Installation and Performance
Welcome
Thank you for purchasing Visual Reality software. Visual Reality is designed to offer an easy but extremely powerful, three dimensional environment in which full color still images and 3D animations can be created. Visual Reality 2.0 includes:
Renderize Live. Load 2D and 3D models from a variety of drawing and modeling programs or drag and drop from Visual Model and Visual Font and compose unique scenes in an intuitive 3D environment using a wide variety of material, lighting and camera effects. Load bitmap images from a variety of common file formats for backgrounds in scenes and as color, bump or reflection maps in material definitions. Render your compositions as full-color photorealistic images at any resolution. Animate just about anything with just a few button clicks. Objects, camera views, color intensity and location of lights and the bump height of materials can all be set in motion or transformed. Rotoscoping allows you to create moving water and flickering fire. Bend, twist, stretch and morph objects over time. An advanced channel editor gives you precise time line control of every attribute, for every element or object. The 'Ease to' and 'Ease from' functions and hierarchical linking of objects give your animations a natural feel with smooth, fully controllable motion.
Visual Font. Load Windows TrueType fonts and create 3D text objects by defining extrusion and bevel properties. Load extruded text into Renderize Live for inclusion in 3D scenes.
Visual Image. Load and modify bitmap images from a wide variety of file formats. Work on individual images, or use the powerful layering tools to create digital collages. Select from dozens of bevels, align text along various pre-defined paths. Work in full solid shaded mode using 3DR acceleration. Transfer images freely between Renderize Live and Visual Image with a simple "drag-and-drop" operation.
Visual Model. Create simple or complicated 3D objects with a straightforward and complete set of modeling tools. Organic deformations include 3D morph, Push/Pull, Bend, Twist, Stretch and Melt. Transfer models freely between Renderize Live and Visual Model, or load and manipulate extruded 3D text objects from Visual Font.
Visual Reality Installation and Performance 3 Visual Catalog. Organize your work in catalogs to facilitate the re-use of 3D scenes, objects, material and images from previous projects. Use Visual Catalog to drag and drop 3D clipart from Simply Scenes to Renderize Live, Visual Model and Visual Image.
Simply Scenes. A highly detailed 3D virtual world with fully textured objects and environments that can be used with Simply 3D. Northern Castle, Orbit City and Jurassic Adventure are only part of the extensive nine volumes of Simply Scenes. Each scene includes a detailed environment, dozens of objects and textures pre-built and ready to render.
Visual Uni-SpheresTM. Seamless 360 degree images where mapped on the interior face of a large hemisphere to provide a perfect surround background for animations.
500 3D Objects and 1,500 Textures. A widely popular collection of business objects and textures tailored for the business graphics market.
Visual EnergyTM. The premiere Hollywood library of the finest film quality AVI video clips and still images for use in Visual Reality animations.
Your package includes the following CDs :
CD1 Visual Reality 2.0 programs 500 3D Business Objects Visual Uni-SpheresTM CD2 Simply Scenes Vol. 1&2 Day at the Beach Baseball Summer Central Park Terrace North Beach Cafe Colonial Dining Room Country Club Lockers Northern Castle CD3 Simply Scenes Vol. 4 Orbit City CD4 Simply Scenes Vol. 5 Jurassic Adventure CD5 Textures & Materials CD6 Textures for Professionals CD7 Visual Energy
4 Visual Reality Installation and Performance Technical Support
Visual Software is pleased to offer free technical support to all registered Visual Reality users. Call us at (818) 883-7900 weekdays between the hours of 8AM and 5PM Pacific time to speak to an applications support engineer. In addition, you can visit Visual Software on CompuServe by accessing the Animation Vendor A forum. Or, simply GO VISSOFT to jump directly to the Visual Software section. If you are a new Visual Reality user and you cannot get the software to run correctly, we encourage you to read this chapter in its entirety before calling, in order to confirm that your system has been properly configured to run the software. If you have questions regarding the use or Visual Reality, we encourage you to run through the tutorial lessons before calling, in order to maximize your familiarity with the software.
Using the Documentation
The Visual Reality User's Manual is broken up into sections based on the different applications. That is, there are separate sections in the User's Manual for Visual Catalog, Renderize Live, Visual Font, Visual Image and Visual Model.
For the Impatient
Regardless of your general familiarity with modeling, rendering or imaging applications, we recommend that you use the tutorials that are supplied with Visual Reality before getting too deeply involved with your own projects. The tutorials will teach you the nuances of the interface in addition to the specific concepts and commands related to rendering. If you must jump in head first and begin with your own projects, at least run the first two tutorials in the Renderize Live section before going off on your own, as this will give you a good overview of Renderize Live, and how the applications can be used together.
