Figure 1. -- Click for a larger version.

So you got the hottest tools in the industry for 3D animation and visualization. You fire up AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max and dazzle your customers with breath taking AVI's of architectural fly-throughs and presentations. After all you have the option of delivering your AVI's on CD-Rom and VHS videotape. What else can a customer ask for? Well, how about: "Why can't I control the camera myself and look at my designs in my own time?" The moment you tell a customer "No silly, you can't do that", you give him the best possible reason to look for someone who says "Sure, we can do that". So let's find out if RealiMation can help us keep our promise.

RealiMation is a collection of tools for the development and delivery of real time 3D applications. With the 3 different versions of RealiMation you can create interactive visualisations, simulations and games. The heart of the Professional and Designer Edition is the STE (Space Time Editor). The entry-level package and the Professional Edition let you create and deliver simple VRML and 3D scenes. The more expensive Designer Edition gives you additional tools and features and is the one to go for if you want to do professional 3D visualisations. If you are a game developer, then the VSG (Visual Simulations and Games) Developer Edition is what you need. The content of this review is based on the Designer Edition.

THE TOOLS
The Designer Edition ships with the RealiMation STE, RealiStorm and RealiView. You also get a collection of sample worlds and models, RealiSave for creating your own 3D screen savers and a set of color manuals. For a package in this price region you might expect more than one STE user's guide, a thin RealiStorm user's guide and a thin STE appendum. The contents of the manuals are, however, comprehensive and well written. The STE user's guide starts of with an introductory guide into 3D computer graphics, which is a helpful feature for novices. The on-line documentation and help system is very comprehensive, so this product is by no means short on documentation.

The STE is the place where you create and design real time 3D interactive environments. A typical RealiBase, or RealiMation virtual world, consists of views, shapes, placements, materials, cameras, lights, atmospherics, images and actions. You can create 3D primitives such as boxes, spheres, cylinders and tories. RealiMation is not a 3D modeler, so if you want to create more complex objects, you'll have to import them from a modeler like 3D Studio Max. For this reason you can import DXF, 3DS and VRML models. The best format by far is 3DS, since it's efficient, keeps texture coordinates and even imports keyframes into the STE. Once you have created your 3D environment, you'll want to deliver it to others for exploration. All you have to do is copy your virtual world (stored as a RealiBase RBS file) together with the RealiView application onto a floppy disk (yep, one of the beauties of this package is that the end product occupies only a minute amount of space). RealiView is a freely available and distributable interactive viewer. It even plugs into Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer for delivery of real-time 3D over the Net. RealiView can be downloaded at www.realimation.com. RealiStorm is a plug-in currently available for AutoCAD, 3D Studio Max and MicroStation. With RealiStorm you can create your 3D virtual world from within any of these three applications. This can give you a massive productivity boost. Unfortunately the RealiStorm plug-in for 3DS Max is currently not compatible with Max R2, so I wasn't able to give it a try.

All the information about your virtual world is stored in a RealiBase. It's like a database storing your objects, cameras, lights and actions etc. This is why a RealiMation is so compact. Everything in the RealiBase is stored in numeric format and gets rendered on the fly in RealiView.

It's important to note that the STE Designer and RealiView viewer are renderer independent. You can dynamically choose between the Direct3D, RenderWare and OpenGL drivers. I found that on Windows NT the best display quality and performance is achieved with OpenGL. You can use the RealiBench utility to determine which renderer gives you the best performance on your specific operating system and hardware configuration.

GOING THROUGH THE TUTORIAL
If you buy a package like the RealiMation STE Designer Edition, chances are that you want to do more than just doodle around with 3D objects. The best way to start learning new software is to work through the tutorials. RealiMation provides a number of tutorials, which are delivered both in print and as on-line help files. 3D Studio Max R2 has taught me to appreciate on-line tutorials. You can neatly size them to one corner of the screen and don't have to keep looking up and down from book to screen. If you are a paper die-hard, you can use the printed tutorials instead.

