CompuServe Messages

1) VP renders terrain. It uses all sorts of little tricks to get as much realism as it can out of small data sets. Cliff algorithms. Recognition of the different behavior of snow and trees when given a mountain valley to play in. Random fractalization of surface normals for added roughness. Detail invention between data points. There is a program called dem23d which will take VP data and create a 3DS mesh for you. I have not tried using VP data in 3DS yet, so can not comment on how well this works. Since VP does all sorts of clever stuff between data points on the grid when rendering, you can not expect your 3ds rendering of VP's data to look as good as VP does. You can render in VP from way up high and save the resultant image for use as a texture map. I do not know how well this works. I used VP once to render an image with hills in the background and a devil's tower in the foreground. This I split up and applied to near and far items in 3DS and had a robot run around in this scenery. Like theater 'flats'. Looked pretty good. You can use it to render terrain made out of a 2d picture of your own. I draw terrain with a white airbrush on black in Fractal Paint and then bring it into VP. Works OK, but has some trouble that I plan on writing a solution for. 2) I bought mine at my local Egghead. 3) Just got VP for Windows with the CD of data for Mike a couple days ago. Cost $70+. Less than $80 before tax. 4) I forget if VP needs a 386 or math. But you probably want these anyway. I ran it well enough with 8meg. It runs happier with 20. VP has 4, I think, different sizes of terrain data grid. The largest gets very big and slow. 2050×2050 I think. Math coprocessor _may_ not make a difference. I don't know. Anybody? Any questions? – gruhn