Read this first !
If you do not have the Win32s extensions The Visual Reality applications are true 32-bit applications that will not run under Windows 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups 3.11 without the Win32s extensions. Windows NT and Windows95 are by nature 32-bit operating environments and as such DO NOT REQUIRE you to install the Win32s extensions. If you do not already have Win32s installed on your system :
Visual Reality Installation and Performance 5 Run the Setup program in the \Win32s directory of the Visual Reality CD. This installs Win32s on your system. Restart Windows before continuing the installation process. If you do not have Video for Windows You may already have a runtime version of Video for Windows installed on your system. Many of today's multimedia applications as well as graphics accelerator cards come with enhanced Video for Windows players. To assure optimal playback we recommend that you DO NOT replace the Video for Windows drivers with the drivers supplied with Visual Reality. When installing Visual Reality under Windows NT 3.5 or Windows 95 DO NOT INSTALL the Video for Windows 1.1E drivers and MediaPlayer. Windows NT 3.5 and Windows95 come standard with enhanced Video for Windows playback capability and installing older drivers may cause loss of playback performance or incompatibilities. If you do not already have Video for Windows installed on your system : Run the Setup program in the \VFW11D directory of the Visual Reality CD. This installs the Video for Windows runtime on your system. When running Microsoft's MediaPlayer you will now have the option to play back .AVI files that were created using Visual Reality.
Installing Visual Reality
The entire Visual Reality package, including executables and tutorials, requires approximately 14MB of disk space. The executable programs and related files require about 7.5MB; the tutorial files require about 6.5MB. Start Windows before beginning the installation process Insert the Visual Reality CD into your CD-ROM drive From the Program Manager, select File, Run, type D:\SETUP and press ENTER Click the OK button to begin the installation process and follow the prompts. If your CD-ROM drive is not the "D" drive, substitute the appropriate drive letter during the setup process.
If you perform a full installation, Renderize Live, Visual Font, Visual Model, Visual Image, Visual Catalog, the tutorial files and all animation players are installed onto your hard drive. A Visual Reality program group is created and it includes icons to launch the Visual Reality applications, as well as the Media Player, Autodesk Animation Player and Visual Player animation playback utilities.
Visual Reality Recommended System Configuration
The applications that make up Visual Reality, Renderize Live, Visual Font, Visual Model, Visual Image and Visual Catalog, are enhanced mode applications requiring a 80386 or
6 Visual Reality Installation and Performance 80486 microprocessor; if you are running using a 386 based system then you must also have a math-coprocessor. The recommended minimum system configuration is 486 33MHz PC with 12MB of RAM or better DOS 5.0 or DOS 6.x and Microsoft Windows 3.1 (or WFW 3.11) in Enhanced Mode or Windows95 A Windows-compatible VGA display with a minimum resolution of 800x600 at 256 colors. Regardless of your display color depth, Renderize Live and Visual Image still work at 24-bits and dither the image for the 8-bit display. A permanent swap file (virtual memory) of 25MB under Windows 3.1. The amount of system resources that you may require depends on many factors, including the complexity of your model, the number and resolution of image and reflect textures assigned to materials, the number of lights casting shadows, the map sizes of the shadows and the resolution and color depth of the image file that you are rendering. The following topics discuss those system configuration issues that may affect the performance of Visual Reality. While it is not required that you make changes to your system configuration according to this information, it is recommended that you review these issues in the event Visual Reality hangs up during operation.
Video Display Visual Reality requires a minimum display resolution of 800x600, 256 colors, although we recommend that you run the software at 1024x768. If you wish to run in a high color mode (either 64K colors or 16.7M colors), you must have at least 12MB of RAM to run the applications effectively. Visual Reality has been successfully tested with a wide variety of video display cards at all applicable resolutions and color depths. In fact, any compatibility issues lie not with the display card, but with the Windows drivers (DRV files) that control the card. The quality of these drivers, shipped with and specific to each video board, vary widely from manufacturer to manufacturer. If you are having a driver compatibility problem, your software may crash with a "General Protection Fault in Module
Disk Cache (not applicable when using with Windows95) A disk cache (such as SmartDrive) improves disk access speeds. Since Visual Reality uses virtual memory in a permanent swap file on disk, the disk cache can have a large impact on performance by speeding access to the swap file.
