This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
Search Results (120 messages)
I don't stop by Amiga Arts much these days but I happened to pop my head in and saw your message. For future reference, VRLI maintains a section in the Graphics A Vender Forum, GO VRLI or GO GRAPHAVEN. Both Clint and I check messages there a few times a…
Ron, Thanks for the info about the Mac using HFS format on CD-ROM's I was unaware of that. I guess the Mac has to do everything it's own way! John.
Laurie, I haven't been in the Amiga forums in a few weeks and only today say your message regarding the Vistapro CD-ROM. I thought virtually all newer CD-ROMs on the PC were ISO-9660 — maybe the Mac is different. Of course that only means you can access the data (landscapes,…
Adib, Since you have a PC download LPARSER and LVIEWER from the Graphics Developer forum. It's a freeware L-System generator (command line driven, no user interface) that can output in several formats (RAW, DXF, POV, Renderstar). It comes with control strings that can build trees, bugs, etc. You might be…
Laurie, This message is really intended for all Vistapro users but your's was the last message in the thread… I don't know if Clint made this clear, but the current Vistapro CD-ROM for the PC is ISO-9660 format so the Amiga Vistapro can use all the landscape directly from it.…
Angelo, Vistapro uses fractal subdivision to create the 3D textures. So there will always be an event horizon where one polygon becomes two. The only way to eliminate the noise is to antialias it away. John.
Angelo, About the only thing you can do to reduce the "fault-line" in Vistapro is to render at twice the image size that you want and use HALFTGA.EXE or HALFPCX.EXE to reduce the files as they're rendered using the batch processing function in Vistapro 3.1. HALFTGA and HALFPCX shrink TGA…
Steven, I'm sure you'll like the 3.1 version of Vistapro. But don't expect to render a DXF landscape in 3DS and get results like Vistapro's. About the best you can get out of 3DS will be similar to Vistapro at Polygon Size 1 with no texture. The DXF files don't…
Dennis, I'm sure you'll like the 3.1 version of Vistapro. But don't expect to render a DXF landscape in 3DS and get results like Vistapro's. About the best you can get out of 3DS will be similar to Vistapro at Polygon Size 1 with no texture. The DXF files don't…
John, Under the current design of Vistapro there's no way of using the alpha channel from a TGA32 file, although that's a possibility in the future. What's a few more megabytes of RAM anyway! Vistapro 3.1 can save Vistapro DEM files as a DXF object (polyface mesh). If you mark…
Vistapro will quite easily render realistic looking images from USGS DEM data. Vistapro also has the ability to overlay a PCX image onto the landscape. The problem I foresee you having is aligning the DEM data with the image data; and you will need some other software to produce the…
David, That's right, you would use Vistapro to render the backgrounds scenes and then 3DS to render the foreground objects. A crude list of steps: 1) Save landscape as DXF from Vistapro. 2) Load DXF landscape into 3DS, use it as a matte. Set up the rest of the scene…
James, We made the Vistapro 3.1 product announcment here a few days ago; maybe it's already scrolled off. 3.1 has Save DXF to save the landscape (but not the trees, fractal detail, etc), Save Texture Map, and a program that translates 3DS VUE files into Vistapro scripts (to sync the…
Rich, The 3.1 upgrade is the PC software, but you can use all the DEM files (except the session files) on the Amiga. There is a special up/cross grade price for Amiga Vistapro owners. I'll make sure Clint sees you message and emails you the info… John.
John, You can download a functional demo version of Vistapro from DL 15 of GraphAVen, GO VRLI for short. The demo is called VP3DMO.EXE. John.
Fredrik, Everyone involved in the Vistapro 3.1 release has different types of tape drives so we're having trouble getting all the pieces to one place! (3.1 will come on CD-ROM.) That problem should be solved sometime this week so the release is a week or two away at best. The…
If your Vistapro is older than about 7 months old you must have 1.0 (there never was a 2.0 on the PC). If you liked 1.0 you're gonna love 3.0 or 3.1. VRLI has been charging $45 for the upgrade from 1.0 to 3.0. My guess is they'll charge you…
I think VRLI plans to charge their usual upgrade price ($45) for Vistapro 3.0 to 3.1 — maybe even less since it's only a decimal point change in the version number. I'll post an official announcement here when 3.1 is ready…
I'll make an official annoucement here when Vistapro 3.1 is available. Hope you all like it….
Being the author of Vistapro, my opinion is somewhat biased, but… Vistapro does generate landscapes that make good backgrounds for 3DS and it can generate fly throughs in both TGA and PCX formats. It also comes with tools to join the PCX files into FLC animations. If you want to…
Ron, RL> could you use VistaMorph to alter the seasons? Yes. Morphing the shape of the landscape is optional. You can alter only the other settings if that's what you want. For instance you could change the tree colors from green to orange and yellow over a number of frames.…
Jonathan, Thanks for the detailed information about the Emplant. Mac emulation is trivial on the Amiga since the Amiga can directly execute Mac programs — all the "emulator" does is replace low level Mac system calls with equivalent Amiga routines. Under these conditions you would expect to see an A4000…
Nick, VistaMorph started out as a program for morphing one Vistapro landscape into another. For instance, you could smoothly morph Mount St. Helens into Crater Lake. It grew into a more general purpose "control" program that can also "morph" many of the settings withing Vistapro during an animation. For instance…
Jonathan, What exactly is the PC module for the Emplant? Is is a software x86 emulator or is is an actual x86 processor? John.
Donald, Is PCTask a software PC emulator? I suspect most of the software emulators won't be able to run VP3 since it runs in protected mode and uses the x86's MMU for virtual memory management. If PCTask can run Windows in "enhanced" mode it will probably run VP3 — and…
Daniel, I'll email you a GIF and DXF…. I suggest you download the Vistapro demo from VRLI's forum (GO VRLI). It's mostly functional so you be able to tell a lot about what the program can do. 386 or better with 4MB required…. John.
