From: Steve Koren Subject: submission: Scenery Animator vs. Vista Pro Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Jason L. Tibbitts III Phase-Of-Moon: the moon is waxing crescent (7% illuminated) Subject: REVIEW: Scenery Animator vs. Vista Pro Keywords: application, graphics, 3d, rendering, landscape, commercial Path: menudo.uh.edu Distribution: world Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Reply-To: Steve Koren --text follows this line-- This is a comparison review of Scenery Animator and Vista Pro. Both programs have strengths and weaknesses and both are well worth owning for anyone interested in rendering or animating landscapes. Scenery Animator is available from: Natural Graphics P.O. Box 1963 Rocklin, CA 95677 916-624-1436 VistaPro is available from: Virtual Reality Labs 2341 Ganador Court San Luis Obispo CA 93401-9826 Scenery animator has a suggested price of $99, but mail order prices are as low as $55. VistaPro is slightly more expensive, with a mail order price of around $85. Both run under AmigaDos 1.3 or 2.04, can be HD installed, and come with versions optimized for accelerated machines with floating point coprocessors. I have tested both on an accelerated 2000, but not a 3000 (although it is unlikely there would be any problems). What are they? -------------- Both of these programs load digital elevation data and create 3D landscape images from that data. Digital elevation data is available from the companies in formats designed to be used with their programs. Most of this data is originally from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and can be purchased in mass quantities from USGS as well, although it must be converted into a form which can be read by the programs. Similarities ------------ Both Scenery Animator (hereafter referred to as S-A) and VistaPro (hereafter referred to as V-P) permit you to control the observer viewpoint and the "target" at which the observer looks. This is done in an intuitive manner using the mouse and a contour map in both programs. Both also permit you to enter coordinates as well for more precision. Both programs also permit you to vary other aspects of the rendering, such as the lighting angle (which controls shadows), the extent of detail in the rendering, and the palette used for various aspects of the terrain. Both will model water, rock, vegetation, and snow. Both will allow you to create animations, although this process is cumbersome in V-P unless you purchase an external program designed to ease the task. Both also support IFF24 output for sending images to framebuffers. What is different ----------------- Rendering Quality: Scenery Animator wins by a large margin. It is trivially easy to produce stunningly beautiful renderings with only a small effort. The results are very nice even using normal Amiga graphics, and get better if you have a 24 bit output device. VistaPro can produce good results, but they take more "tweaking" effort. Since USGS data covers the entire United States (and some areas of Mars), there is a limit on the amount of detail necessary. Most of the data stores elevations for points 30 meters apart. This imposes a limit on the resolution of the rendered scene, and V-P shows this especially when looking at terrain which is near the observer. V-P addresses this by smoothing the polygons. S-A addresses the limitation by filling in fractal data between elevation points. The S-A method produces much better results especially for terrain close to the observer. The only area of rendering where V-P wins is that it produces nicer looking lakes than S-A does. S-A will also generate very realistic looking fractal clouds which can be animated to move across the landscape, something V-P does not support. Grades: Scenery Animator: A, VistaPro: C. Easy of Use: Scenery Animator also has the edge here. The main editor screen in V-P is a contour map, over which you move the observer and viewpoint. This means that you must perform at least a low resolution rendering to get a good idea of how your scene will look. S-A shows you a filled polygon preview of the scene which is usually enough to get a good feel for how the scene will look. This preview even gives you some idea of the effect of light angle so that you can see which areas will be in shadows or "washed out". S-A also shows the view angle graphically on the contour map. You can click on the preview window to move your viewpoint around. Grades: Scenery Animator: A-, VistaPro: C+. Degree of Control: VistaPro permits the user more control over the scene. It has some limited abilities for "terraforming" built into the program - you can add lakes and rivers, etc. S-A also has a few, but not as many. Both programs let you control the elevation at which vegetation starts and ends, at which snow starts on mountains, etc. V-P lets you render scenes at night easily with a background starfield, which S-A will not do, and it also lets you change the color of the sky from horizon to zenith. The companion program "Terraform" available from VRLI lets you change the terrain data in any manner you wish. V-P will also let you control fog and haze effects, which S-A does not do. Grades: Scenery Animator: C, VistaPro: B+ (A with Terraform). Availibility of Data: Both programs come with a limited supply of data on the original disk. Both companies also offer other data disks for various geographically interesting areas of the US, and VRLI offers some data from Mars as well. VRLI offers more data than Natural Graphics does, partially because V-P is an older and more mature program. S-A will, however, load V-P scenery files but cannot append them into a larger terrain. Both programs also permit you to create random fractal based scenery based on a fractal seed and some other data such as the average height of mountains. V-P has more controls for this creation, but the results do not look like realistic terrain now matter how you tweak the controls. S-A, on the other hand, produces beautiful fractal landscapes