Visual Reality Installation and Performance 7 Setting your disk cache size requires making some choices in order to balance the need for maximum RAM with the need for fast access to the virtual memory swap file on your hard drive. Any RAM allocated as a disk cache is removed from the amount of RAM available to Windows. If you set up a 2MB SmartDrive, you will enhance performance by speeding access to the swap file on disk. On the other hand, because you have reduced your available RAM by 2MB, more disk swapping needs to occur. If your system has 8MB of physical RAM or less Do not set a disk cache larger than 1MB. Although a larger disk cache would improve system performance by speeding access to the swap file, it would reduce your available XMS memory to a point where the Renderize Live interface would no longer fit entirely into RAM and, therefore, would need to be swapped. This would dramatically increase the amount of swapping going on, adversely affecting system performance. We highly recommend that you increase the amount of physical RAM to at least 12MB if you plan on working with large project files. If your system has 16MB of RAM or more You can afford to set up a larger disk cache, perhaps 2MB or more. The degree to which a larger disk cache improves performance depends on the performance of your hard disk and the size of the projects you are working on. If you are working on small projects, the need to use the swap file is decreased, so it would be faster to run with a smaller disk cache. However, in larger projects where disk-swapping occurs more frequently, a larger disk cache may increase performance.
Swap File (not applicable when using with Windows95) Before running Visual Reality, you must set up a swap file under Windows. A swap file is an area on your hard disk that acts as "virtual memory," increasing your total available memory. Your physical RAM plus your swap file make up your total available system memory. To optimize performance, it is recommended that you create a permanent swap file of at least 25MB. If you plan to work on complex projects, you may wish to increase swap file size significantly.
Windows uses several parameters to determine the size of the swap file that can be set: The swap file must occupy contiguous space on the hard disk. Therefore, you should run a disk defragmentation program before setting up the swap file. If your disk drive has strategically placed bad sectors, this may limit the amount of swap space that can be set. The maximum swap file size is initially limited to 4X the amount of physical memory available after Windows has been launched. The multiple that is used in determining maximum swap space can be increased, if necessary, by adding the line PageOverCommit=n in the [386ENH] section of the Windows SYSTEM.INI file, where "n" is the multiple that you wish to use, between 2 and 20. In addition, this value determines the maximum amount of total memory (RAM plus swap space) that can be recognized by Windows. To eliminate this limitation once and
8 Visual Reality Installation and Performance for all, we suggest that you set the multiple to its maximum of 20, then set your swap space according to the amount of disk space that you can afford to allocate.
Note: Your Visual Reality installation process automatically adds this line to SYSTEM.INI. The default recommended swap file size is limited to 50% of the free space available on your hard disk drive. You may type in a permanent swap file size greater than 50% of the free space on your hard drive, and ignore the resulting warning message. However, you may not specify a swap file size greater than the maximum swap file size indicated.
To create a swap file under Windows 3.1: Launch Windows Select Main, Control Panel, 386 Enhanced, Virtual Memory. This window displays the type and size of the current swap file. Select the Change command to modify the swap file. Make sure that the file type is set to Permanent. Enter in a swap file size up to the Maximum Size listed in the window. If you enter a swap file size larger than the Recommended Size a warning message will appear saying that Windows will not recognize the entire size of that file: this message is erroneous regarding permanent swap files. Full information on setting a swap file can be found in your Windows documentation.
The minimum recommended swap file size to run the applications in Visual Reality is 25MB: however, the larger the swap file you can afford to define, the better off you are. Specifically, a larger swap file allows you to define and render larger, more complex scenes. After setting the swap file size, be sure to re-launch Windows.
High Memory (not applicable when using with Windows95) Because of the way Windows uses memory, it is no longer necessary, or even desirable, to maximize the amount of free conventional memory. In fact, using DEVICEHIGH (in CONFIG.SYS) and LH (LoadHigh, in AUTOEXEC.BAT) to load drivers and programs into high memory not only doesn't change the available XMS memory, it can cause memory conflicts that can crash your system. The likelihood of problems occurring depends on a wide variety of factors, including the programs being loaded, their location in high memory and the BIOS of your computer. Therefore, it is difficult to say whether a problem may actually occur. There are two ways in which you can disable DEVICEHIGH and LH commands. The simplest thing to do is disable or remove the DEVICE=C:\[directory]\EMM386.EXE line from your CONFIG.SYS, as this manages the use of the high memory area. When you disable EMM386, all LH and DEVICEHIGH lines are still loaded, they are just loaded normally into low memory.
