Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: koren@hpfcogv.fc.hp.com (Steve Koren) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Essence Volumes I and II Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 6 Oct 1993 16:04:18 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 383 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <28uqa2$6dc@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: koren@hpfcogv.fc.hp.com (Steve Koren) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: graphics, 3D, rendering, Imagine, commercial PRODUCT NAME Essence Volumes I and II BRIEF DESCRIPTION Essence is an algorithmic texture package for (at this time) Imagine on the Commodore Amiga. The June 1993 newsletter from Apex (the creators of Essence) hints at the possibility of Essence for Lightwave and Read3D, and perhaps others. It also has mentioned Essence for the PC version of Imagine. This review was written based on the Amiga Imagine version. "Essence" with no volume number is used in this review to mean both Volumes I and II. This review assumes some knowledge of 3D rendering. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Apex Software Publishing Address: 405 El Camino Real Suite 121 Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA Telephone: (415) 322-7532 E-mail: spworley@netcom.com LIST PRICE Essence I: $48 (US) (prices from Apex newsletter) Essence II: $74 (US) SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Essence requires an Amiga with a floating point coprocessor. Some of the textures are complex enough that a 68040 is quite desirable, although not strictly necessary. Essence does not explicitly require a hard disk, although I strongly recommend one for doing 3D rendering. SOFTWARE Essence requires the floating point version of Imagine. It also claims to support Turbo Silver, although I haven't tried that. It supports AmigaDOS 1.3, 2.04, and 3.0, and might also support 1.2. Since older versions of Imagine can be had very cheaply, this is a good way to start in 3D graphics without a huge initial cost. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000/040 2 Mb chip RAM, 16 Mb fast RAM Workbench 3.0 Imagine 2.0, FP (floating point) version. INSTALLATION Installation is trivial for both Volume I and II. The supplied install script copies Essence to a location you specify. The Commodore Installer is used. OVERVIEW Essence I and II are packages of algorithmic textures. An algorithmic texture is a method for the 3D software to decide the attributes of a particular object as a function of the coordinates on that object and the coordinates of the texture itself. The texture can vary the color, reflectivity, or transparency of an object in interesting ways across that object's surface (or inside that object's volume if this is supported by the software). Texture can also simulate altitude effects. Some textures are more or less hardcoded for a specific surface type (such as a sphere or flat plane), while others are usable for any surface. While it is possible to achieve some of these effects with bitmap color or altitude maps, using textures has many advantages: - Textures use far less RAM than bitmaps. - Textures have almost infinite detail, while zooming in on a bitmap might either require a very large (and thus RAM consuming) bitmap, or might produce "jaggies" and pixel artifacts. - Many features of textures can be morphed over time to produce stunning animated effects not practical with bitmaps. - Creating some of these effects with bitmaps would be quite difficult. Textures also have some disadvantages. Chiefly: - They can be much slower than bitmaps. Essence I and especially II contain some very powerful algorithmic textures. There are textures in Volume II which are difficult to achieve using any other rendering engine, Amiga or otherwise. ESSENCE VOLUME I Essence textures are divided into two volumes. The first volume contains textures which are more basic building blocks. Low level fractal noise textures are common in Volume I, along with various useful transitions and patterns. The fractal noise textures are very powerful and are useful to model countless real world objects. Fractal noise can be used, for example, to create weathered patterns on buildings, dirt on windows, marble objects, or anything else with non-regular patterns. It is also useful to make rendered objects less "perfect" or "sterile" by adding a slight amount of random discoloration to an object. This can dramatically improve the quality of the image by eliminating the sterile feel of a perfect object. Fractal noise can also be used in altitude textures to create bumps on an object. In addition, Essence I has many useful transition textures. Some of these also employ fractal patterns; for example, you might make a blast wave from an explosion radiate outward from the impact point, but the wavefront itself would not be "smooth". Transition textures come in linear, spherical, and cylindrical forms, with smooth or fractal edges. The transition width and the sharpness can be controlled. These transition textures are unexpectedly useful once you have grown accustomed to them. A common use is to "shape" objects by using a transparency transition texture. I recently created a picture with flames shaped by this technique; it would have been much harder to accomplish this by creating an actual object outline shaped like a flame, and it would have lacked the same amount of detail. Almost all textures supporting fractal noise have parameters that let you control various aspects of the noise, such as the scale of the noise, the detail level (the more detail, the more time it takes to render, but the nicer it looks), random seed values, the "time scale" (which controls how the fractal noise is formed) and some other values. In many cases, different patterns can be combined to form new effects. Textures can be made to cooperate (for example, coloring only the highest parts of a