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1992-05-06
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From: Steve Koren <koren@hpmoria.fc.hp.com>
Subject: submission: Scenery Animator vs. Vista Pro
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Jason L. Tibbitts III
Phase-Of-Moon: the moon is waxing crescent (7% illuminated)
Subject: REVIEW: Scenery Animator vs. Vista Pro
Keywords: application, graphics, 3d, rendering, landscape, commercial
Path: menudo.uh.edu
Distribution: world
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Reply-To: Steve Koren <koren@hpmoria.fc.hp.com>
--text follows this line--
This is a comparison review of Scenery Animator and Vista Pro. Both
programs have strengths and weaknesses and both are well worth owning for
anyone interested in rendering or animating landscapes.
Scenery Animator is available from:
Natural Graphics
P.O. Box 1963
Rocklin, CA 95677
916-624-1436
VistaPro is available from:
Virtual Reality Labs
2341 Ganador Court
San Luis Obispo CA 93401-9826
Scenery animator has a suggested price of $99, but mail order prices are
as low as $55. VistaPro is slightly more expensive, with a mail order
price of around $85. Both run under AmigaDos 1.3 or 2.04, can be HD
installed, and come with versions optimized for accelerated machines with
floating point coprocessors. I have tested both on an accelerated 2000,
but not a 3000 (although it is unlikely there would be any problems).
What are they?
--------------
Both of these programs load digital elevation data and create 3D landscape
images from that data. Digital elevation data is available from the
companies in formats designed to be used with their programs. Most of
this data is originally from the United States Geological Survey (USGS),
and can be purchased in mass quantities from USGS as well, although it
must be converted into a form which can be read by the programs.
Similarities
------------
Both Scenery Animator (hereafter referred to as S-A) and VistaPro
(hereafter referred to as V-P) permit you to control the observer
viewpoint and the "target" at which the observer looks. This is done in
an intuitive manner using the mouse and a contour map in both programs.
Both also permit you to enter coordinates as well for more precision.
Both programs also permit you to vary other aspects of the rendering, such
as the lighting angle (which controls shadows), the extent of detail in
the rendering, and the palette used for various aspects of the terrain.
Both will model water, rock, vegetation, and snow. Both will allow you to
create animations, although this process is cumbersome in V-P unless you
purchase an external program designed to ease the task. Both also support
IFF24 output for sending images to framebuffers.
What is different
-----------------
Rendering Quality:
Scenery Animator wins by a large margin. It is trivially easy to
produce stunningly beautiful renderings with only a small effort. The
results are very nice even using normal Amiga graphics, and get better
if you have a 24 bit output device. VistaPro can produce good results,
but they take more "tweaking" effort. Since USGS data covers the
entire United States (and some areas of Mars), there is a limit on the
amount of detail necessary. Most of the data stores elevations for
points 30 meters apart. This imposes a limit on the resolution of the
rendered scene, and V-P shows this especially when looking at terrain
which is near the observer. V-P addresses this by smoothing the
polygons. S-A addresses the limitation by filling in fractal data
between elevation points. The S-A method produces much better results
especially for terrain close to the observer. The only area of
rendering where V-P wins is that it produces nicer looking lakes than
S-A does. S-A will also generate very realistic looking fractal clouds
which can be animated to move across the landscape, something V-P does
not support.
Grades: Scenery Animator: A, VistaPro: C.
Easy of Use:
Scenery Animator also has the edge here. The main editor screen in V-P
is a contour map, over which you move the observer and viewpoint. This
means that you must perform at least a low resolution rendering to get
a good idea of how your scene will look. S-A shows you a filled
polygon preview of the scene which is usually enough to get a good feel
for how the scene will look. This preview even gives you some idea of
the effect of light angle so that you can see which areas will be in
shadows or "washed out". S-A also shows the view angle graphically on
the contour map. You can click on the preview window to move your
viewpoint around.
Grades: Scenery Animator: A-, VistaPro: C+.
Degree of Control:
VistaPro permits the user more control over the scene. It has some
limited abilities for "terraforming" built into the program - you can
add lakes and rivers, etc. S-A also has a few, but not as many. Both
programs let you control the elevation at which vegetation starts and
ends, at which snow starts on mountains, etc. V-P lets you render
scenes at night easily with a background starfield, which S-A will not
do, and it also lets you change the color of the sky from horizon to
zenith. The companion program "Terraform" available from VRLI lets you
change the terrain data in any manner you wish. V-P will also let you
control fog and haze effects, which S-A does not do.
Grades: Scenery Animator: C, VistaPro: B+ (A with Terraform).
Availibility of Data:
Both programs come with a limited supply of data on the original disk.
Both companies also offer other data disks for various geographically
interesting areas of the US, and VRLI offers some data from Mars as
well. VRLI offers more data than Natural Graphics does, partially
because V-P is an older and more mature program. S-A will, however,
load V-P scenery files but cannot append them into a larger terrain.
Both programs also permit you to create random fractal based scenery
based on a fractal seed and some other data such as the average height
of mountains. V-P has more controls for this creation, but the results
do not look like realistic terrain now matter how you tweak the
controls. S-A, on the other hand, produces beautiful fractal
landscapes with no effort. One almost might mistake them for the real
thing. This gives you an endless source of terrain to explore. So V-P
has more "native" real terrain locations, but S-A has an edge in the
creation of random fractal terrain.
Grades: Scenery Animator: B+, VistaPro: B+.
Animation Abilities:
Both programs let you create animations by rendering a large number of
individual frames in a batch mode. This process is very easily in S-A
- you create key frames and the program interpolates between them for a
given number of frames. For example, I recently made a 500 frame
animation by entering only 5 key frames. V-P, on the other hand, has
very cumbersome animation capabilities. You must enter the positions
of the observer and the viewpoint for each and every frame. However,
V-P has a companion program available, called "MakePath", which allows
you to more easily make script files for animations. MakePath is more
powerful than the keyframe mechanism in S-A, but it is an extra cost
program, and does not integrate well with V-P when compared to S-A's
smooth and well thought out keyframe system. In short, V-P when
combined with MakePath has an edge in power and flexibility, but S-A
provides much of this ability in an easier to use manner.
Also, S-A lets you create very large animations by loading several
contiguous terrain files into memory at once. The current release of
V-P is limited to a very small area, and you quickly run out of terrain
when making animations. The next upgrade to V-P is supposed to fix
this limitation. S-A will also let you define a "sliding box" around
your observer to avoid performing needless computations on scenery
which would be obscured anyway.
Grades: Scenery Animator: A-, VistaPro: C