{"id":101,"date":"2011-02-07T21:32:44","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T21:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/?p=101"},"modified":"2011-02-07T21:34:41","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T21:34:41","slug":"3d-spectacular-cu-amiga-december-1994","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/?p=101","title":{"rendered":"3D Spectacular (CU Amiga December 1994)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Editor’s note: this article appeared in the December 1994 issue of CU Amiga, and ran over 4 pages)<\/em>
\nCast your mind back to late 1986. In computer shops around the country, an incredible plague was appearing in any available window space. The plague was known as the Juggler demo, and is quite possibly the only disease to be contracted visually. \"\"<\/a>Once Juggler had been seen, an irresistible urge to buy an Amiga followed. For those who didn’t contract the Amiga virus from Juggler, let me explain: one for the first animated demos on the Amiga was of a robot juggling 3three metal balls and I still remember closely scrutinising the animation and eagerly pronouncing that, “you can see the reflections of the other balls on the balls”.<\/p>\n

This was new. This was animation. This was ray-tracing. And this was on the Amiga. Eric Graham, author of the masterpiece, beavered away to produce Sculpt 3D, one of the first commercial ray tracers for the Amiga. At the time, this caused a storm: $99.95 bought you a software package capable of modelling complex objects and rendering them in all their glory using phong shading, different colours and some limited texture effects. This rendered image could be saved as an IFF or even to 24 bit hardware frame buffers. Remember this was 1987, and 24 bit was still very high end. The Amiga crowbarred its way into the 3D market…<\/p>\n

Soon, the raytracing bandwagon was well and truly rolling. The Silver appeared from Impulse offering power along with a new definition of the words, “user unfriendly”. Then Sculpt came along and added the dimension of time, bringing animation. Turbo Silver appered, offering more power yet no real interface improvement. When Newtek, a small company at this stage, was primarily making video digitisers, Activa offered Real 3D which gained many followers with its unique hierarchical system. Turbo Silver grew into Imagine, offering yet more flexibility and a new interface. Many more packages became available, all with strengths and weaknesses. Imagine 2 arrived and gained many followers due to its flexibility. Then Newtek got bigger and created a video revolution with their Toaster editing system, which came with a free rendering package called Lightwave 3D.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 1993. Activa announces Real 3Dv2 with incredible list of features such as skeletons, b-splines, soft shadows and much more. Imagine 2 program disks can be had for a pittance and raytracing is undergoing an explosion on the Amiga. Imagine 3 is announced claiming to do everything you could ever require from a raytracer. The Toaster is heavily used in TV, with names such as Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV under its belt. Lightrave, an intriguing system allowing Lightwave to be run on PAL systems without the Toaster is released yet it is prohibitively expensive and, technically, illegal.<\/p>\n

Newtek are not happy with the situation and announce that Lightwave will be available legally for PAL systems. Which, by a fairly direct route, brings us up to the present. The Amiga is still ruling the 3D roost. Real 3D is at revision 2.49, Imagine 3 has arrived (only just) and Lightwave 3D 3.5 is still recovering from jet lag…<\/p>\n

As each of these three packages have a pricetag which will stretch mere mortals’ wallets, you’ll want to know where you stand when you’re buying one – or at least dreaming of it.<\/p>\n

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.
\n<\/p>\n

Imagine 3<\/h2>\n

After a long wait and the release of Imagine 2.9 to whet registered users’ appetites, Imagine 3 has arrived. The box is excitingly plastered with suitably cool renderings and the standard blurb telling you this is all you’ll ever want as a raytracer.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Imagine’s way of working has been to provide a different editor for different elements in the creation of your masterpiece. Consequently, six editors present themselves upon loading and each must be mastered to get the best from this system. Objects can be quickly constructed in the forms editor. The detail editor can add to these or create further objects from primitives, points and faces. Splines can be edited in the spline editor and fonts can be loaded here to be turned into objects. Movement is defined in the Cycles editor. The scene editor lays out part of your animations and the action editor fine tunes this.<\/p>\n

