Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: kpetlig@halcyon.com (Kelly Petlig) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Forge 1.0 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 18 Jun 1994 21:10:31 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 204 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2tvns7$mdp@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: kpetlig@halcyon.com (Kelly Petlig) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: graphics, 3D, rendering, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Forge 1.0 BRIEF DESCRIPTION 3D rendering software AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Apex Software Address: 405 El Camino Real Suite 121 Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA Telephone: (415) 322-7532 LIST PRICE Forge version 1.0: $60 (US) Essence I version 3.0: $140 (US) Essence II version 3.0: $140 (US) SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE 1 MB RAM required. Math co-processor or 68040 processor required. SOFTWARE AmigaDOS 2.04 or higher required. You must have Essence version 3.0 or later in order to use Forge effectively. Theoretically you could use Forge with older versions of Essence or Imagine's own textures, but since they weren't created with Forge in mind, like Essence version 3.0 is, they are missing internal information that Forge needs to properly load them. INSTALLATION Installing Forge from a single disk using the Commodore Installer is painless and quick (it took me a less than a minute). As an option you can install the 68040 optimized version, which will take maximum advantage of the 68040 instruction set. It is recommended to install it in the same directory as Imagine, but not required. This is especially true if you don't even have Imagine. REVIEW This is a review of version 1.0 of Forge, which I received in the mail just last week. This is my overall first impression of Forge and how it lives up to the press release in the Apex newsletter. I will assume the reader has a working knowledge of 3D rendering on the Amiga. I also won't attempt to teach the reader how to use Forge or its companion products. Apex has added another great 3D rendering product to its fantastic line of tools, Forge. It's named Forge, suitable since it's a tool to forge new textures with Essence. It is beyond the scope of this article to reiterate a review for Essence, but I will briefly introduce it to those who are unfamiliar. Essence is a library of algorithmic textures for Imagine, and now Forge. Using fractal noise and a bit of magic, Essence comes up with bump maps and color maps to make realistic looking textures that can be applied to surfaces in Imagine. Ranging from crumpled paper to cedar shingles, the patterns are seemingly random, yet infinitely precise and reproducible. There are two volumes of Essence as I write this, and who knows how many to follow. Before the release of Forge, Imagine was required to tap the powerful textures of Essence. Forge itself is a simple program, as the textures really do all the work. Forge opens a 16 color (256 for AGA) high res custom screen at 704 by 441 (using TEXT overscan prefs) and will preview images dithered with twelve colors (252 colors for AGA) in a window on this screen. Forge can also render in full 24 bit at most any resolution, generating IFF, JPEG, TIFF or PPM files. Down the right half of the screen are all the variables of a texture represented with number and slider gadgets. When moving the slider gadgets, the preview window in the upper left corner will update automatically. Using pull down menus, you can load up to ten textures at a time. You can also animate textures by defining two sets of texture parameters and morphing between them. Before Forge, users of rendering packages other than Imagine have missed out on the power of Essence textures. Now a Lightwave user can use Forge to render fantastic textures in full 24 bit and import them as a brush map. Forge will also render in 8 bit grey scale to be used as bump maps, but unfortunately it doesn't render altitudes as brightness levels but just a grey scale version of the color output. Rendering Essence bumpmaps to import to Lightwave is difficult to say the least. When saving 24 bit textures for use in 3D programs it is best to stay with color variations and not height variations. You could render 24 bit brushmaps to use in Imagine, but there would be little point since it is much more efficient to allow Imagine to render the textures directly. Forge renders textures about the same as if in Imagine, which makes sense, since Essence seems to do most of the render work. You can save an attribute to be loaded into the Imagine attribute requestor, and even save a collection of them to be used later. Even though Forge is a tool, it's amazing how much entertainment you can derive from it. If you're the type to endlessly play with Mandelbrot or Julia sets, you'll have that and more with Forge. Essence not only has Mandelbrot and Julia sets, but also the TreeBark and BBCourt sets. You can make the most beautiful or the ugliest textures you've