0 255 0 255 0 100 0 200 0 30 0 0 0 0.4 0 Size: (86, 86, 86) - Add a primitive sphere with it's default values except for the size values, they should be, at least (75, 75, 75) Color: (255, 85, 0) Fog length: 0.01 - Apply the NEBULA texture. - Make these adjustments to the texture variables: Column One Two ____ ____ 325 0 1 0 0 0 5 0 0.2 0 1 255 1 255 0 100 Size: (4.5, 4.5, 4.5) - Apply the GHOST texture. - Make these adjustments to the texture variables: Column One Two ____ ____ 1200 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9] Sludge, By Scott Kirvan (Imagine 2.9 and higher) This uses the DINOSKIN texture: - Add a primitive cylinder (size: 88, 88, 175) - Make these adjustments to the attributes variables: COLOR FILTER SPECULAR R 255 255 38 G 255 255 38 B 255 255 38 Hardness Index of refraction Phong 20 1.50 - Apply the DINOSKIN texture. - Make these adjustments to the texture variables: Column One Two ____ ____ 10 0 10 0.5 10 0 2 0 0.3 190 0.6 1.73 2 0.5 1 0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 10] Marble, By Rob Freundlich Make your object a pale white (190-ish on all the RGB sliders), high Shiny value, high Hardness, low Roughness, Specular just a few shades below the object color, ummm, possibly others as well. Apply two wood textures. The textures are rotated with respect to each other. Both have very wide bands (and a low number of bands) and a large Variation value (for "burl" effect, according to Understanding Imagine). The color of each texture is a darker shade of grey than the object, and the two textures have slightly different colors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 11] Starfield (Imagine 2.9 and higher) We all know that Imagine's starfield is very cheesy at best. Here is a great solution for Imagine 2.9 and higher users: - Create a sphere that is as large as your world, minimum size should be at least 1000 units along each axis. - Set the sphere's filter values to 255 for each R,G,B component. - Apply the CONFETTI texture and make these adjustments to the default values: Color 1: (255, 255, 255) V1: .53 Size: .25 Color 2: (100, 100, 100) V2: .55 Make sure the camera is somewhere in the center, and render. Voila! A great Starfield! Refer to the docs on the confetti texture to make any adjustments that you like. Also, try making a short anim with just the sphere, and just change the camera's perspective, you can get a nice space warp effect. This actually gives a good looking starfield with almost no RAM consumption. Plus, you can easily set the colors and frequency. As a suggestion, 1] Make the sphere bright to make sure the stars show up. 2] Make a copy of the sphere and scale it slightly smaller or bigger and rotate it so it's at a diff angle. Then, you'll get a cool rotate effect when you move the camera. This is called "stellar parallax", and it will never happen in real life, simply because all the stars are so far away that you basically can't move fast and far enough to make their relative alignments change in this kind of obvious way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 12] Photon Torpedo (Imagine 2.9 and higher) In Detail, create a default primitive sphere. Copy it, scale it down to .8, Paste it and group the 2 objects together. The larger sphere's attributes's should look like this: COLOR R 255 G 0 B 0 Fog length Phong Bright 125 Then Add a FogPaint Texture with the following data: T: .8 Denser Color: 255, 100, 0 2nd Color: 255, 0, 0 Scale the axis to be just as big as the sphere. The smaller sphere's attributes should look like this: COLOR R 210 G 15 B 15 Phong Bright Light: Color: 500, 0, 0 Point Source Controlled FallOff FireBall texture: Color 1: 255, 15, 15 Color 2: 200, 30, 0 The rest of the settings are 0. Axis size should be slightly larger than the sphere. Load this object into Action after setting the # of frames. Add the Spike effect on frames 2 (right after the torp exits the torpedo tube) to the last frame that the object will be in the camera's view. You might want to tweek the Spike settings. Set up the motion in Stage, and you're all set. Render and serve. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 13] Spaceship shield, By Charles Blaquiere (Imagine 2.9 and higher) To do a Star Trek-like "shield absorbs energy blast and dissipates it", you need to create a sphere for the shield. You then use Shellturb combined with SwapCRF to _vary the transparency_ of the texture and make the energy blast visible. Here's an example: - Create a standard Imagine sphere. Scale in Z by 0.5. - Give it a color of 255,255,255 and click on Bright. Add the Bandturb (not Shellturb) texture. - Edit the texture as follows: Column One Two ____ ____ 0 0.4 Axis position: 110, 0, 0 20 0.4 Alignment: 0, -90, 0 30 0 20 0 10 0 5 0 4 0 0.4 0 - Add the SwapCRF texture. All parameters should be 0, except Color -> N Filt which should be 1. - Add the Solid texture. Leave all parameters at -1 and set Color to 50, 255, 200. - The texture order should read, from top to bottom: Bandturb, SwapCRF, Solid. If not, use the Priority button to make it so. - States/Create DEFAULT, click Textures/Brushes on. - States/Create START, click Textures/Brushes on (This is not a typo. Unless I'm mistaken, you