Imagine provides a bones system with kinematics. Complex skins can be tacked over simple bones and can then be made to move when the bone moves. This allows for natural-looking movements which work well, but all is not what it should be : the manual explanation of how Imagine’s bones work is bad.<\/p>\n

Animation is achieved either with the cycles editor, action editor and scene editor. Practically everyone I have spoken to regarding Imagine thinks that the addition of states (for animation) is the best feature, making animation much easier : I agree.<\/p>\n

Imagine provides a wealth of procedural textures ; many more than lightwave. These are superb, if somewhat memory consuming. There’s no limit on the amount of texture maps you can apply to an object, either. Textures are worth the upgrade charge alone to registered users of version 2.<\/p>\n

Another nice thing with Imagine is the Boolean operations. However, these can cause “strange” error messages and the only help the manual provides is “Try moving one of the objects”.<\/p>\n

Global and local effects have also been added such as lens flare, depth of field and more. These are all set up in the action editor’s window and are well featured if a bit complex to use.<\/p>\n

All is not rosy with Imagine though. The two major things determining the usefulness of a proram are, in my opinion, the interface and the manual. Imagine’s user interface isn’t bad, but needs a complete rethink. I was most at home with Imagine 2’s interface and not much has changed since that but after using the other two packages, Imagine has the silliest interface : why take six editors to do the work of one? The infuriating refreshes, which cannot be interrupted, drive you up the wall : press the cursor key twice in rapid succession and it redraws your wireframes twice. You’ve got to wait for the first update to finish, then the second one.<\/p>\n

The manual is not bad, proving you can switch your brain off to the grammatical errors, typos and sheer incorrectness. It’s a major step forward from Imagine 2, but still is poor.<\/p>\n

It’s worth mentioning that Imagine offers the ability to save and load AutoCad DXF files, which are the closest thing 3D has got to a standard format. However, this version seems buggy on the loading and saving.<\/p>\n

Imagine crashes with alarming regularity on a 10MB machine – push it to anywhere near full memory usage and stand well back – it’ll take the whole machine out, not just it’s own task. Even with no problems with lack of memory, Quick Render locked my machine (and others I tested this on) completely for around 30 seconds.
\n<\/p>\n

Lightwave<\/h2>\n

Lightwave has two sections to it, these being Layout and Modeler (it’s how they spell it). Objects are built in Modeler and are then coloured, textured, surfaced, positioned and animated in Layout.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Modeler, whilst at first appearing fiddly, grew on me. The tools it provides are simple yet effective and are all in one place (unlike Imagine). Freeform modelling is a bit tricky, but the Magnet tools (which displaces points in a defined box depending on how close they are to the centre of the box) amongst others make this possible. Subdivide, used to create more polygons and hence a smoother object, has a very useful option of metaform. This tries to smooth objects : start with a box and perform metaform subdivide a few times to get a sphere!<\/p>\n

One problem that should be mentioned is that the boolean functions are not quite perfect – they don’t produce the expected results all the time.<\/p>\n

Modeler provides a tri-view of your object and an either static or moving preview of your object. This preview can be grabbed and rotated with the mouse and is again a very good feature. Polygons that are created in Modeler are given a surface name – to Modeler this is nothing more than the name.<\/p>\n

Ten layers (or worktops) are provided. These can be either in the foreground (active), in the background (inactive) or simply off. Another point worth mentioning is that a grid snap is automatically on. I like the grid as it automatically resises when the zoom changes, but it can be disabled if needs be.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Moving into layout, things get really interesting. Animation is simply achieved with keyframing but this leads to very quick development of complex scenes. Lights are either point sources or spot sources and their intensity throughout an animation can be controlled using an envelope. Envelopes are a graphical representation of an attribute of a particular thing and exist for most things, such as light intensity, lens flare effect, zoom factor, fog controls and more.<\/p>\n

