Installation and Performance
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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.