should refrain from using the default state in an animation, which is why I had you create an identical state). - Change the texture: Time to 1 Fade to 1 Position to -50, 0, 0 - States/Create END. - In Action, morph from START to END over N frames. You'll see an energy blast hit the right side of the image, where the ship inside the shield would presumably be pointing, and travel along the shield, dissipating as it goes along. How does it work? The base object is white, and gets a turbulent band of black applied to it using Bandturb. Then, SwapCRF turns this color information into _filter_ values -- black means no filter, white means fully transparent. This makes part of the shield visible. All that's needed is to give the visible parta of shield a color using Solid. Finally, we create two states, START and END, which allow the texture axis to travel from one end of the shield to the other. The END state also has Bandturb's Fade parameter set all the way to 1, so that the texture loses strength as it travels along the shield. Just add a ship inside the shield, and a starfield in the background. The effect is beautiful. Bug alert: Imagine 3.1 doesn't remember texture parameters and axis settings very well when you use States. Until that bug is fixed, you will need to create two separate objects, Shield-start and shield-end, and morph from one object to the next. No big deal. ======================================================================== SECTION 9 - Miscellaneous ======================================================================== 1] What the heck is BTW, IMO and other weird abbreviations... BTW is an abbreviation for "By The Way". IMO is an abbreviation for "In My Opinion" IMHO is an abbreviation for "In My Humble Opinion" IML is an abbreviation for "Imagine Mailing List" :) is a sideways smiley face :( is a sideways frowny face ;) is a winking-eye face etc... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2] My rendering times and even my refresh times in the editors are much MUCH too slow, even with an accelerator. Is there any basic tricks or hints that are often overlooked that might help me out?" Always be sure to MERGE your objects. This eliminates multiple faces, points and lines. Some objects have a VERY large number of these and it can slow your times down by up to 1/2! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3] When does one get good enough so that they don't render ugly pictures! Practice with a simple objects (to cut down trace time) over and over and over. Varying lighting & color etc. This will allow you to get the effect you want which is only a technical problem. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4] Hires Video modification for Amiga Imagine From James R. Walker ***Note: The following explains how to modify the actual executable file of Imagine. Do this at your own risk! If you have any problems or end up trashing your copy of the program it is your own fault. It is highly recommended that you make a backup copy of the program before you mess with it. Ok, here's how it works... (If you don't have an Amiga, don't do this!) Get a filezapper type program. (NewZap DPU FileZap Hex etc...) Look up your version of Imagine on the chart below. Edit the executable at the bytes indicated in the chart. The block #s and byte #s are shown in decimal. The hex numbers in parenthesis are the hex versions of the block numbers. The bytes to modify are, of course, in hex. Replace the resolution you find there with the resolution you want. Then save the new file. (I don't have to remind you to keep a backup of Imagine on hand!) Notice that Imagine automaticly doubles the vertical resolution for use in interlace mode. So, if you want vertical resolution of 462 then you must tell it to give you 231. (231 = 00E7 in hex) Imagine Version # Horizontal Vertical FP 1.1 Block 393 ($189) Block 83 ($053) Bytes 220 & 221 Bytes 162 & 163 From 02 80 From 00 C8 (Example: To 02 BC = 700 in dec)(To 00 E7 = 231 dec) FP 2.0 Block 497 ($1F1) Block 95 ($05F) Bytes 328 & 329 Bytes 250 & 251 From 02 80 From 00 C8 INT PAL 2.0 Block 500 ($1F4) Block 94 ($05E) Bytes 124 & 125 Bytes 42 & 43 From 02 80 From 01 00 FP PAL 2.0 Block 497 ($1F1) Block 95 ($05F) Bytes 388 & 389 Bytes 244 & 245 From 02 80 From 01 0 INT 2.9 Block 1561 ($619) Block 119 ($077) Bytes 486 & 487 Bytes 480 & 481 From 02 80 From 00 C8 FP 2.9 Block 1529 ($5F9) Block 95 ($05F) Bytes 82 & 83 Bytes 168 & 169 From 02 80 From 00 C8 FP PAL 2.9 Block 1529 ($5F9) Block 95 ($05F) Bytes 146 & 147 Bytes 162 & 163 From 02 80 From 01 00 FP 3.0 Block 1667 Block 126 Offset +60 Offset +425 Abs pos 853564 Abs pos 64937 Current value $0280 Current $64 FP 3.1 Block 1765 Block 131 Offset +424 Offset +343 Abs pos 904104 Abs pos 67415 Current value $0280 Current $64 Block + Offset is commonly used with most disk editors, but some use the Absolute Porition instead. Remember to divide the height of the screen by 4 first, and that you can't use values higher than 127 due to Impulses use of signed character storage. 