IMAGINE 2.0!  A Review by John Rowe  (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) A little over a year ago, Impulse Inc. in Minneapolis U.S.A. shipped their long awaited sequel to their revolutionary rendering program Turbo Silver. This program - Imagine - incorporated a complete rewrite and optimisation of Turbo Silver's rendering routines to produce in Impulse's words the "fastest rendering engine available on the Amiga". In addition they had vastly improved and added to the program's capabilities and user interface, and had added features of ease of object creation and motion control hitherto unknown to Amiga modellers and animators. In short they set the industry on its ear! Shortly after, Impulse released a relatively minor upgrade with bug fixes and some new features in Imagine Version 1.1. But there have long been rumours of a major upgrade in the works. Now the wait is over! The best renderer just got better - Imagine Version 2.0 is now shipping. Was it worth the wait? Definitely! Does it fulfil all our wishes? Not Quite!  Upgrade After delays with the PAL version of Imagine 2.0, Impulse finally began shipping about 4 weeks ago. The upgrade is available to all registered Imagine users at a cost of $100 U.S. and can be ordered by ringing Impulse and supplying your MASTERCARD or VISA card number. By the way they don't take American Express so save yourself the phone charges until you can borrow some understanding friend's VISA or MASTERCARD. The upgrade arrived in a plain padded envelope containing the new manual and 4 disks. The 4 disks contain as follows. Disk 1 holds the integer version of the program for standard 68000 based Amigas. Disk 2, the FP version for those with Floating Point Math Co-Processors and accelerators. Disk 3, some sample Attributes (Bluefabric, Redplastic, Fog, Gold, Chrome and Glass), the Effects and Textures directories, a Tutorial directory, some IFF wraps and some objects and of course the last minute Manual Addendum information. Disk 4, more objects (including the most detailed cow I have ever seen... Strange but true!). When all else fails read the Instructions ----------------------------------------- The manual (there is now only one) has been completely rewritten by Mike Halvorsen and weighs in at about 300 pages of fine print. It is written like one big (as in huge) tutorial for someone who doesn't know the first thing about Imagine, but Mike also intends it to be used as a reference for the experienced user, as it has an index. Unfortunately, the index is not very complete with many key words not being referenced in it at all. Unlike the previous reference manual, it has a VERY brief table of contents in the front, very few headings and is not organised based on the program's functions. For the experienced user who wants to work out what a new menu item does, any reference to the said function can be very, very tedious to find. Also, unfortunately they decided to put the approximately 100 pages of appendices at the very back of the book, after the index, making it necessary to flip from the back of the book towards the front just to find the index itself. It all goes to make finding something time consuming and more than a little frustrating. Ironic that the original 1.0 Reference manual was well organised but with too little detail and no index. We now have a manual with masses of information and an index, but very poorly organised for reference. On to the software... --------------------- For those of you who have grown accustomed to being greeted by Imagine's impressive opening picture (I must admit I'm in this group) you will not be disappointed. Imagine 2.0 opens with a beautiful gold rendered image of the word "Imagine", once again in 16 colour Hires Interlace, but this time undoubtedly rendered with the program itself and full PAL size. (Version 1.0's picture was digitised). For those of you who couldn't wait the few seconds for the image to come up and discovered ways of removing or modifying it, you can now start again on finding ways to circumvent the new version. There are LOTS of new features, but many of them are not immediately obvious. The whole program has been given a WorkBench 2 look, with 3D type gadgets to be found everywhere (pretty appropriate for a 3D type program hey?). Shades of gold are the predominant colours, which, coupled with the 3D gadgets gives the whole interface a very professional look. I think they could have perhaps drawn the line at giving the menus a 3D look however. They are drawn in gold over a slightly darker gold offset down and to the side one pixel, giving the slightly blurry impression that I'm trying to read them without my glasses. An Editor for every occasion ---------------------------- Imagine 1.0 and 1.1 had 5 distinctly different editors for handling 5 distinctly different types of tasks. In Imagine 2.0 they have gone 1 better - or to be more precise 2 better - there are now 7 editors. The brand new boy is the Preferences Editor which allows you to edit your Imagine.config file. This editor allows you to effortlessly alter you preferred settings to your heart's content. All the old presets present in 1.1's config file are here, with the addition of a few new ones, the most obvious being the program's new user-configurable gadgets. The user now has control over a line of gadgets along the bottom of each editor, configurable to execute specific commands and functions the same way as the Function Keys are under Imagine 1.1. You can set up different gadgets for each Editor if you wish. Also, if you set up a gadget to turn a particular feature on or off, the gadget stays appropriately in or out to indicate that feature's current state. Each gadget only does one thing however, they are not 'Macros'. The Action Editor is now separate from the Stage Editor and has its own place on the Project Menu (not a good move in my opinion as you now have to specify the frame number you want in the Stage Editor every time you come back from the Action Editor). In good Form ------------ The Forms Editor has always given you the unique opportunity to create a 3D object from a 2D perspective; now it is even more powerful with several dramatic additions. You