T E X T U R E by Dan Ritchie (V1.21) Fractal cloud and texture rendering program. This thing's compiled with AC-BASIC so I "gota" say... Portions of this program include material copyrighted© by Absoft Corp 1988 Hi there: Texture is a program that lets you create, manipulate, and save realistic (cloud-like) fractal textured surfaces based on random numbers. Its output can be used for video, presentation, or multimedia backdrops, surface and bump mapping, painting and rendering, desktop publishing,(or just about any other buzzword you can think of). The program is run from a simple intuition style interface, and comes with a number of different textures and palette sets to experiment with. The following is a description of Textures Menu Items: Project Menu Generate... Starts the rendering using attributes selected from other menu items. Pause... Pauses rendering to allow other programs to run at full speed. Stop... Stops a rendering in progress. For the sake of speed, the program only checks menu events between the drawing of whole lines. Settings... Allows you the set parameters used in rendering. Set Scale Scale in this case acts something like a contrast control. A higher value will produce more contrast. This control can be used to soften or sharpen textures or to produce unusual "surfaces" such as rough stone. A value between 0 and 4 usually works well for clouds. For the Tile2 texture a value of 0 or 1 usually works best. Setting the scale to 10 or above, and using the Cloud3 Texture and the Stone palette produces a rock-like texture. Dithering Adds randomness to the rendering and creates a broken up appearance. In most cases you should not use dithering, but it is useful for certain effects. Higher values can be useful for rock-like textures. Tile Size Lets you set the size of the tile used in the Tile textures. The value is in pixel width ( an even number between 10 and 40 usually works well. ) Palette... Allows you to make quick and easy changes to the screens color palette. It is a sweep style requester, in that you make changes to the red, green or blue values by sweeping you pointer across the color bars. Save... Allows you to save the screen as an IFF ILBM file. The screen is 320*200*16 colors, but part of the display is taken up by window border. This can be fixed in a paint program that allows you to enlarge a brush. Other effects such as perspective are also useful. Since there is no real detail, the textures should resize with little loss of quality. One word of warning! The IFF save routine saves the screen (as is). That is, it saves the screen exactly as it appears, window borders and all. Just make sure the window is at its full size. About... Displays information about the program Quit... Exits the program. Texture Menu Cloud1... Cloud1 is a texture that resembles a cloud formation. It is best to use horizontal render with this texture. Cloud2... Cloud2 is like Cloud1 except it is more diffused and dispersed across the "sky". Cloud3... Cloud3 is also similar, but more dispersed. Tile1... Tile1 is a Texture resembling tile with a light source in the upper left corner. It's size can be set from the Project menu's Tile size option. Tile2... Tile2 is a checkered board like texture. It's size can also be set. Wood... Wood is a Texture with Vertical (or horizontal) bands that vaguely resemble the grain of wood. Color Menu Sky... A color palette designed to look atmospheric. Sky2... A reversal of the Sky palette. Sunset... What can a say? Wood... For the Wood Texture, but feel free to use it any time you feel lead. Scroll... Is it the Magna Carta or is it Amiga? Stone... A gray scale color palette. Marble... A palette for marble-like textures. Tile... Another marble-like palette. Map... Great if you always wanted to visit other places. *User... this is a storage space for a palette edited with the palette requester. Render Menu Horizontal... Causes rendering to be done Horizontally. Vertical... Causes rendering to be done Vertically. Why: There are several landscape rendering programs on the market and PD that render beautiful, surreal landscapes, but few I have seen render clouds realistically. That's were this program started. This program was written in AmigaBASIC, and compiled with AC-BASIC. It has been an experiment to see what could be done in BASIC without resorting to .Bmap files and library calls. Unfortunately, AmigaBasic does not easily allow for BackDrop, non-GimmeZeroZero (borderless) windows, But the output can be resized and edited in a paint program to fit your needs. For example? There are a few examples of uses I have found for this program in the Examples directory. Imagination and a good paint program are the keys to making this stuff work. Some PD software was also helpful. Memory? Being Written in BASIC, this program weighs in at a bloated 90k and uses a lot more memory when running. It will run fine on a 512k machine, and maybe even multitask (a little) with other programs (slowly while rendering!). Bugs? In very low memory situations, I have managed a few remarkable crashes. This bug seems to be in the compiler, and out of my control. Well, have fun, and don't take any wooden pickles. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tool Chest Volume 3, Issue 2, Disk 2 IDG Communications/Peterborough, Copyright 1989 Peterborough, NH 03458