The first tutorial teaches you how to fly around in a virtual world. This applies to a design session in the STE or while exploring in RealiView. Your first attempt will probably see you fly through buildings and mountains. At first it feels like maneuvering a formula one car through a porcelain shop, but when you learn how to adjust and control the sensitivity, you get the hang of it very quickly.

A little white square in the center of the screen helps you to coordinate your navigation. Pressing the mouse button above, below, left or right of the square moves you forward, backward, left or right. You can also combine directions, just like using a flight stick. Once you know that the Ctrl button reduces sensitivity, navigating the scene is simple and exact. The right mouse button pans the camera up, down, left and right. Pressing both buttons lets you control roll and pitch. This gives you enough control to move to any location in your scene and adjust your desired viewing angle. You can set the sensitivity of the mouse controls in the Customise menu, where I prefer to keep them near the "fine" side.

To the top of the view are a number of speed buttons, which help you navigate the scene. The Solid Camera option keeps you from flying through objects. The Terrain Camera lets you fly over a terrain at a constant height, raising and lowering the camera as you glide over mountains and buildings.

Besides navigating with the mouse, there are control buttons for navigating the scene to the left and bottom of the Main View window. It's a bit tedious, however, having to move the mouse from button to button. Using the mouse like a flight stick is far more interactive and I suppose the separate buttons are mainly for use during a design session.

CREATING A SIMPLE REALIBASE
The first thing you might want to do after loading the STE, is to switch off the automatic hint mechanism. Everytime you do something, a window pops up telling you of the consequences of your action. This might be helpful for people new to computers, but I thought it was really annoying and found the place to disable it very quickly.

Some terminology before we dig deeper: RealiMation uses the term 'shape' to describe a 3D object. In 3DS Max a shape is a 2D outline, but here it's definitely a solid 3D object.

The STE makes heavy use of drag and drop, Lister Windows and Placements. Lister windows store and list different types of information. E.g. the Shapes Lister keeps a list of all your shapes while the Materials Lister list all your materials. To apply a material to a shape, you drag it from the Materials Lister to the respective shape in the Shapes Lister. From there you can drag the shape into the main view. The members of a Lister are displayed in a hierarchy and dragging one member onto another makes it a child of that member. This is how you link shapes together. Placements are links or references to shapes. Working with placements reduces the size of a RealiBase, since many placements can make reference to a single instance of a shape. Every placement can have its own position and orientation.

Figure 2. -- Click for a larger version.

You start populating your virtual world by creating geometric primitives in the Create menu, or by importing objects from other applications. Once you have placed a shape in your virtual world, you can change its size, position and orientation by clicking and dragging the mouse over clearly marked and coloured areas. You can actually use the mouse to transform a shape the way YOU want, precisely and without fuss. Compare that to some 3D Modeling applications, where your object ends up in an unrecoverable mess once you attempt to rotate it with the mouse. A nice feature is the color coded axes - cyan, magenta and yellow for x, y and z. On a cube, for example, the sides of a box have a little coloured square on them and if you click on yellow, you know that you are transforming your shape along the z axis. Clicking a shape once lets you change its size and position, while double clicking puts the shape into 'rotation' mode. Now little color pentagons let you rotate your shape along the different axes. You can even change the center of rotation by dragging one of the pentagons with the right mouse button. A little legend at the bottom of the screen always reminds you which color is associated with what axis.