surface with a fractal altitude map applied), or not. Many textures can set either the color, reflectance, or transparency of a surface. Some are limited to only one or two of those due to Imagine's limited number of texture parameters. In these cases, a utility texture is provided to translate any of the 3 to any other. Also, multiple versions of the texture are sometimes provided, one to control color, one for reflectance, etc. Almost all the textures have a "fade" value which can be useful to smoothly introduce or remove the texture in an animation. Almost all also support some sort of "time" parameter which can be used to change the texture in an animation. A recent newsletter from Apex had an example of a stunning animated fire effect using three Essence I textures which were morphed into a new object with different parameters. The time parameter might be used to create clouds which change shape as they move across the sky, or a fungus which grows on an object over time. With only a very few exceptions, I have found the textures in Volume I to be very high quality. The only texture which I was never able to get much satisfaction with is the "tree bark" texture, but this might be just a problem with my use of it. All the other textures I have used from Essence I have produced marvelous effects. In all cases, the textures come with default values which look "good" for most normal-sized objects. You can then adjust individual values to obtain the best effect for your needs. Most parameters can be morphed over time, and these are indicated with a special mark in the documentation. Several of the Essence I textures are similar to textures provided with Imagine, but provide much more control. In a few cases I have wished for some of the Essence II features in the Essence I textures (such as a new cylinder brick texture); but for the most part, Essence I textures can do what I want. ESSENCE VOLUME II After owning Volume I for quite a few months, it provided so much that I was at first skeptical that Volume II could give me anything else I would need. Luckily, I was wrong. Instead of lower level building blocks, Volume II textures tend to be dedicated to a specific purpose, such as making a flagstone wall or walkway, or a wood surface, or various sorts of tiles or shingles or scales. There is a "hurricane" texture which, in addition to producing nice animated storms, can be used to make other spiral objects such as galaxies, or perhaps water going down a drain. There are several water textures, including standing waves, "caustics" (the patterns you see on the bottom of a swimming pool), and several water drop and rain textures. There is a stunning "sea waves" texture which produces very nice oceans, and especially nice reflections from the rippled water. Some of the Volume II textures are almost biological in nature, producing the effect of "veins" on the surface of an object, or a sort of crusty fungus appearance. I haven't yet found a use for most of these textures, but the effects they produce are quite nice. There are also some Volume II textures which are similar (but not identical) to effects that you can get by combining 3 or more Volume I textures. Some of the "flake" textures can produce nice rock walls which previously required 3 Essence I textures. This is an advantage because it takes much less time to produce a nice effect (you don't have to experiment nearly as much), and you also get more control over the final surface. For example, the texture which lets you add random raised "flakes" to an object, lets you control the color of the applied flakes, the shape of the protrusion, random discoloration, and several other things. Most of the textures provide very detailed control, and most have some altitude effect which cooperates with the applied texture color. Volume II includes on-disk images which show small pictures of the various textures. I have found that these pictures (probably due to disk size constraints) are of too low resolution to be of much real use. However, the Imagine objects used to produce them are included, so you can render high resolution versions yourself. Volume II also includes some sample attribute files using the supplied textures. Some of the Volume II textures are ideally suited for high resolution displays because of the amount of detail they add. Using them on a plain ECS display is possible, but it is easily possible to "overdrive" the resolution of the display unless you make the feature size large. Others, however, work fine in low resolutions. DOCUMENTATION The Essence documentation for both I and II comes in a spiral bound 5 1/2" X 8 1/2" document, which is nice because it is easy to open flat to a particular page. The text is both good and bad. It succeeds in conveying almost everything you need to know about using the textures, assuming that you understand enough about Imagine to be able to understand and use external textures in the first place. The documentation is certainly in a class far above the documentation for Imagine 2.0 itself. It includes pictures of most of the texture "families", along with a textual description of the texture, and a description of each of the parameters to the texture. The introduction also has some information that applies to all of the textures, such as general information on fractal noise. I do, however, have a few complains about the manuals. First, the style in which they are written tends to become overly "cute" or "chatty." I can handle a fair amount of this in informal communication, but it manages to become annoying when used to document what is otherwise a very professional piece of software. To some extent this is a matter of preference, but at the very least I think that it hurts the professional image that the software deserves. My initial copy of the Volume II documentation was missing certain pages and has duplicates of others, so there are a few textures about which I lacked either documentation