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
http://www.cucug.org/amiga/amiinfo/reviews/SceneryAnimato.txt
(possibly inaccurate URL)
08/1997
