Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

n the beginning the
earth cooled, the seas
formed, and fife came
to the planet. That life
evolved from single cell animals all
the way up the food chain to the
dinosaurs which eventually became extinct
for reasons still uncertain. Man reached his
ascendancy and inverted the home computer,
for which more men designed the software
Imagine 3. Finally, there came Dinoverse from
a small company called Kryonix and now we
On the story.
Dinoverse is the name of a very cheap set of
objects designed for use with Imagine 3 or
higher based around a variety of dinosaurs.
Thee are four dinosaurs in the package rang.
ing from the highly-detailed Velociraptor design
to the Triceratops. In addition to these four
familiar beasties, there is also a selection of
prehistoric plants and insects, although, given
the differences in scale, you might never end
up using them in the same scene together.
TEXTURE MAPS
The objects themselves are not modelled in
superfine detail, but certainly detail enough for
whole body foreground shots, except for the
selociraptor which fills a disk all by itself, The
texture maps that the author has created for
the models are nice, with larger-than-screen
sized bitmaps for good surface detail, but there
are no separate greyscale bumpmaps for that
authentic pebbly skin look
This is wholly due to Imagine's deficit when
it comes to bump mapping an object with a
texture. The reason for this is that Imagine 3
uses the Y-axis to determine the apparent
extent of the peaks and troughs of a picture
used as a bumpmap, which means that positioning
and sizing a texture in three dimensions
becomes an impossibility, To add insult to
injury, Imagine's fairly groovy states function
don't work properly with bumpmaps, so
though you can set a state you can't
lock it down. This means that instead
of the bumpmap moving with your
object it stays in the same place, so
that your object moves through
the texture. This problem is supposed
to be resolved in Imagine
4, but as Kryonix supply the
object- without bumpmaps, it's all
much of a muchness. In addition
• &pont/ D e skI n's supe rb listociroptor
sbfo
,
t
w i
t h
i
to the dinosaur
models, you will
also find several landscapes that
have been saved out of Vista Pro in
two versions as low and very low resolution
(compared to the originals) Imagine
objects which would make a useful background
on which to place your saurian actors.
To finish off the scene, Kryonix have provided
an animated sky map with 120 frames of
animation to overlay onto a cloud object as a
transparency map. The sky animation is
extremely subtle, so don't expect to see major
changes in the sky if you use it. Also, it doesn't
loop, which is a shame, so there's no use making
your animations exactly 120 frames to take
advantage of a loop.
The 10 disk set comes with a printed manual
explaining how to install the disks (simply
copy them all into a drawer and assign it
accordingly) and more importantly, how to
actually use the objects in Imagine. The tutorial
provided is written in a sparky, clear manner
and makes it easy for even the bare bones (if
you'll forgive the pun) beginner to get to grips
with the awkwardness that is the States function.
One thing that must
be pointed Out is
that you
probably
States is a function
Imagine 3.0 and higher
• .1 allows the user to set
sitioning and texture mfor-
.iPon for on °two, Once
•u hove set several states
•L
, •••rn Wittl th
, •er-used feature
cS
p o a w e r
f u
n o
l
r
t h
e
n
m
o
r
p
d
The objeds contained in this set are all of reasonable h but not outstanding
quality, but the amount of effort that has gone into b creating a decent
skeleton for them is easy to see. Kryonix Design e deserves plenty of
support for this collection and Amiga Computing awaits t his collection of
States-controlled aircraft
w
e
AMIGA e COMPUTING
FEBRUARY n
1 996
r vats
1 Digital dinosaurs still seem to
be in vogue even two years
after the release of Jurassic
Park. Frank Nord investigates
Jargon
box
Nimpmaps are prchwes
311 CE140111 information
2reyscole), that ate used by
&D rendering programs to
give the impression that an
obrecfs surface is bumpy
when rendered. you need
to actuany deform the surface
or an obiect you have to use
displacement map
shouldn't read the manual if you are one of
those people who get incensed by poor
spelling. Numerous 'their's for 'there's and
bizarre punctuation means that the manual
has a less than professional feel to it, and 1
would urge Jeff (the author) to use a spell
checker before he does his next print run.
Things like this do make a big impression on
people and can spoil a very good product_
However, at a cost of only E24,99, it is hard to
fault the amount of work that has gone into
the truly important side of this package - the
models.
Supplier
Price
1
ussential 1BLACK t ei..01
.
1.11oerided
UL RAM
Imagine lx
Product
Tel
Ease of use
Implementation
Value For Money
Overall
El AWL]
line
PRODUCT DETAILS
Dinoverse
Kryonix design
E24.99
01303 243845
Scon't"Tp
,
•!:
60
,90:
75