or hardcopy sample pictures or both. (For example, my pages proceeded thus: 28, 31, 32, 31, 32, 33, ...). Thankfully this was an anomaly and the manual was replaced at no cost by Apex within a week of my mentioning it. The new manual has all the pages it should. Lastly, even though the documentation is adequate, there are some texture parameters which I wish were explained in a bit more detail. For example, the cyclone texture accepts an "Arm Scale" parameter, which is explained as: "A hurricane has a definite scale to its arms. Are there many thin arms, or maybe just a couple of fat ones?" However, this explanation leaves me with questions about just how this parameter relates to the number of arms (if at all), and at what point the arm scale is measured and in what direction, etc. There are other similar cases. More precise explanations could only help. There are also cases where there are several parameters which have a similar enough description that the difference between them is not clear. Although it would probably take a large amount of documentation space, I would like to have seen perhaps 4 to 8 different pictures in the manual for each texture, with each picture made by varying one of the primary texture attributes. That would immediately make it clear what the effect of changing a given attribute would be. In many cases these effects are obvious, but in others, they are not. The documentation is, however, adequate for the intermediate user familiar with Imagine textures, and is far above the quality of the Imagine documentation from Impulse. LIKES AND DISLIKES Overall, there is little to find fault with about Essence. Other than relatively minor documentation complains, the product has been able to do almost everything I have asked of it. It lets me build a huge variety of surfaces that would not otherwise be possible. Occasionally, the textures overload parameters in a somewhat non-intuitive manner (such as using the fractional part of a number for a different purpose than the integer part), but this is usually required by the limited number of texture parameters that Imagine provides. I'd like to see a separate Apex product containing simply objects which use the Essence textures. For example, the "fire" object in their recent newsletter uses 3 layered textures and would not be easy for a novice user to produce without a lot of experimentation, especially as the effect is animated. I have some objects which use up to 7 Essence textures at once. If Apex released a disk containing simple plain objects such as the fire example, it could save a lot of time. Other potential things would be a "waterfall" effect, various other types and styles of fire, perhaps a "mold growing over object" effect, etc. Tweaking the parameters to get a high quality animated effect can take a lot of time, especially when you have many layered textures. A disk full of these high quality effects would be a significant value. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS I am not familiar with any other algorithmic texture packages for Imagine. Right now, I believe this product has no competition. Compared to the Impulse-supplied textures, Essence is a far more capable product. Comparing Essence to the Impulse textures is roughly akin to comparing a Corvette to a Yugo; both are transportation, but the Corvette has much more power under the hood. The difference between Essence and textures supplied with other Amiga 3D systems is not as great, but is still significant. Some other Amiga rendering systems provide perhaps a dozen or two various sorts of textures. Essence provides hundreds, and provides useful effects that are simply not present elsewhere. I have recently been looking at the possibility of moving from Imagine to another rendering system, but so far have held back mostly because this would mean giving up the familiar Essence textures for a more incomplete set. BUGS I have not found any bugs in the software. One was apparently found by Apex, and a workaround for it was documented in one of their newsletters. VENDOR SUPPORT My only experience with Apex support was my original defective manual, which was replaced by Apex immediately. Apex also seems to be committed to listening to its customers, unlike Impulse itself which seems uninterested in, and at times almost hostile to, user feedback. Essence Volume II was apparently created almost entirely from user requests. A recent Apex newsletter has also mentioned a new version of the existing textures which are significantly faster, and provide new abilities such as using one texture as an alpha channel to control application of another. WARRANTY I cannot find any warranty information in the manual. It might have been on the registration cards I sent in, but they are gone now. CONCLUSIONS Both Volume I and II are indispensable for anyone who is even moderately serious about 3D rendering. I am interested in 3D rendering only as a hobby, not a profession; but thankfully, both Essence volumes are priced to be affordable on a hobbyist's budget. I'd go so far as to say that if you use Imagine, Essence is a "must-have" addition and makes the program far more powerful than it is otherwise. I like it enough that even though I have some complains about Imagine & Impulse (the company that produces Imagine), I will not consider moving to another 3D program if it does not have Essence available. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being best, I rate Essence as 9.5. The only thing keeping it from a "10" is my few complains about the manual. There are very few software products which have impressed me enough that I'd buy anything else put out by the company sight unseen, but Essence has managed to be one of these. DISCLAIMER I have no relationship to Apex other than as a (satisfied) customer. I also do not have any professional use for 3D rendering tools; it is a hobby only. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews