I've just got `On the Net' and am dumping all my Pd stuff onto hensa. This app was my A-level project and is a bit iffy to be frank. The main thing is that the `Typing into a window' style output is pretty, but silly (I didn't know hoe to do proper Drag'd'Drop At the time). It woulden't take long to re-do it, but I'm a bit busy at the moment (Ha!) If you use on of those `move input focus with pointer' patches/hacks, you may be in for a shock.
I am intrested in contacting other Arc users of POV (or any platform), to swap SDF's and utilitys. I have written a Torus generator for 1.0, and a sort of spiral thingy generator, they are un relased.
!Help file for Bifrost.
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Boring introduction.
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Bifrost is a 24-Bit colour picker that is intended to be used in conjunction with POVray, (Persistence Of Vision raytracer). It allows you to choose colours and make colour maps without stumbling wildly in the dark over the exact proportions of red, green and blue.
You will get the most out of this if you’ve used POV¹ a bit and are now beginning to think ‘this is very nice, but doing such and such a thing is difficult‘. One of these things is probably making colour maps, and straight colours. No doubt you’ve thought ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Risc-OS compliant colour picker, like in paint, and a colour map maker for POV‘.
Well That’s exactly what this is!
¹ If you have never heard of POV, its a very good raytracer, ported to the arc by Pete Goodwin. If you like pretty pictures and have the patience to wait while they render, get a copy, you will not be disappointed.
How to use Bifrost.
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** At the moment Bifrost supports minimalist interactive help. **
** More should be added by the time you read this. **
If you are one of those infuriating people who refuses to read instructions, or some one who has a reasonable amount of experience with Risc-OS Apps, then you will probably want some kind of quick introduction to this App. Their are three points to note.
Most colours can be dragged any where else, experiment to find out.
Colours in colour maps can be removed with ADJUST
Colours can be typed directly into a SDF using the Export window,
again experiment to find out.
This is probably the hardest bit of any program, explaining to the user (You !) how to use it, when you’ve, (me this time) have just spent a week or so writing it. I know perfectly well how it works, so trying to forget all of that and explain it to somebody else (whom I can’t see, let alone gesticulate to), is tricky. Oh well, here goes.
Double-Click on the rainbow icon to start up Bifrost, and Click SELECT on the iconbar icon. Two windows will open, the one on the right that looks like a juvenile albino chessboard, is the Scratch Pad, used for storage of colours, and the complicated one on the left is the Work Area, used for manipulating colours. Ok so far?, Yes?, Good. Just to simplify matters further the names of both windows are on the top of the prospective windows, couldn’t be easier. We shall refer to these names thought this file.
Pressing MENU over the IconBar icon produces a menu with the standard Info and Quit at the top and bottom and three other items in between. As you will probably know the ampersand (...) after the item names indicates that they refer to dialog boxes. Work Area... and Scratch Pad... we have already seen, Export.. opens the export window which we will come to in time. Clicking ADJUST on the iconbar icon will also open the Export window.
Now, in the Work Area window there are 4 main areas.
The long bar at the top, which is currently showing a nice Gray scale blend, (pretty isn’t it, looks even better in a 256 colour mode, change to one now), this un-surprisingly is an area for producing blends and getting colours from the middle of blends. It’s called the Colour Mix area, which is why it says colour mix below it. To use it drag a colour to either of the squares at the beginning and end and it will magically blend the two colour together. Intermediate colours can then be dragged out of the middle bar and used elsewhere.
In the middle, there are two structures, on the left is a standard colour picker, and on the right is a large white square, showing the current colour. Underneath this is a writable icon which is probably showing the word ‘<Main>’ to show that their is no named colour here. To the right of the main colour display is a Menu icon, Click on it and you get a menu with three entries. Defaults gives a sub-menu listing some default basic colours, all the standard ones are there. User goes to a sub-menu which will probably say ‘<None defined>’ why this is so we will see later. The third and last area is blank. What’s the point of that I here you cry?, well if you move the pointer over the blank area, a caret will appear and you can type things in. The purpose of this is so that you can name colours for easy reference later, (and they can also be #Declared in SDF’s). Once a colour is named its name will appear below the main colour display square icon thingy.
The un-coloured bar at the bottom is the Colour Map area, dragging colours into here will start making a map. Clicking ADJUST on a dragged in colour will delete it, they may sometimes be hard to find.
Now you will probably be wondering what the Export window does, but before we can use it we need some colours. So...
Tutorial.
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If you’ve been playing with the App quit it and start afresh. For the purposes of this tutorial we will make a few colours and a colour map.Click SELECT on the iconbar icon and then Click MENU on the menu icon next to the main colour display thingy. Then go to the Defaults menu and click on Red. The main colour display thingy will then turn red and the word Red will appear underneath the main colour box icon.
Happy so far? good, you can now choose colours from the defaults menu. Give yourself a pat on the back and play around with this for a bit until you’re perfectly happy with it, then choose Red again and Drag it to the left hand box at the end of the colour mix area, (above the ‘C’ of Colour Mix), Woah, exciting, the Red and the white are mixed together to produce many interesting shades of pink.
Ok now choose one of the other colours from the defaults menu (the Greys are pretty boring, see for yourself) and drag it to the right hand box, again, many nice shades of colour, play with this for a bit. IF you drag a colour over an existing one it is overwritten. If you try dragging the same colour to each end, the whole bar goes that colour all the way along.
Righty-ho, now we can make pretty intermediate shades of colour, this looks nice, but you will have to agree it’s not very useful. Bur wait, find a shade of colour you like in the middle of the blend and press and hold down SELECT in the middle of it, you can drag out the colour!. Drag a colour from the blend into the main colour display area, it will change to that colour and underneath it will say ‘<From Blend>’. If you want play around with the slider bars to the left until you are happy with this colour and then bring up the menu from the menu icon again. Now move the pointer over the writable icon until the claret appears and type in a suitable name for your colour, (‘Light-Purple-Pink’, ‘Aardvark_Yellow’ etc.). You cannot type spaces or numbers since POV doesn’t like them, (You can use an underscore ‘_’ (⇧–) as a substitute for a space), you are limited to a maximum of 19 characters which should be sufficient for most purposes. When you press Return or Click on the menu item the ‘<From Blend>’ underneath the icon will change to the name you’ve typed in. Look at the user menu, it will now contain the name you typed in. Clicking on the name will replace the colour in the main colour area with the one you just named. If necessary you can drag colours to the scratch pad and back again as a tempora