with no effort. One almost might mistake them for the real thing. This gives you an endless source of terrain to explore. So V-P has more "native" real terrain locations, but S-A has an edge in the creation of random fractal terrain. Grades: Scenery Animator: B+, VistaPro: B+. Animation Abilities: Both programs let you create animations by rendering a large number of individual frames in a batch mode. This process is very easily in S-A - you create key frames and the program interpolates between them for a given number of frames. For example, I recently made a 500 frame animation by entering only 5 key frames. V-P, on the other hand, has very cumbersome animation capabilities. You must enter the positions of the observer and the viewpoint for each and every frame. However, V-P has a companion program available, called "MakePath", which allows you to more easily make script files for animations. MakePath is more powerful than the keyframe mechanism in S-A, but it is an extra cost program, and does not integrate well with V-P when compared to S-A's smooth and well thought out keyframe system. In short, V-P when combined with MakePath has an edge in power and flexibility, but S-A provides much of this ability in an easier to use manner. Also, S-A lets you create very large animations by loading several contiguous terrain files into memory at once. The current release of V-P is limited to a very small area, and you quickly run out of terrain when making animations. The next upgrade to V-P is supposed to fix this limitation. S-A will also let you define a "sliding box" around your observer to avoid performing needless computations on scenery which would be obscured anyway. Grades: Scenery Animator: A-, VistaPro: C+ (B+ with Makepath). Rendering Speed: V-P lets you control the relative level of detail of the rendering by either rendering each polygon, or every other polygon, or every 4th or 8th. You can get a "quick and dirty" preview by setting the detail level to 8, and render the final scene at 1 with Geraud shaded polygons. S-A has only a binary detail control which controls whether the program fills in its own fractal data between the 30m points in the database. With "detail off", S-A renders very quickly - more quickly, in fact, than the preview modes in V-P, and the results are better. At the highest detail setting in each program, S-A still wins in rendering speed. I rendered several terrain files in V-P and then imported the same files into S-A and rendered them there from the same viewpoint with the same screen mode and resolution. The results are below. Both times were measured using the floating point specific version of the programs and a PP&S 68040 card. Scenery Animator: 0m58s VistaPro: 1m57s Grades: Scenery Animator: A-, VistaPro: C. Scene Preview: As mentioned above, S-A gives you a polygon preview of your screen at all times, which V-P does not. It also produces nice looking scenes in just a few seconds if you turn off the "detail mode". V-P lets you preview the scene by ignoring most of the polygons, but this produces only marginal results and can still take a long time. Grades: Scenery Animator: A-, VistaPro: C-. Program stability: Both programs run under AmigaDos 2.0 and on 68030 and 68040 based systems. VistaPro has proven to be very stable for me; it has never crashed that I can remember. S-A has crashed once. Grades: Scenery Animator: B+, VistaPro: A. Memory Use: Both programs like a lot of ram. V-P requires a 3 mb system, and S-A requires 2 mb. However, if you wish to load in many terrain files, S-A will start to require more memory quickly to store the necessary data. For the same amount of data, S-A requires less ram then V-P. Grades: Scenery Animator: A-, VistaPro: C+. Multitasking: Both V-P and S-A are written so that they do not take CPU time when they are not busy rendering. If you have sufficient memory, you can easily place them in the background, lower their task priorities to -5 or so, and render away without noticing any degradation in the performance of the rest of your system. Grades: Scenery Animator: A, VistaPro: A. Company Support: VistaPro is well supported with upgrades from VRLI, their technical support line, and with the free newsletter they send you when you register the program. VRLI also has a good track record in the Amiga community and has published other popular programs such as Distant Suns 4.0. Since I have only just registered S-A and have not had the chance to use their technical support yet, I do not know how Natural Graphics compares. I did call to give them a few suggestions, and the woman I spoke to seemed friendly and knowledgeable. Grades: Scenery Animator: unknown, VistaPro: A. Conclusions ----------- If I had to recommend just one of these programs, it would be Scenery Animator. It produces beautiful scenes quite easily, is easy and intuitive, and provides easy animation abilities without external support programs. VistaPro has been around for longer, is well supported by VRLI, and produces good images, but there are a number of things that Scenery Animator simply does better and easier for less money. The biggest decisive factor in my mind is the rendering quality of S-A. You can't really go wrong with either program though. A recent VRLI newsletter has announced that VistaPro 2.0 will be ready in early 92, and promises to enhance many of the areas where V-P is behind S-A. In particular, it promises better rendering quality and the ability to load several landscape files into memory at once for creating very large animations. V-P 2.0 may again make VistaPro the premier program of its type. In summary, if you have any interest in making realistic animations of real or fractal terrain, you owe it to yourself to buy one of these two programs. Applications like this were only possible on very expensive high end systems just a few years ago, but now, this can be done on an Amiga, and quite well if you have an accelerated system with several mb of ram. Steve Koren koren@hpfcly.fc.hp.com