Lightwave is now famous for supporting lens flares and the effect is simple to produce : the lights menu has a toggle switch to turn a light into one. Lens flares are nice, but overused in my humble opionion (but it didn’t stop me from using them – oops!)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Textures cannot be mixed : you are limited to one at a time. However, every attribute (specularity, colour and all) can have a map controlling it. A good feature is the displacement map (just like Imagine’s strangely named Appliqu\u00c3\u02c6 map) which moves polygons according to the grey value of the pixels closest to the polygon on the map. Another nice one is the diffusion map, which changes the intensity of the objects colour but not the base colour. For example, you can create a pink object and use a green marble map as a diffusion map to get pink marble – excellent.<\/p>\n

Motion blur and depth of field (both controllable with envelopes) are available along with field rendering. Layout will also import a wide variety of different formats; many more than the other two.<\/p>\n

It’s worth mentioning that buying Lightwave will not allow you to make Babylon 5 – it wasn’t modelled using Modeler or fully animated with Layout.
\n<\/p>\n

Real 3D<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>Real 3D approaches the 3D world from a totally different perspective (no pun intended). True CSG is employed along with b-spline freeform modelling. What this equates to is Boolean operations that work and smooth surfaces without any faceting.\u00c2\u00a0 Interesting side effects are that lenses can be modelled realistically.<\/p>\n

The package still offers polygon capabilities, but not in the same way as any other package I have used. There are many different ways of making and manipulating polygons in Real, and it’s beyond the scope of the review to go into them here. It’s slightly immaterial as Real’s true power lies in b-splines. Imagine any surface and with time, patience, skill and Real you can create it. For freeform modelling, no other package is quite as powerful.<\/p>\n

The way objects are linked together in Real is unique, too. Forget grouping or parenting, a true heirarchical system lies at the heart of Real. Objects can be put into levels in much the same way as files can be put into directories. Anything above the current level in the heirarchy is a parent, so actions taken on the parent affect the children. Levels play a vital part every part of Real, including boolean operations and animation features.<\/p>\n

Real allows no limit on the amount of texture maps placed on an object. These maps can be parallel to a user defined plane, spherical, cylindrical, non-directional, circular or can be made to follow any b-spline surface.<\/p>\n

Different “handlers” for different aspects of the texture can be controlled using mathematical formulae, Real’s FORTH-like RPL language and more. Flexibility over textures is the impression I’m trying to get over.<\/p>\n

Animation in Real is, none too surprisingly, completely different too. Think of a way of moving an object and Real will probably have it. Briefly, Real allows “methods” to be defined, and there are currently 26 on it’s list. Of course, things can follow a path (and be made to rotate to follow the path too), but so much more can be done. Sweep will gain many friends as it allows a pivot point to be defined for an object (or objects) and then the motion of the other end of the object to be defined. To model a leg walking is simple with this : the hip is the pivot point, and the knee moves in an ellipsoid path. The heirarchical level system aids further the leg model : create a level inside the hip level with the shin moving (pivoting at the knee and sweeping at the foot) and you’re there.<\/p>\n

Real’s animation system is extremely powerful and exploits the heirarchical system of real perfectly. Again, a full description of the system would take pages and pages and pages. Another feature of it worth mentioning is that it is a true particle system with collision detection. Collisions are still only around 80% accurate but are much better than what the others offer (ie nothing).\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Real, like the other two, supports bones. The joints of the skeleton allow fidelity and friction to be changed, controlling how accurately the object follows the bone at the joint. Bones are a very well implemented part of Real and are refreshingly simple and powerful.<\/p>\n

Rendering controls are all there too. If b-spline objects are taking too long to render, the option exists to convert them into as many polygons as you want for rendering. Renders of any size can be put out to a file, window or directly to 24-bit boards. Depth of field is available, as is antialiasing (to different levels) and motion blur. It’s worth mentioning that Real’s soft shadows (or penumbra) are true shadows and are correctly formed, unlike LightWave.<\/p>\n