127 will give you screen height of 508. I don't think its easily possible to hack Imagine to use an unsigned character to get a higher screen size. Anyone? One Final Note: Imagine PC users have a whole different program than Amiga users. This modification will not work on the PC version. I would guess that a similar modification for the PC version would be more complicated, given that VGA modes are more complicated than Amiga modes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5] What are particles? (Note: Particles were add in Imagine 2.9) There are a couple of different meanings and interpretations of what particles and particle animation software should do. In general, a particle is an object, or point in 3D space that is then controled by parameters mimicking real world physics. For example, take a point in 3D and apply motion to it as if it were under gravity. The result would be it would move downward increasing in speed. So you can use particles to simulate wind, exploding, melting and other things that move points in different ways. Particles can also be objects or simple polygonal shapes rather than just points. In imagine, you can make a 'particle object' by modeling a normal object with faces. Then, using the particle requestor in the Detail Editor, specifiy that all faces/polygons of the object be replaced by cubes, spheres, tetrahedrons and so on...or even other objects. When you go to render the object, each face will be replaced with the particle you have chosen. This means in Imagine, you can make objects created out of many 'particles' even though you don't use any particle type of motion. This is true since you could now take that object, and just animate it normally using standard key frame techniques and so on. However, Imagine does have a new method for applying the motion control over these particle objects, (or even normal objects, since it will simply affect the faces). In the Action Editor you can now use the particle effect. This lets you specify how the particle/faces of the object will be affected over the course of an animation. In general, particle systems allow one to simulate complex motion easily. They allow one to create many particle objects and to have their motion defined by mathmatical properties. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6] Everything about motion blur, By Mark Allan Fox I thought that I would devulge the information I know about this subject as well as why I sincerly doubt that Impulse will include this feature in any of the upcoming upgrades. I will also give some hints as to how to simulate motion blur (actually it really isn't simulating, it is the real thing) using Imagine (or any other rendering program for that matter) and an image processing package. Motion Blur - What is it? How do we get it? The human eye does not see motion as most computer renderers see it. The human eye does not see motion as a continuous set of instantaneous pictures. The human eye sees motion through persistence of vision. Our eyes are constantly taking visual data from our surroundings, the data our eyes feed to our brains is not sampled. This is a difficult effect to achieve on the computer. There are algorithms that allow a computer to achieve real motion blur, but these tend to be really slow if your using a large number of polygons. They get even more complex, and even slower, if you start moving objects along spline paths (if you're interested, and have access to a good library, check out Computer Graphics, Volume 17, Number 3, July 1993, Temporal Anti-Aliasing in Computer Generated Animation). Much faster ways of approximating motion blur exist. These approximations hide some of the temporal-aliasing (aliasing over time) while the real motion blur method completely eliminates it. Some programs use a method much like the way Imagine casts multiple rays while ray-tracing to eliminate regular (spacial) aliasing. This method is called distributed ray-tracing. While Imagine (3.0) can cast many rays through the area of a pixel to approximate the pixel's average color value, motion blur casts many rays over time through the area of a pixel to determine that pixel's average color value (note that both methods can be combined without necessarily increasing the rays cast. Realistically the number of rays should be increased, perhaps by a factor of two, because when combined the two methods tend to have a negative impact on each other's approximations). Distributed ray-tracing is fairly easy to implement _when ray-tracing_. It becomes infinitely more difficult when using a scanline renderer (so difficult, in fact that I won't even discuss it). Motion Blur - Why Impulse probably won't implement it? As pointed out above, motion blur is hellishly hard to implement in scanlining (because scanlining does hidden surface removal on a line, actually a plane, that passes through a row of pixels). I'm sure that this method can, and has, been implemented, but by a company much larger and richer than Impulse (like Pixar). Problems exist in the distributed ray-tracing method as well. For this method to work it must have information about every objects position over time (or at least the frame to be traced and the two adjacent frames). Imagine's global effects are given access to much information about a _single frame_, and they can be used to control the renderer (as in depth of field), but I'm guessing that