can now create multiple key slices to control an object's shape when viewed from above, at whatever point moving down through it you wish. With this greater control, you can use it as a sort of sophisticated interactive lathe or skin tool. Mike Halvorsen demonstrates the use of this through the analogy of cutting the head of a store manikin into thin slices from top to bottom. Each of these slices would represent a key slice in the Forms Editor and by putting each one in separately in this manner you could build up a head in Imagine. Anyone have any spare polystyrene heads around?? The Forms Editor also gives you the option of using single former or spacer views, for simpler object creation. Down to Details --------------- In the same way you could move, rotate and scale whole objects under the previous versions of Imagine, the Detail Editor now has interactive point manipulation for moving, rotating and scaling of groups of points within an object. Feedback is given in the title bar as to your current angle of rotation or degree of scaling. All paths are now spline based and are fully editable from the Detail Editor. You can define subgroups of faces within an object, to make it easier for you to change the attributes of certain parts of an object, or to pick specific faces, edges or points for extra manipulation. In Pick Points and Pick Edges Modes, under the Pick SubGroup menu item you can further specify that you want just the border points or edges of a particular subgroup, their inner points or edges or the whole subgroup. You can also change the Phong shading on certain edges merely by picking them and telling Imagine to make them soft or sharp. You can conform an object to a path in the Mold requester. The only reference I can find to this in the manual is Mike saying he'll explain it later... You can tell Imagine to pick a range of points, edges or faces in an object by specifying the starting and ending point, edge or face and the step. So picking every second face in an object for example, to alter its attributes is simple and painless. You can now add a Font object! You tell Imagine your text and specify which Amiga font and which point size and it builds the object in a flash! It doesn't do too bad a job either. In the Attributes requester the program now supports real fog which varies with depth, so you can easily create clouds or foggy scenes with glowing spotlight beams. Pretty neat! If you save your attributes to a separate file it now automatically saves any brush map or texture settings as well. Brushes can be specifically mapped to a subgroup if you wish, but you are still limited to 4 maps per object. Slice, I'm sad to say, can still be a pain, but the manual promises it to be less so. The Texture list has grown and now consists of : Angular, Bricks, Camo, Checks, Disturbed, Dots, Grid, Linear, Pastella (sort of Camo but with gradual colour changes), Spots (Dots within dots like a leopard skin), Radial, Waves (realistic water here we come) and Wood. I hardly ever touch the Cycle Editor, but it looks just about identical to the previous version. Nothing to speak of here, but probably some improvements under the surface. Lights, Camera, Action! ----------------------- The Stage Editor now includes QuickDraw options so there is no more need to jump between Stage and Detail to enable speedup of the drawing routines in the Stage Editor. You now have functions to reset the relative position and alignment of hinged objects. A Camera Retrack hot key has been added to make life a little easier. The Action Editor supports 2 F/X lines per actor and now includes housekeeping functions to sort and find Actors by name. You can specify a sequence of global backdrop pictures or global brushes much the same as you could previously specify a sequence for brush mapping onto objects in the Detail Editor. There are some new effects, bringing the list to : Explode, Fireworks (like Explode with added 'Hollywood' twinkle and gravity), Flash ( a simple effect to allow you to flash lights on and off), Grow, Ripple, Tumble (instant logos tumbling in randomly from off screen), and Boing (make objects stretch and contract as they bounce up and down). All editors include a Quick Render option which allow you to do a render of a type and size which you pre-specify under the Preferences Editor. The Quick Render then produces an image from the same view as shown in your Perspective window and with automatic lighting. You can vary the angle of this lighting prior to rendering as you wish. Provision for the graphics displays of Tomorrow ----------------------------------------------- Imagine 2.0 directly supports Digital Creation's DCTV 24bit display hardware and will thus render DCTV compatible images and anims. While DCTV supports its 24bit images encoded into 3 or 4 bitplane images, Imagine only creates 4 bitplane versions - whether interlace or non-interlace as you wish. I have been able to render DCTV images in image sizes as small as 248 horizontal pixels by 32 vertical pixels, and still display them through this incredible hardware add-on. Imagine 2.0 will also produce stereo 3D images for use with X-Specs if you have them. The manual says the renderer's speed is virtually unchanged. I have also found a few bugs: Function Keys don't work in the Action Editor, and the Merge Function in the Detail Editor doesn't eliminate duplicate points as it did in version 1.1. Sadly, no AREXX support yet, we'll just have to wait for Imagine 3.0! Oh well, no program is perfect. To Sum Up --------- In short, it's worth your upgrade bucks guys! The new features may not seem all that extensive or obvious when you first look, but there's a lot of new stuff in there. By way of proof, I've just spent over 2000 words telling you about them, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, then there's quite a few million words waiting to be produced by this amazing program. All you need is Imagine 2.0 and a little Imagination... Any qustions or queries please feel free to contact me: John Rowe P.O. Box 420 Toowoomba Qld. 4350. AUSTRALIA Ph (076) 324444 (Working Hours) Fax (076) 383867  (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 )) (( 27 ))