Finally, Real’s user interface is completely configurable. It can be made to run on any available screenmode with whatever configuration of windows you require. This, contrary to what some people think, is not a bad thing. Your workplace can be exactly how you want it : triview or single view, single or multiple select windows (for picking objects out of levels), as many tools as you want on screen and much more. Along with being able to make objects wireframe invisible, you can make Real a very nice place to work.
\n<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

All three are excellent packages. All three have their strengths and weaknesses. Real is superb for freeform modelling, complex animation and it’s sheer flexibility. Imagine has a wealth of procedural textures which everyone likes. Lightwave is incredibly easy to pick up and use.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Imagine scene<\/p><\/div>\n

\"real3d<\/a>

real3d scene<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lightwave Scene<\/p><\/div>\n

With something as complex as a rendering package, the manual is essential. Lightwave is good, but manuals are crippling both Real and Imagine. Impulse has never been a company for good manuals, and it’s a shame to report Imagine 3 continues the trend. It is rushed and has not been proof-read. Phrases like “Imagnie” drive you mad and the tutorial on bones is, quite simply, a great bit of creative fiction. The manual also begs the question of why there’s 150K of text files to read, as it was so obviously rushed. Real’s manual is complete but very heavy work and hard going.<\/p>\n

Real 3D – “Perhaps the most feature packed and open ended 3D software I’ve ever seen or used” says David Ingebretsen of Binary Illusions (a US company who produce 3D anims for broadcast and courtroom demos and use all three packages and the Video Toaster). It’s power is awesome : consequently harnessing this power may be seen as being difficult. It’s a completely new way of thinking for a 3D package too. Fortunately, technical support in the UK is excellent. Andy from Activa UK knows Real inside out and is on the end of a phone whenever you need him. This is worth bucketloads. He’ll quite happily spend time to make sure you get your money’s worth out of this. One thing is missing, and that’s the now overly used clich\u00c3\u00a9 of lens flares. In real life, people carefully set scenes up so as to minimise the fault (which lens flares are) but every 3D animator seems to use them to death. Still, they are a necessary evil and it’s the only thing that real is missing. I’d also like to see more examples of procedural textures as they are possible with Real just a tad more complicated. At least you can write your own ones, though, given time and skill with RPL. I like the way the system is also truly multitasking – you really can do as much as possible at the same time without a crash. Imagine should look carefully at this.<\/p>\n

Imagnie’s (sic) lens flare is fully featured if unnecessarily complex, as is the Depth of Field function. I love the procedural textures, though why Impulse didn’t license them from Apex (the producers of Essence) and spend their time improving the interface is beyond me. The six editor system (five of which I was used to from Imagine 2) seems unnecessary after using only one in Real and two in Lightwave. I’m disappointed with Imagine 3 – it should have been so much more. I’ve heard reports from Stateside users saying that 3.1 fixes much of this, but I haven’t seen it so cannot comment.<\/p>\n

Of the interfaces, Imagine also irked me the most. Non-interruptable refreshes are mind numbingly bad and make for slow going, even on a 50MHz 030\/882 machine.<\/p>\n

Lightwave is the least powerful of all three with the weakest-featured modeller. The idea of a bone not being linked to an object but having a radius of influence needs a complete re-think. However, with these limited bones it is possible to create nice effects if you are careful not to let things overlap (all hell breaks loose). Without a shadow of a doubt though, it is easily the most productive of the three – it takes seconds to set out a convincing scene using the keyframer. The interface is very well designed : someone thought about it a lot to the extent that when you press the “Help” key you get a list of keyboard shortcuts that apply to what you are doing at the moment. It’s very welcoming. Modeler (how NewTek spell it) is a bit strange to get used to, but once you’re used to it it’s pretty good to use and will do most things. The manual is a good idea. Page 1 is part one of the tutorial. The tutorials are a good idea too – it leads you gently in and then tells you if you don’t understand anything, use the reference section (which is very well written).<\/p>\n

