#Vistapro 3.0 ?
11 messages in this thread
So, do a lot of people use Vistapro for making 3D backgrounds for 3dS? It
looks like just the tool I've been looking for. I have Vistapro v.1, which was
included on the Inside 3d Studio CD-ROM, but it's pretty limited. Is 3.0 worth
69$ (or 45$ on floppy I hear)? And how does 3ds deal with the super high
polygon count for a DXF exported Vistapro file?
Steven:
Actually, VistaPro 3.1 is the version which has DXF support. When
exporting landscapes as DXF files, you have control over the amount of
detail that you want to export, so you won't always have a huge number of
polygons. VistaPro is still primarily a landscape renderer, but with 24
bit support and fractal texturing, the differences between 1.0 and 3.1 are
enormous. In addition, the CD contains MakePath, the animation script
utility and VistaMorph, a landscape morphing utility and about 3500
landscapes.
Clint <VRLI>
Clint,
I have a question regarding VistaPro's output. I understand that the fractal
textures increase their resolution as you get closer. What seems to be
happening though is that this increase in resolution is occuring in a
non-gradual manner and thus you get a traveling "fault-line" of sorts where a
noticable change in the texture map follows the camera as it moves. Is there a
way of eliminating or reducing this effect?
Ang
Angelo:
The problem is that polygons tend to grow larger in integral
steps. One solution is to render oversize images and shrink them
using the HALFTGA or HALFPCX utilities. This tends to average out
that kind of detail. I will ask John to read your message and see if
he has anything to add.
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 and PCX files to half size (both
dimensions) and produce antialiased output files — the fault-line (I call it
the event-horizon) disappears in the antialiasing. You can reduce the texture
level by one setting (use medium instead of high) to keep the rendering time
down. Even without considering the fault-line, animations look much better
with HALFTGA(TGA) antialiasing.
For instance, if you want 640×480 TGA files, render at 1280×960 and elect to
run HALFTGA.BAT when Vistapro asks for the optional batch file to execute after
each frame. The resulting output files will be shrunken from 1280×960 down to
640×480 immediately after each frame is saved to disk.
The batch files are standard DOS batch files so you can perform any function
(program) that you can form the command line or a DOS batch file.
John.
John,
Is the event horizon a fuction of how you'll "descretized" the fractal math ..
or is it a funtion of the math itself. If the former
. it might be a nice option to have control over the interval size (or number
of intervals) to allow the user to select how it is calculated.
Ang
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.
>>So there will always be an event horizon where one polygon becomes two.
Vistapro does black holes? <g>
Ahh, ok, thanks Clint.
It IS what I've been looking for.
But having v.1 is so teasing!
-S
Steven:
There is a demo version of 3.0 over in the VRLI library
(VP3DMO.EXE) which will let you get acquainted with the fractal
texturing and other new features of 3.0.
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 contain the fractal detail that Vistapro generates while
rendering. Even so, a small Vistapro landscape at full detail is a 13MB DXF
file (130,000 polygons). 3DS gets very sluggish when working with that amount
of data. A Vistapro landscape with all the fractal detail would be many
gigabytes as a DXF file.
Of even more importance is the program VUE2SCR.EXE which is included with the
CD-ROM. It translates 3DS VUE scripts into Vistapro format. This gives you the
ability to create a series of Vistapro images that are synchronized with 3DS's
camera. You can then use those images as backgrounds in 3DS.
John.