they can't access anything but the information about the current frame. So, Impulse would have to over-haul Imagine to implement motion blur. If you look at versions 2.0, 2.9, 3.0 and soon 3.1, you'll notice that almost all the new features are add-ons and really aren't integrated into imagine as a whole. It's great that Impulse planned far enough ahead to allow Imagine to be so modular that these new features are just added-on. Unfortunately, I really don't think Imagine's modularity goes far enough to allow an easy addition of motion blur. So until Impulse completely rebuilds Imagine (something, I for one, think is due) I sincerely doubt that we will see motion blur in Imagine. Of course I sincerely hope that I am absolutely wrong in the above and that Imagine isn't designed the way I think it is, then perhaps we might see motion blur in one of the next few updates. Motion Blur - How do I do it on my own? Motion blur is quite easy to approximate on your own. However, it does have costs, namely, increased rendering time (everyone knew that one was coming), and an increase in storage space for the individual frames before they are compiled into an animation. There is a slight increase in the space the animation will take too. Simply put to acheive motion blur render more frames than you actually need. So, depending on the amount and speed of the motion in an animation, you render perhaps 3 times as many frames as you want to be in your animation. So if you have a 10 second animation (300 or 240 frames) render 900 or 720 frames. Then use an image processing package to average 3 frames into one. So for frame 1 in the animation you will average frames 1,2 and 3 (DTA does this on the PC, the command for compiling the above example into an FLC file would be <dta pic*.tga /a3>) The real trick here is to figure out how much motion blur you need, if you need it at all. Generally, I find that if an object moves across the whole screen in one frame I will want about 30 sub-frames per frame (big hint: avoid the above case). So if it moves across half the screen I will want about 15 sub-frames per frame. It's also nice to always use an odd number of sub-frames. That way you know the objects exact location at any given frame (in the middle sub-frame). Another problem arises when working on looping animations. The first and the last frame will not look correct. What you have to do is tack on some extra frames before the first and after the last frames. The number you add depends on the number of sub-frames you are using. If N is the number of sub-frames you are using you have to add (N/2)-1 frames to each end of the animation. You then have to set up in the action editor so that the first (N/2)-1 frames look like the last (N/2)-1 frames and vice-versa. Sometimes you have a scene where motion blur is only needed for a few frames or to one degree or another. This is where scene planning comes into play. Personally I haven't had enough practice in doing this to tell anyone how to achieve this. I have had some success at this, I just haven't yet realised a good method of approaching the problem. A good work around is to plan your camera angles so that you cut from one degree of motion blur to another when the camera changes views. If you have no choice but to have one consistent camera angle then start drawing time-lines, make lots of copies of the whole project (one for each degree of blur), and think hard about what your going to do before commiting yourself to the final render. Of course if you have a Pentium 100 and a couple gigabytes of hard drive space you may be able to use brute force and just do everything at the maximum needed degree of blur (not recommended, as you'll save yourself more time by setting up everything the hard (or is that the easy) way, especially if this is a long animation). If you have more interests in motion blur try Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, Fundamentals of 3D Computer Graphics, the comp.graphics, comp.graphics.algorithms, newsgroups, or contact me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7] 3D stereograms, By Gary Beeton We all know that Imagine allows you to create stereo pair images for use with special 3D glasses. But did you know that Imagine 3 will, with the help of shareware, let's you create 3D images that do not require glasses and that you can also print? I'm talking about SIRDS (Single Image Random Dot Stereograms) or sometimes called Stareogram; you know, those posters made of dots which, when you look (persistently) straight through them, will reveal extruding shapes. It's easy! All you need: a shareware SIRDS generator (I'm not sure about the PC, but for the Amiga there's a bunch of them in Aminet under gfx/3d), Imagine 3.0 and a scene. An example: Load an object into the Detail editor (i.e. Cow.iob). To simplify the process UnGroup any parts then Join them all together as one object. Attributes should be: Color white, set the rest to zero (0); Bright should be on (x), set Quickdraw on (x) and Texture: ZBuffer. Now reset your perspective view and rotate your object just as you would like to see it by the camera as viewed in the perspective view. This is important because ZBuffer is relative to