Despite being the weakest featurewise, Lightwave is at the top because of it’s sheer productivity for easy animations – it’s quality of renders is also better than Imagine. I’m not alone in the view that it’s the best phong shader on the Amiga. The features that it does have allow for excellent effects in animations or with stills. Real is up there too, as I reckon it can be just as productive as Lightwave when you’re fully used to it. I’ve witnessed it being used by a pro : they were lightning fast at using it. Both need slight improvements and I’ve no doubt they will get them. I’ll re-iterate that Imagine could and should have been so much more. Third party support for Lightwave and Real is rosy too, with Essence being released for both and a plethora of add-ons for Lightwave such as WaveMaker and Sparks. But they are for another feature…
\n
\nSpeed tests
\nTo generate the test image, each program took:
\nImagine 1hour 46 mins
\nLightwave 2hours 52 mins
\nReal 3d 3 hours 2mins<\/p>\n

Real took longer due to the use of splines to improve quality. Imagine was fastest at rendering but took longest to set up.
\nPackages were asked to produce an 800×600 24 bit image with anti-aliasing, shadows, etc. The test machine was an A3000 with a 50MHz 030\/882 and 10MB of RAM.<\/p>\n

A Question of Speed?
\nBy now, most people have heard of a device called the Raptor offering incredible rendering power for around \u00c2\u00a315000 plus VAT. With this little beauty, Lightwave renders can be achieved at around 40 times the speed of that of a 4000\/40 : quite nippy really. For Real power though, RealSoft can provide Andre ; Automated Network Distributed Rendering Engine. With this, you can render on as many machines as you have on a network including more Amigas, Pentium PCs, Dec Alpha workstations (nippy) and Silicon Graphics machines.<\/p>\n

Contrary to popular belief, Lightwave hasn’t got the monopoly on snappy rendering : check with Activa UK for more information as they’ve got two Dec Alpha workstations linked up at the moment. Andy Leaning, are you still alive? Can you still walk? That’s real power for you…
\n
\nBust that Jargon
\nPolygons
\nTwo dimensional structures with any number of sides. These are linked together in three dimensions to make oobjects.<\/p>\n

Splines
\nMathematical models capable of simulating almost any smooth curve.<\/p>\n

B-Splines
\nSplines in 3 dimensions, allowing for incredibly smooth, non-faceted surfaces.<\/p>\n

Phong Shading
\nA method of making polygons look rounded. The shading of the polygon depends upon surrounding polygons’ orientation.<\/p>\n

CSG
\nConstructive Solid Geometry. Instead of polygons, structures are made from solid structures. This allows true Boolean operations without having to have a mass of polygons.<\/p>\n

Particle System
\nEach object is treated as a particle and can be given a velocity, acceleration and other attributes. Set the system going and watch the collisions happen as they would do in real life (in theory, at least!).<\/p>\n

Motion Blur
\nTo compensate for an animation with not many frames per second, motion blur literally blurs the individual frames giving the effect of a smoother animation.<\/p>\n

Lens Flare
\nWhen a camera lens looks at a light source, artefacts sometimes invade the picture such as reflections from internal lenses and more. It’s something people have been trying to avoid for years…<\/p>\n

Depth of Field
\nNext time a photograph you take is out of focus, tell people it’s a depth of field effect and tell them off for being so stupid. Depth of field makes things in the distance blurred and out of sharp focus for more realistic images.<\/p>\n

Boolean Operations
\nA system of joining two or more objects together. Using these operations, windows can be cut in things, apple cores created and much more. Real’s boolean operations are superb, Lightwave’s are satisfactory. Imagine’s almost work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Editor’s note: this article appeared in the December 1994 issue of CU Amiga, and ran over 4 pages) Cast your mind back to late 1986. In computer shops around the country, an incredible plague...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amiga","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}