Thank you for purchasing Real 3D, the fastest and most impressive ray tracing software in the market. We can now offer you a program, which consists of four disks: the program disk and three support material disks. In the program disk you will find everything you need to produce real ray tracing pictures. You will also find some quite useful support material in the drawers Materials, Textures and Objects. The Animations drawer contains an example animation, and the drawer Pictures contains a rendered image of the same example. When you create ray tracing images, you probably need different textures. Therefore, we have supplied you with some useful textures which you can find on the disk Support3. The same disk also has a few example pictures created using Real 3D. You will also find some 3D fonts on the disks Support1 and Support2. If you use the software from a hard disk, it is a good idea to copy the contents of the drawer Textures2 to the drawer Textures, place the font drawers into the Objects drawer and place the Orbits drawer into the Animations drawer. During the printing process of the manual, we have decided to support you with ready made animations for quick and easy animation production. You can use the animations in the orbits directory of the Support1 disk in the following way: - Load the desired animation from the directory orbits to the editor. - Go to the wireframe mode and 'play' the animation. If the chosen animation does not suit you, try another one. In this way, you can choose between different animations. - When you have found the animation you want, change the cube of the original animation to a suitable object. To get a good result, create the new object in the same size as the cube. - Go to the wireframe mode and check the animation. You may have to use some editor modifications to achieve the desired result. If you have created a very complex object, you can use the editor function Drawmodes->None to obtain high enough speed in the wireframe mode (see page 105 in the manual). - Render the animation. NEW FUNCTIONS IN THE REAL 3D ---------------------------- The program contains some functions not documented in the manual. The following list shows how to activate and use these functions. - alt-key + '1': move point function for moving certain points in certain primitives. With this function you can move the top point of a cone or a pyramid, or any point of a triangle. - alt-key + '2': makes a chosen point in an object invisible. If you have used some logical operation and want the wireframe of the object to give a better impression of the object, you can 'turn off' points outside the operated object. - alt-key + '3': you can draw a new wireframe representation for an object with the mouse. Note that this cannot be done to an object which already has a wireframe. Note also that the wireframe you add with this function is invisible in the solid model rendering. - alt-key + '4': with this function you can close the hierarchical structure of an object. If you choose the function again, the structure is opened. This protects you from creating objects to unwanted hierarchical levels. You can move through the closed level using Ctrl-key + 's'. THE 24 BIT VERSION ------------------ The new version of Real 3D with support to 24 bit images contains some new, useful features, which are documented here. New Tools --------- - With the polygon tool you can create plane polygons. Use the left mouse button to add new edge points when drawing a polygon, and right mouse button ends the function. Note that the edge curve of the polygon is closed automatically. - With the polyhedron tool you can create an object whose surface consists of polygons. Use it in the following way: - Select the menu Creation->Tools->Polyhedron. - First define the intersection shape of the object, in other words the shape of the bottom plane of the object. You can do this in the same way as with the polygon tool. Use the right mouse button to end the shape definition. - If you only want to extrude this shape into the third dimension, click the right button again. Otherwise, click the left mouse button in the position to which you want to place the first point of the polygon which forms the top cover of the object. - Now you can size the top cover by moving the mouse and when the size is suitable, click the left button. If you hit the right mouse button instead, you get a pyramid-like shape with a sharp top peak. Material device --------------- - The brilliancy, transparency and speed of light -gadgets now display their values as a percentage of the maximum value. - When defining a texture map for the material, you can directly write the name as earlier, but it is also possible to use Picture-gadget, which activates the input-output device. - SHOW-gadget displays the texture of a material, if it is defined. Palette device -------------- - Color signal values are displayed. Info-function ------------- - Displays now the color signal values, and you can even change them to change the color. The device allows you to define greater values than 15, which is maximal