by Fred Thorlin
If you saw Toy Story you had to be impressed with the quality of the images and animations making up this first wholly computer generated feature film. I have wanted to make images like that for at least ten years. I first saw Caligari’s trueSpace at a COMDEX several years ago and was impressed with its ability to let you work on solid models as well as the wire frames that every other 3-D modeling program offered.
After downloading a demo of trueSpace3 from http://www.caligari.com taking a look at features for simulating interactions and inverse kinematics I was hooked. The demo along with “Caligari trueSpace2 Bible” was enough to convince me to buy the program.
Caligari has an ambiance that has kept me working, whereas I have given up on several other 3D programs in the past. Instead of 3 or 4 views and a bunch of numbers, you start up with a perspective view of a plane in space. There is a menu of primitive ob jects, cube, sphere et al, which you can manipulate, distort and combine into your desired shape. Alternately you can draw a 2-D shape on the plane and extrude it into a 3-D shape. Then you can dress up the objects by covering their surfaces with materia ls like wood, glass, gold, brick or the bitmaps of your choice; photographs are interesting. You control the glow, shinyness, roughness, transparency and index of refraction of each object in a scene. Throughout this process you are also concerned with p ositioning of these objects in your scene. You can open up to three small windows to provide additional views of your scene. You can, in addition to the aforementioned perspective view, select a view along the x, y, or z-axis and select a view from any o bject in the scene; this includes lights and cameras that aren’t normally visible in the finished image. This is the way to easily position lights and cameras for best effect. Numerically specifying a camera position is boring and painful, but if you are so inclined this option is always available for positioning any object. I will admit that there are times when this is desirable.
When you have your scene constructed, your textures mapped and your lights positioned, it is time to take the picture. Did you remember to set whether or not your lights cast shadows?
What size and format image do you want to produce? There are a dozen standard sizes offered or you can set your own. You can produce images up to 8,000 pixels square as BMP, TGA or JPG files.
Two thousand pixels square is about the same precision as a 35mm photograph.
If you want the very most realistic image available you can turn on ray tracing and anti-aliasing. Press the render button and a frighteningly realistic scene is painted on your screen.
Even some of my first scenes have gotten me into difficulty explaining that they aren’t photographs.
I print them on an Epson Stylus II printer with glossy paper. The paper makes all the difference in the world on the appearance of your final product.
A Slovakian programmer used the Commodore Amiga computer to develop trueSpace in 1986. He is now the president of Caligari. Following the market, in 1994 they released trueSpace for Windows.
They released trueSpace3 early this year. The major additions to the feature set for this version has inevitably resulted in a lot of bugs. Suffice it to say they have not been sufficient to reduce my enthusiasm. On the bright side Caligari already has a beta of an update out, so I feel they are responding to the problem. The other problem is that, in many respects, they have the goofiest of user interfaces.
They have over three dozen stacks of icons on the screen! Beneath each of the visible icons are usually several more. Sometimes the one on top was the last selected. Sometimes the icons are related. Left and right clicking each of the icons can bring up different options sometimes. Frequently submenus appear.
To make a choice between two options you may get a check box, a single button, a pair of buttons or radio buttons.
Consistency is not their strong suit.
If trueSpace3 did only what I have discussed so far, it would be well worth its price. There is still a collection of animation resources of great substance to be enumerated. The key-framing lets you just specify what is changing between different frames and trueSpace will work out what needs to be in the intervening frames.
This is not just moveing the rocket from where it was in frame one and then moving it to where it is to be in frame 10.
You can also indicate objects that will fade out by frame 5 and reappear in frame 9. The movement is not just linear. It can be along a path made up of any collection of curves. Furthermore you can assert that the object is always pointed forward, whiche ver way that is, as it moves along a path, without your needing to intervene in each frame. There are many more features in the product and more can be added through plug-ins.
To learn trueSpace3 you need a tutor.
It is an easy amusing read and provides step-by-step procedures for the most important tasks. If you want to find out what inverse kinematics is and how to use it, see Chapter 15 for the best discussion of it I have seen anywhere.
Windows 95 or Windows NT, 486 PC (Pentium recommended), 16 megs RAM, 15MB free hard disk space, VGA graphics card, (3D video card recommended).
Fred Thorlin is president of Personal Instruments, Inc. The Houston, Texas based company does Visual Basic development and consulting. You may contact him at fredt@hal-pc.org.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.