Global coordinates, and not relative to the camera. Go into the "Top" view window, turn Coordinates on, move your cursor to the bottom of the bounding box and write down the Y coordinate (Y1), move the cursor to the top of the bounding box and write down the Y coordinate (Y2). These two Y coordinates should be entered in the ZBuffer texture's Y1 and Y2. Leave the color settings from white (255,255,255) to black (0,0,0) (assuming your SIRDS generator expects white as out and black as in). Save the object. Go into Action editor, Add your object and set camera position to 0,Y1-n,0 alignment to 0,0,0 where n is the distance from the object to be viewed. Save Changes. Go to Stage editor, add a light and place it anywhere in front of the object, turn on camera view and fine tune the placement of the camera making sure not to change it's alignment. Render. The resulting image should be a gray scale image which can be loaded into and processed by a SIRDS generator. I've had excellent results with this technique, many of which surpassed some commercially available SIRDS posters. The 3-D option: X-Specs "driver" The 3-D option in Imagine is designed to produce a format which is viewable using 3-D LCD shutter glasses called X-Specs. The X-Specs "driver" interleaves the top and bottom halves and syncronizes the right/left lenses with the interleave refresh rate of the display. The top and bottom halves appear squashed because each represents one field (half of the data for a full frame). Unfortunately for Imagine PC users, I think X-Specs are only available for the Amiga. This would appear to be a vestigial "feature" from Impulses' attempt to make the PC and Amiga versions have the same look and feel. I don't think there is a way to have Imagine separate the images into separate files. To overcome this problem I would try doubling the project's vertical resolution and make the aspect ratio 2:1. Then use an image processor to reset the aspect back to 1:1 to unsquash, then separate the images. An alternate method would be to manually reposition the camera for each left and right image (this will be a big pain if you intend to animate though). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8] Working with bitmaps, By Douglas Smith I find that the best sort of image to work with is obviously one made up of lots of lines, some of the best are those nice little painting illustrations that are always part of the instruction sheet for model kits. If you're using one of these, set your scanner to text mode, 200dpi seems to work best and scan. Then clean up the image in DPaint, this is the key step, so don't skimp, get an image made up of smooth sharp lines. If you are using a colour image, you need to get it into two colours, for this either start drawig on top in DPaint, then stencil your new lines and rub out the image. One method that can work, is to use an Emboss command (have a look at PBM tools), this will effectivly outline different blocks of colour, you can then just touch it up in DPaint. Beware that you tend to loose a lot of dimensional accuracy doing this unless you have a really hires image, so be careful. If the drawing is to scale, mark a scale on it, a simple graduated bar, preferably one horizontal and one vertical round the part of the image that you are interested in. When you clean up the drawing make sure these scale marks are clear. You can later use these marks to scale the bitmap to an imagine grid. Now use ConvertIFF/ILBM, say no to the add faces requester, and in a minute or so all the lines will appear. Now all you have to do is to go into pick points mode and tidy it up a little more. Save this. If you have a plan, front and side view you can position these objects so they are visible in their respective window, but not visible in the other windows, i.e position the front view so it is say, 500 units in front of the world-centre etc. then redraw speeds are quite nippy. Using this method may be a bit more memory intensive than using a bitmap, but you can zoom in to see finer detail. Also the images can be to a known scale and you can scroll the windows about without loosing the image. ======================================================================== CLOSING - Closing statements and Disclaimer ======================================================================== Hopefully this document is useful to people out there. Once again, if there is anything you want added/changed/deleted, please e-mail as listed at the top of the document. What follows is a small disclaimer so no one gets sued for information that is harmful or accidentally incorrect or misleading. (If you find a mistake...please send e-mail so it can be fixed!). Disclaimer: There is no guarantee regarding any information presented in this document. The information may not be correct, useful or helpful. The reader accepts ALL responsibility for actions pertaining to reading this document regardless of consequence. ======================================================================== END OF IML-FAQ /\_ | | "cn01@novell.dima.unige.it" | O | "G.Scibilia@agora.stm.it" | | "2:332/211.24@FidoNet.org" | O | "Imagine Mailing List,IML FAQer" ae(-_^)ue |___| _ __ ___ ______Wizard signing off