color signal in Amiga color system. You can use this feature to obtain very bright objects, light sources etc. Modifying the wireframes of objects ----------------------------------- - Extras->Representation->Obscure is the function for making points invisible (= alt-key + '2' ). - Extras->Representation->Draw wire is the function for drawing new wire for objects (= alt-key + '3' ). Workbench Screen ---------------- - You can try to close and open the Workbench screen using Extras->Open Wbench and Close Wbench functions. Closing it gives 40 K more free CHIP memory. Wireframe screen ---------------- - The right mouse button hides the control panel. Rendering control ----------------- - It is possible to define the size of the image to be rendered using Width and Height fields. If the size is bigger than the screen size, rendering is done directly to disk using the file name given in the Name field. Maximum picture size is 1024 * 1024 pixels. - The gadget 24_BIT selects 24 bit rendering, and the image is constructed using over 16 million colors. Of course, the renderer writes the image directly to disk with the file name defined in the Name field. The file format Real 3D uses is true color Targa format, which is a popular standard in professional level computer graphics environments. Anyway, if also the GREYSCALE gadget is activated, then the result is saved using compressed IFF ILBM format with 8 bitplanes. Note, that the FAST and OUTLINE modes do not support 24 bit rendering. Note also, that 24 bit rendering creates very big picture files, for example a picture with 1024*1024 pixels requires three megabytes. - You can select a suitable level of anti-aliasing using Anti-aliasing gadget. The effect of this function is that jaggies caused by insufficient picture resolution are smoothened using color sweeps. If the value is 0, no anti-aliasing is done, but if the value is 2 or 3, you get quite nice and smooth pictures. The only disadvantage is that rendering gets much slower when the anti-aliasing factor increases. With Amiga picture formats, there is no need to use higher anti-aliasing value than 4, but if the rendering is done using 24 bits, increasing the factor may give a visible improvement in the picture quality. FAST and OUTLINE modes do not support anti-aliasing. - If you have a box definition on the rendering display, but you want to render the whole screen, you can use BOX OFF gadget to remove the box. Other features -------------- - Rendering goes faster than earlier, especially what comes to plane surfaces. - Now there is a way to cancel most time-consuming operations in editor during their execution, namely the 'Esc' key. - Also the rendering process is easier to cancel, especially in the beginning when many time-consuming optimizations are carried out. - Orbit-function now creates automatically a smooth loop if the start and end points are the same. The orbit is no longer calculated using the offset point of the object, but instead the position of the object in relation to the first orbit point in the first frame in question. - The Display program now displays the new picture formats produced by the current Real 3D version. - A small utility program SculptToReal converts Sculpt scene files to Real 3D animation files. The current version converts only object shape definitions. PHOTO24 ------- The new Real 3D package also includes a utility program for photographing the targa images from the computer screen. To be able to produce and also show computer graphics with 16 million colors, you only need Amiga, Real 3D and a ordinary SRL camera. The program exposes targa images to film by showing several different images, and the sum of those images contains the whole 24 bit color information. The picture to be photographed can be any targa image produced with Real 3D. The picture must fit to CHIP memory, so if your Amiga has the usual 1 MB CHIP ram, the maximum resolution Photo24 can display is about 640*500 pixels. If the image is bigger, the program compresses it and shows as big part of it as possible. You can use Photo24 - program in the following way: 1. Activate the program with the command 'Photo24 picturename' or with icon multiselection. 2. Wait until the image is loaded into the memory. 3. When the program asks 'do you need a test picture', hit 'y'-key and return. Now one of the images to be used for exposure is displayed, and you can adjust the monitor brightness, contrast and your camera so that the suitable exposure time is about 10.2 seconds. 4. Now increase the exposure time to about 13 seconds, without changing any other exposure values. 5. Hit return to remove test picture. After a while, display becomes black. 6. Start the exposure and when the shutter opens, hit return. Now the exposing pictures are displayed and after 10.2 seconds, the screen becomes black again. 7. After the shutter has closed, you can proceed by hitting return. 8. Then you can choose whether to expose the same image again or to quit. To do the exposure again hit return to switch the display off. Then continue by following the steps 6,7 and 8.