Subject: submission: Scenery Animator vs. Vista Pro
From: Steve Koren <[email-masked]>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

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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
          [email-masked]