GIFDXF does not convert b/w GIF images into vector files the way you're thinking. It converts 8 bit GIF files (maybe lesser color too) into DXF polyface mesh files. It does so by converting each pixel into a point and then connecting all the points into faces. The altitude at…
John, From my own observations programming on both the Amiga and the PC, similar instructions run about the same speed on a 60040 and 80486. C compilers on the Amiga are real trash and generate code that is half as fast as the 32 bit compilers on the PC. And…
Don, I don't need benchmarks of "real" 486 machines, I know how fast they are. You'll find that a 486-33 runs Vistapro about twice as fast as an A4000. What I'm curious about seeing on the Amiga is how fast the IBM emulators can run Vistapro. Those with real 80×86…
Don, I would be curious to see how fast your PC emulators run Vistapro. You will need a 386 or better (either real hardware or software emulation) and 4MB RAM (actually VP3 PC will run with 2MB RAM but we say 4 to be safe). The CD ROM should be…
Erik, It's sad to hear you didn't finish the ringworld animation. Maybe you'll get around to it eventually…. Let me make sure I understand what you're saying about the dithering problem. You're talking about pixel dithering (PixDith) right? Are you using Random or Ordered dither (or both)? Are you rendering…
Don, I think Opal did offer a board a while back — but Clint was too busy at the time. His priority at the time was to get all the AGA modes working. Having been a hardware developer myself I know that you get tons of request from "developers, reviewers…
Laurie, Your friend> Why cant I or how can I render only a particular frame Your friend> or part of a VistaPro animation … something he is Your friend> able to do in Imagine. Because Vistapro is not Imagine! But seriously: There are a few approaches to "previewing" a Vistapro…
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WIN32S anyone?
Message #57294
Gus, Flashtek's number is 800-397-7310. John.
Daniel, DW> Vistapro 3D … the best implementation ever. Only because there's not much else out there! The implementation works but it's not especially easy to use. I plan to make it friendlier in the next release — probably as simple as a single command. It will also have the…
Ali, AK> MakePath Flight Director manual, page 15 "… value is in AK> kilometers per hour, assuming a playback speed of 30 fps" I forgot about that setting in MakePath. In any case, that value is very approximate. If you need to make two animations, one at 30 fps for…
Ingo, Gary Yost just sent me the information needed to convert field of view to focal length. VUE2SCR.EXE should be ready for beta testing this afternoon. Thanks for your efforts though. John.
Danial, I'm glad to see your 3D stuff is selling well. And thanks for the kind remarks about Vistapro's 3D generation a while back in this thread. I read somewhere that Sega's head mounted VR system is not stereo. It's a single lo-res LCD with lenses and mirrors that make…
Mike, VP3+DXF will be available to users of any version (except the demo) of Vistapro. Probably at less than the price of upgrading to VP3 ($45) from an earlier version. It won't become the regular shipping version of VP3 since it will run very slowly (1/2 speed) if you don't…
John, I kludged up a version of VP3 with DXF which overlaps sub-objects at the edges as I described before. As I expected, there was no discontinuity at the intersection of the two objects. I'll email the GIF files to you so you can see the results. One image has…
John, I havn't had to try it out yet in 3DS. But note that a decent renderer, with Z buffering, should properly hide the lowered flaps. John.
Ingo, I'll be looking into the transformation from 3DS focal length to VP3 focal length shortly. In Vistapro I the focal length is proportional to 1/tan(field_of_view). From a quick inspection of the standard lenses in 3DS, this didn't seem to be the case there. "Tax deductable" means that the item…
Ali, I forgot to ask about this the other day… What do you mean by "choosing between PAL or NTSC timing" in Vistapro? Vistapro is frame based — it knows nothing about how fast it's output will be displayed. With the VUE to SCR converter it will generate one Vistapro…
Mike, The DXF-output version of Vistapro and VUE->SCR conversion utility could be available in as little as a week or two. I originally wrote Vistapro as an entertainment product — to entertain ME! I think you'll find if fun to play with. I like think of the product as a…
Ingo, Vistapro 3.0 can still use script files from 1.0. 3.0 has a few hundred new new script commands with which you can control most functions of the program from a script. Your conversion program should be of use to both 1.0 and 3.0 users. (For those of you wondering…
John, You must be misunderstanding me at a very fundamental level because you're arguing my half of the argument! Consider the following surface (I not going to make the surfaces "rough" because that's to difficult to show in ascii): .——-.——-.——-.——-.——-.——-. . = point – = face which gets split into…
John, As it turns out a .VUE file's "camera" command is perfect for Vistapro. The arguments are the camera's X,Y,Z coordinates, the target's X,Y,Z coordinates, the roll (bank) of the camera, and the focal length. The camera and target coordinates and roll work the same way as in Vistapro. The…
Ali, AK> I have two PCs churing out 3DS/VistaPro as samples for a feature. Could you send me a sample of your work on NTSC VHS? I'm always curious to see what people are doing with Vistapro. AK> One thing I noticed was if one lays in, say stars, the…
John, The idea is that the two seperate surfaces intersect each other. Each one is itself smoothly shaded. I do not rely on the renderer to smooth between the seperate objects. Since they are the same shape (except for the very small bend near the edges which causes the intersection…
Mike, MK> I guess there's then no way to do flybys or other such stuff Vistapro has the ability to render sequences of images from an ascii based scripting language similar (but not the same) to 3DS's .VUE files (see pages B-8 through b-10 in the 3DS manual). I plan…
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