ACTION
When you want your shape to do something, you assign an action to it. Actions are something between animations, scripts and behaviors. Every action consists of a number of nodes. 3D Animation packages create motion by defining keyframes and interpolating between them. Unlike keyframes, nodes are defined according to time. Nodes describe the position, orientation and speed at a particular time. Since nodes are time based, they can also describe a rate of change, i.e. at a particular time a shape rotates at 35 degrees per second. A powerful feature of actions is that they can be modified dynamically. This is rather indispensable for game development, where the course of a heat seeking missile needs to be recalculated constantly. You can choose from predefined actions such as Spin, Linear or Circle etc. A spin action will causes a box to rotate around its own axis. You can also create more versatile actions with a General action. As you create your actions, they get listed in the Actions Lister, where you can double click them for further modification or drag them onto a shape. The course of an action can be modified by adding and deleting nodes. You can also make actions repetitive. In the case of a butterfly, which you get to create in one of the tutorials, you create an action which makes the wings beat up and down. Another action makes the butterflies body bob up and down and yet another action puts it on a circular flight path. You can even nest actions to create more complex motions.

A set of axes at the bottom left of the view window helps you to keep your orientation while orbiting the camera. Designing with a single view of your scene is not very practical and accurate, so the STE lets you spilt your current window into four sub-views.

Figure 3. -- Click for a larger version.

After the split, you have one perspective view and three orthographic views. Manipulating shapes is similar to working in 3DS Max's sub-object mode. The Pick menu lets you activate 'Placements' or 'Shapes' mode. 'Placements' is the default mode where you work on the entire shape, e.g. changing its position or orientation. 'Shapes' mode lets you select and manipulate vertices, edges or faces.

Figure 4.

At this point a little annoyance pops up. Doodling around selecting and de-selecting vertices with the mouse causes the Main View to stop updating its contents. The first time this happened, the whole STE crashed. Investigating, I found that switching the display driver from OpenGL to RenderWare doesn't fix the problem, but makes it less acute. For now I just have to press the ESC "Clear Selection" button every time before selecting other vertices. I don't know whether this is related to my display driver or not, but the Diamond FireGL 1000 is not an uncommon configuration for running OpenGL applications.

The shapes you create are pure polygon objects, there is no such thing as spline based modeling here. This makes perfect sense, since the aim of a RealiMation is to retain a high level of interactivity.

TEXTURE MAPPING

Figure 5. -- Click for a larger version.

The STE lets you map textures and bitmaps onto shapes using planar, spherical or cylindrical mapping. You can even make a sub-selection of a shapes faces and map a material onto only the selected faces. This is similar to a multi/sub-object material in 3DS Max. The Texture Coordinate Editor is a great tool for visually fine tuning and positioning textures.

MORE FEATURES
The multiple undo tool keeps a list of previous actions. The alignment tool lets you precisely align objects. Flip face and vertex normals to remove anomalities from imported DXF files. Reduce the face and vertex count of imported models and smooth their vertex normals to improve appearance. A single shape can have several geometry representations, from rough to detailed, speeding up interactivity within the virtual world.

CONCLUSION
The RealiMation Designer Edition produces fully interactive 3D virtual worlds and supplies the right tools to do the job. Outside the gaming industry there are already numerous commercial applications for interactive virtual worlds, and there will be more every day. Architects can take a stroll through a virtual implementation of their 2D plans and get a first hand impression of what their masterpiece will look and "feel" like. Construction companies can provide prospective shop and office tenants with a fully featured virtual shopping mall and let them decide there and then which location suits them best. You can even simulate certain actions, which are too dangerous to try out in real life (like military maneuvers and other silly games). The big difference to a pre-rendered or raytraced video fly-through is that a Realimation is fully interactive and puts you into the pilot seat. RealiMation claims that one megabyte of AVI can take as little as one kilobyte of RealiMation. So does a RealiMation replace pre-rendered visualisations done in programs like 3DS Max? Hardly, since there is still an enormous detail and quality penalty to be paid for real-time rendering. RealiMation is rather the perfect complement to 3D modelers and renderes, where interactivity and speed of delivery are important. By the time you are still busy burning an AVI onto CD-Rom, or rendering to VHS output, your customer can already explore your RealiMation from a self contained stiffy disk or even over the World Wide Web.


Robin Lankes is the senior member of Animatix Design, a South African based 3D Animation and Visualisation company. You can contact Robin at robinl@taiga.co.za.

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