Visual Reality Installation and Performance 9 If you run DOS applications on your computer that require the use of expanded memory, you won't want to disable the EMM386 line, as it is your expanded memory manager. If this is the case, you must modify each LH and DEVICEHIGH line individually. A CONFIG.SYS line that reads: DEVICEHIGH /L:1,14512 =C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE Should be changed such that it reads: DEVICE=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE An AUTOEXEC.BAT line that reads: LH /L:2,32336 C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.COM Should be changed such that it reads: C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.COM If you do run DOS applications in addition to Windows applications and need to maximize your conventional memory using DEVICEHIGH and LH, it is highly recommended that you create a multiple boot configuration so that you can have a simple configuration for when you run Windows, and the high memory configuration for when you run DOS applications. Note that it is OK and recommended to load DOS into high memory using the DOS=HIGH,UMB command in the CONFIG.SYS file.
TSR and Auto-Launch Programs The Visual Reality applications are true 32-bit applications and although the 32-bit Windows DPMI memory model should not conflict with other programs that may be loaded into memory, problems sometimes do occur. It is strongly recommended that you limit the number of programs that run simultaneously with Visual Reality. Specifically, TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs or applications that work in the background may cause problems.
The first place to look for TSR's is in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Don't be concerned with drivers or programs that control standard hardware devices such as mice, hard drives, CD ROM drives or sound cards. Instead, focus on utility programs that sit in the background and wait for a "hot key", or poll the system for a predetermined date, time or event. Similarly, check the LOAD and RUN lines in your WIN.INI file (found in the \WINDOWS directory) for similar TSR programs. For example, PIMs that poll for a specific date and time, or auto-receive fax utilities that wait for an incoming call can cause problems. Many other programs, such as the Windows Clock or Calendar, or Adobe Type Manager, or screen saver programs, should not cause a problem. Finally, look for a Startup Program Group under Windows to see what applications or utilities may be launched automatically when you launch Windows.
10 Visual Reality Installation and Performance Sample AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS Files (not applicable when using with Windows95) The following AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files represent a sample configuration under which the Visual Reality applications run efficiently on a CPU with 8MB of RAM in a 256 color video display mode. This is a "stripped down" configuration: your configuration may vary significantly. AUTOEXEC.BAT: PROMPT $P$G PATH=C:\;C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS C:\WINDOWS\SMARTDRV.EXE 1024 1024
CONFIG.SYS: DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE DOS=HIGH,UMB SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /P /E:2048 FILES=40 BUFFERS=40 STACKS=9,256
Operating Visual Reality With Other Windows Applications
Multiple applications can be launched under Windows at any given time. However, because Renderize Live and Visual Font are 32-bit applications and most other applications are 16-bit, it is possible that launching and using 16-bit applications may corrupt or fragment the memory used by the Visual Reality applications. Unfortunately, not enough information is currently available regarding the simultaneous use of 16- and 32-bit applications under Windows 3.1. Therefore, if you run other applications simultaneously with Visual Reality, be sure to take care and save your work regularly. Remember that programs can be loaded or run automatically when you launch Windows. If you are having problems with Visual Reality, open the WIN.INI file and see if any programs are specified in the "Load" and "Run" lines at the beginning of that file.
Using the Visual Reality Programs Together
The different applications that make up Visual Reality are united in their ability to transfer data to and from one-another. In addition to transferring data through common file formats (outputting a TGA file from Visual Image and loading it into Renderize Live, for example), you can also transfer data directly among applications by copying, or by dragging and dropping. The specifics of copying data to and from a particular application is described in full in that application's section in the User's Manual.
Visual Reality Installation and Performance 11 Visual Image, Visual Model and Visual Font all contain Edit, Copy to Renderize commands to copy images, models and extruded fonts, respectively, into Renderize Live. In addition, the "current" image in Visual Image can be copied to Renderize Live by dragging and dropping that image's postage stamp icon. You can also copy image and model data from Renderize Live to Visual Image and Visual Model. Simply drag an image or an object resource icon in Renderize Live and drop it over the Visual Image or Visual Model interface to copy that data. Copy extruded text strings from Visual Font into Visual Model using the Edit, Copy to Visual Model command on the Visual Font Menu Bar. Finally, you can drag and drop resources from Visual Catalog to Renderize Live, Visual Image and Visual Model, assuming the resource being transferred is compatible with the application being transferred to.
12 Visual Reality Installation and Performance Notes
Visual Reality Installation and Performance 13