Virtual Reality Madness & More!/Virtual.Reality.Madness.And.More.1994.Disk1.iso/vistapro/vista1.exe/MANUAL/CH1.TXT

Text File | 1993-08-02 | 12KB | 266 lines

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Chapter 1
Vistapro Users Manual
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INTRODUCTION TO VISTAPRO


WHAT IS VISTAPRO?
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Vistapro is a three dimensional landscape simulation program.
Using U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Digital Elevation Model
(DEM) data, Vistapro can accurately recreate real world
landscapes in vivid detail. As a fractal landscape generator,
Vistapro can create landscapes from a random seed number.
Vistapro supports over four billion different fractal
landscapes. Simply by changing a number, you can create whole
new worlds. In addition, by simply clicking on several buttons,
rivers and lakes can be created in a landscape where none
existed previously.

HOW VISTAPRO WORKS
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Vistapro uses a combination of artificial intelligence, chaotic
math, and a user definable set of values to simulate landscapes
in their natural state. At present, the USGS has converted
about 40% of the United States to DEM files which may be
potentially used with Vistapro. Vistapro is a single frame
generator, meaning that it acts like a camera; point and click
the camera and Vistapro will render a new view of the
landscape.

Landscapes can be viewed from a practically infinite
combination of heights, angles, and distances. Using the
combination of user controllable values and Vistapro's built-in
routines, landscapes can be made as realistic or as surreal as
desired. It is easy to alter tree and snow lines, haze,
exposure, rivers, lakes, and light sources to customize the
appearance of the landscape.

Vistapro uses data derived from United States Geologic Survey
Digital Elevation Mapping files for generating its images.
These files contain coordinate and elevation data at 30 meter
(roughly 100 ft.) increments. Each file used in Vistapro
contains about 65,000 elevation points and 130,000 polygons.

Vistapro doesn't know anything about what covers the terrain.
It doesn't know where the trees, roads or buildings are. It
does its best to color each polygon (based upon a few numbers
that you input) in a realistic way. It still can't draw each
rock and tree where they are in reality.

SOME USES FOR VISTAPRO
----------------------
Vistapro is not only of interest to scientists and engineers.
Artists, writers, teachers, game designers, travelers, and
people just looking for hours of entertainment will appreciate
Vistapro.

Artists can design realistic scenery as backgrounds for their
artwork. Writers can create worlds and see them through their
characters' eyes. Geography, geology, and meteorology teachers
can use Vistapro to breathe life into their subjects. Game
designers can make realistic or surrealistic scenery for
backgrounds in their games. Travelers, hikers, and backpackers
can preview their journeys.

Vistapro can be pure entertainment. Explore fascinating
terrains that you might never have a chance to see, or visit
distant planets that man has not yet trod. Build new worlds
that exist nowhere except in the imagination, and then visit
them as if they were really there. On the other hand, there are
many scientific and business applications for Vistapro.
Environmentalists, surveyors, geologists, architects and
engineers will all find Vistapro a useful adjunct to their
work.

SPEEDING UP VISTAPRO
--------------------
There are two ways to speed up Vistapro - strategy or brute
strength. After having used the program for a while, it becomes
easy to read the lower resolution settings in Vistapro to see
how the desired picture is developing. When the scene is
properly positioned and lighted, and when the tree line, snow
line, and water levels are set as desired, then and only then,
render the picture at the time-consuming full resolution mode.

The other alternative method of speeding up Vistapro's
rendering process is to add power to your machine. Vistapro is
programmed to use every available computing resource as
efficiently as possible. The time consuming rendering process
is a function of the enormous amount of computation that
Vistapro must do, not any lack of optimization of the program
itself. Vistapro will automatically look for and use whatever
processing resources are supplied.

Realistic ray traced CAD objects, detailed 3-D animations, and
realistic landscapes are all a part of the emerging software
categories called virtual reality, artificial reality, or
computer aided art. These categories all require immense
computational capacity, but as the cost of computing power
continues to plummet, these types of programs will become the
standard.

As a Vistapro user, you are pioneering virtual reality
exploration, and it is admittedly a bit tedious on a slower
machine. But, viewed another way, it is amazing that this type
of rendering can be done at all, let alone on a personal
computer. Until the advent of Vistapro, landscape renderings of
such realism were only available to users of mainframes and
supercomputers for government projects.

MAKING THE MOST OF VISTAPRO
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Making a stunning landscape in Vistapro requires the combined
eye of a photographer and the artistic sense of a painter, but
there are a few tips which can help improve your first
attempts:

Lighting
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Experiment with the lighting. If the light is coming from
behind the camera, then the camera scenes may appear rather
flat-there won't be a strong feeling of three-dimensionality.
Dramatic shadowing effects can be created by choosing the
proper lighting direction and angle.

With the power of Vistapro, an artist can choose to light the
scene in ways which could never occur in the real world, or, if
realism is desired, the correct solar position for that
particular season and geographic location and time of day can
be selected. Virtual Reality Labs' Distant Suns Windows program
can easily calculate such solar lighting conditions in order to
correctly set the light, target, and camera position to obtain
maximum realism in a rendering.

If lighting is left to chance, shadows may cover the scene
making it too dark. Setting the light source (the sun) at 45 to
90 degrees to the left or right of the camera gives the best
results. For example: if the camera is facing due north,
placing the sun at the southeast, east, southwest or west,
usually makes the best pictures.

Placing the sun directly behind the camera usually results in a
lack of three dimensionality and contrast, although there are
times when this is the desired effect. Back-lit scenes (for
example: camera facing north, sun shining from the north) can
also yield interesting images.

Snow and tree line setting considerations
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If the normal range of snow line and tree line is known,
Vistapro can be used in a very realistic way. Tree line varies
with latitude until, in arctic regions, it reaches sea level.
Snow levels vary with the weather and altitude.

A little research at the local library or even listening to the
weather on the evening news can provide increased realism in
Vistapro landscape rendering. Of course an artist needn't
follow the real world as an example. Set the tree and snow
lines wherever they make the picture most appealing. Imagine a
landscape as it might have looked during the last ice age - or
how it might look after severe global warming from the
greenhouse effect!

Changing colors
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Use the Color Control Panel to change the colors, contrast, and
exposure used to render the landscape. Most landscape data sets
produced by Virtual Reality Labs have shades of green for lower
elevations, brown for middle elevations, and white for upper
elevations. Try changing the Tree colors to pinks and whites.
This makes them look like flowering fruit trees in the spring.
Change them to reds, browns and yellows for an autumn scene.

Foreground fat polys or jaggies
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Since the accuracy of the data limits the detail that Vistapro
can display, some of the foreground features will contain fat
polys or jaggies. Vistapro builds all images with polygons -
tens of thousands of polygons per scene. The polygons are all
about the same size but those near the camera will appear very
large on the screen - just as a nearby object looks large in a
photograph of a real world landscape.

There are several ways of reducing this effect. One of the
simplest is to raise the camera a few hundred meters above the
ground. If you use the mouse to position the camera it is
automatically set 30 meters above the landscape. Since the
nearest polygon (the one right under the camera) is only 30
meters away it will look very large (if it is within the field
of view). If you raise the camera 300 meters it will look about
10 times smaller.

The Texture function breaks up nearby polygons into several
smaller pieces and renders each at a slightly different shade-
giving them higher detail.

Another method of hiding fat polys is Gouraud shading. Gouraud
shading blends the edges of the polygons with each other,
eliminating the sharp color change from one polygon to the
next, and provides a beautiful artistic interpretation of the
scene. Gouraud shading blends even very large foreground
polygons into oblivion.

Finally, if there is a particularly critical need for a certain
viewpoint, you may be able to move the camera very slightly
forward to clear local obstacles. If there is still something
in the foreground which you would like to remove, export the
picture to an art program in order to pull out or modify the
unwanted features. Texturizing and Gouraud shading can be
combined to generate even more interesting details.

A note about aesthetics
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Remember, there is no more a right way to use Vistapro than
there is a right way to use a camera. A child using a camera or
Vistapro may derive a lot of knowledge and entertainment from a
result which would not please a more professional artist. Like
the natural world it imitates, Vistapro gives the artist an
unlimited number of choices for portrayal. What looks great to
one person may not appeal to the next.

Fractals imitate the way nature looks, but they carry no
information about geology, plate tectonics or erosion. Pictures
produced with Vistapro will be interpretive because Vistapro is
producing an artificial reality. The philosophical and
aesthetic ramifications of virtual reality construction are
immense. Vistapro is an early forerunner of a medium of art and
expression, as powerful and unique as photography for creative
work.

For many years after their introduction, photographs sparked
lively debate about whether they were art. Computer art and
virtual reality simulation seem destined to foment a similar
debate in the future.

Exploration with Vistapro
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As a virtual reality simulator, Vistapro allows people to
explore landscapes they will probably never be able to explore
first hand. While many people will have the opportunity to
visit a few of the national parks, it is highly unlikely that
any of us, except a few who are now children, will have the
chance to tour the caldera of Mons Olympus on Mars.

As Virtual Reality Labs is able to convert more of the data
already available from planetary probes and undersea explorers,
Vistapro will allow exploration of forbidding and alien
landscapes decades, or even centuries, before the first human
explorer is able to take tourist snapshots. By giving its users
the ability to wander about distant landscapes, rendering true
perspective pictures of their choice, Vistapro and later
progeny will free humanity from its current boundaries long
before such explorations are economically feasible.


Technical Support
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For Technical Support, call Virtual Reality Laboratories, Inc.
[phone]


*** End of Chapter One ***