ever seen. There's even a "Randomize" pull down menu that will randomly vary all the texture settings. Ever wanted a Reptile Skin Workbench backdrop? Just load the "Reptile Skin" attribute from Essence and change the view to "Repetition Map." Render at almost any size and you will have a brush that can be tiled for a wild backdrop. One could make a living selling these things to Windows users. Forge does have limited ARexx support: about fifteen commands. In fact, this is how Forge executes "Randomize" and how it displays to the 24 bit boards it supports. Forge can launch up to ten ARexx scripts with their own entries, or you can launch any ARexx script via a file requestor. ARexx scripts can be launched not only at program start or shutdown, but also before or after each sequence or each frame. With all this, you would think that ARexx is an important element of Forge; but to be truthful, it could use a bit more work. One bug I found was if you launch an ARexx script from Forge that has an error, it will not give any error code, and it once caused Forge to crash completely. As quoted from the manual: "The AREXX commands themselves will not be documented in this manual, mostly because it is much easier just to present demonstration scripts for you to examine." Just the same, it would have been nice to include at least a short summary of their functions. There are at least two commands that aren't in any of the demo scripts that I found by loading Forge into a word processor. For the record, here are all the commands I know of: QUIT, GETNAME, GETMIN, GETMAX, GETVAL, GETSTEPS, SETVAL, DUMPPREVIEW, SHOWSTATUS, PAUSE, RESTARTPREVIEW, UNPAUSE, REFRESHSLIDERS, FORGETOFRONT, FORGETOBACK. The project menu has a selection labeled Iconize that opens a small window of not much more than a title bar on the Workbench. This frees up valuable Chip memory for serious multitasking. Clicking on the close gadget of this window will un-iconize the program and abort any rendering if you confirm the requestor. I wish Amiga developers would follow a rule on this point, as some programs quit, some un-iconify, and this one uniconizes. If "WB Render Meter" is turned on from the prefs, it will also open another small window with frames remaining and a percent finished meter on the Workbench. The Prefs requestor is fairly basic but includes things that make your rendering life easier. Among the parameters changeable are setting screen background color and whether or not you want Forge iconified when rendering. Also in Prefs there are three different task priorities, allowing you to change the importance of CPU time for Forge when rendering, pushed to the back, or front and active (which I think should be in ALL programs of this nature). This way, Forge won't be sharing the important CPU time with your stellar conquest battle simulation program. I do wish the prefs requestor had an OK button: all it has is SAVE and CANCEL. Forge has a real time preview window with a maximum size of 237 pixels wide by 249 high. Real time being defined as constantly updating and refining even as you change parameters via sliders. If your processor is fast enough, it takes only several seconds to see details of your changes. Soon after a change takes place, the window refreshes with 32 by 32 pixel blocks, then down to 16 by 16, then down to 8 by 8, etc., until it finally fills in details pixel by pixel. Any time during this process you can move a slider and it will instantly update. This system works great if you make a mistake and instantly get the garishly colored checkerboard texture (read the Essence manual.) Using the pull down menu you can transfer the preview window to a 24 bit framebuffer like Firecracker or Opalvision. Imagine has the ability to load two objects, or two textures, and morph between them. In the case of animating textures with Forge, you would define two sets of parameters and morph between them. Good examples of animation using Essence would be polkadots growing or clouds dissipating and reforming. When using 3D programs other than Imagine, you would have to render a sequence of texture brushes, which most 3D programs accept as animated brushmaps. Forge can preview the animation either by storyboard or actually showing them animate in a postage stamp size window. The animating preview is done by copying the storyboard views to the anim preview in sequence. You can preview at 30fps and it didn't even seem to slow down the real time updating on my machine. CONCLUSIONS Overall, I like Forge quite a bit. Like almost any other program, the first release can always be a bit more refined. Forge has a very solid foundation to start. I don't know of any program like it on the Amiga, so it's in a class of its own. If you already own Essence, either volume, I highly recommend getting Forge. It will save much time tweaking those texture values. If you're planning on buying Essence soon, Forge is even more important since it is extremely useful in finding out what Essence can and can't do. I commend the Apex team for a job well done. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews