INTRODUCTION TO VISTAPRO

INTRODUCTION TO VISTAPRO!

WHAT IS VISTAPRO?
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Vistapro is a three dimensional landscape simulation program. Using U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, Vistapro can accurately recreate real world landscapes in vivid detail. As a fractal landscape generator, Vistapro can create landscapes from a random seed number. Vistapro supports over four billion different fractal landscapes. Simply by changing a number, you can create whole new worlds. In addition, by simply clicking on several buttons, rivers and lakes can be created in a landscape where none existed previously.
HOW VISTAPRO WORKS
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Vistapro uses a combination of artificial intelligence, chaotic math, and a user definable set of values to simulate landscapes in their natural state. At present, the USGS has converted about 40% of the United States to DEM files which may be potentially used with Vistapro. Vistapro is a single frame generator, meaning that it acts like a camera; point and click the camera and Vistapro will render a new view of the landscape.
Landscapes can be viewed from a practically infinite combination of heights, angles, and distances. Using the combination of user controllable values and Vistapro's built-in routines, landscapes can be made as realistic or as surreal as desired. It is easy to alter tree and snow lines, haze, exposure, rivers, lakes, and light sources to customize the appearance of the landscape.
Vistapro uses data derived from United States Geologic Survey Digital Elevation Mapping files for generating its images. These files contain coordinate and elevation data at 30 meter (roughly 100 ft.) increments. Each file used in Vistapro contains about 65,000 elevation points and 130,000 polygons.
Vistapro doesn't know anything about what covers the terrain. It doesn't know where the trees, roads or buildings are. It does its best to color each polygon (based upon a few numbers that you input) in a realistic way. It still can't draw each rock and tree where they are in reality.
SOME USES FOR VISTAPRO
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Vistapro is not only of interest to scientists and engineers. Artists, writers, teachers, game designers, travelers, and people just looking for hours of entertainment will appreciate Vistapro.
Artists can design realistic scenery as backgrounds for their artwork. Writers can create worlds and see them through their characters' eyes. Geography, geology, and meteorology teachers can use Vistapro to breathe life into their subjects. Game designers can make realistic or surrealistic scenery for backgrounds in their games. Travelers, hikers, and backpackers can preview their journeys.
Vistapro can be pure entertainment. Explore fascinating terrains that you might never have a chance to see, or visit distant planets that man has not yet trod. Build new worlds that exist nowhere except in the imagination, and then visit them as if they were really there. On the other hand, there are many scientific and business applications for Vistapro. Environmentalists, surveyors, geologists, architects and engineers will all find Vistapro a useful adjunct to their work.
SPEEDING UP VISTAPRO
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There are two ways to speed up Vistapro - strategy or brute strength. After having used the program for a while, it becomes easy to read the lower resolution settings in Vistapro to see how the desired picture is developing. When the scene is properly positioned and lighted, and when the tree line, snow line, and water levels are set as desired, then and only then, render the picture at the time-consuming full resolution mode.
The other alternative method of speeding up Vistapro's rendering process is to add power to your machine. Vistapro is programmed to use every available computing resource as efficiently as possible. The time consuming rendering process is a function of the enormous amount of computation that Vistapro must do, not any lack of optimization of the program itself. Vistapro will automatically look for and use whatever processing resources are supplied.
Realistic ray traced CAD objects, detailed 3-D animations, and realistic landscapes are all a part of the emerging software categories called virtual reality, artificial reality, or computer aided art. These categories all require immense computational capacity, but as the cost of computing power continues to plummet, these types of programs will become the standard.
As a Vistapro user, you are pioneering virtual reality exploration, and it is admittedly a bit tedious on a slower machine. But, viewed another way, it is amazing that this type of rendering can be done at all, let alone on a personal computer. Until the advent of Vistapro, landscape renderings of such realism were only available to users of mainframes and supercomputers for government projects.
MAKING THE MOST OF VISTAPRO
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Making a stunning landscape in Vistapro requires the combined eye of a photographer and the artistic sense of a painter, but there are a few tips which can help improve your first attempts:
Lighting
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Experiment with the lighting. If the light is coming from behind the camera, then the camera scenes may appear rather flat-there won't be a strong feeling of three-dimensionality. Dramatic shadowing effects can be created by choosing the proper lighting direction and angle.
With the power of Vistapro, an artist can choose to light the scene in ways which could never occur in the real world, or, if realism is desired, the correct solar position for that particular season and geographic location and time of day can be selected. Virtual Reality Labs' Distant Suns Windows program can easily calculate such solar lighting conditions in order to correctly set the light, target, and camera position to obtain maximum realism in a rendering.
If lighting is left to chance, shadows may cover the scene making it too dark. Setting the light source (the sun) at 45 to 90 degrees to the left or right of the camera gives the best results. For example: if the camera is facing due north, placing the sun at the southeast, east, southwest or west, usually makes the best pictures.
Placing the sun directly behind the camera usually results in a lack of three dimensionality and contrast, although there are times when this is the desired effect. Back-lit scenes (for example: camera facing north, sun shining from the north) can also yield interesting images.
Snow and tree line setting considerations
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If the normal range of snow line and tree line is known, Vistapro can be used in a very realistic way. Tree line varies with latitude until, in arctic regions, it reaches sea level. Snow levels vary with the weather and altitude.
A little research at the local library or even listening to the weather on the evening news can provide increased realism in Vistapro landscape rendering. Of course an artist needn't follow the real world as an example. Set the tree and snow lines wherever they make the picture most appealing. Imagine a landscape as it might have looked during the last ice age - or how it might look after severe global warming from the greenhouse effect!
Changing colors
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Use the Color Control Panel to change the colors, contrast, and exposure used to render the landscape. Most landscape data sets produced by Virtual Reality Labs have shades of green for lower elevations, brown for middle elevations, and white for upper elevations. Try changing the Tree colors to pinks and whites. This makes them look like flowering fruit trees in the spring. Change them to reds, browns and yellows for an autumn scene.
Foreground fat polys or jaggies
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Since the accuracy of the data limits the detail that Vistapro can display, some of the foreground features will contain fat polys or jaggies. Vistapro builds all images with polygons - tens of thousands of polygons per scene. The polygons are all about the same size but those near the camera will appear very large on the screen - just as a nearby object looks large in a photograph of a real world landscape.
There are several ways of reducing this effect. One of the simplest is to raise the camera a few hundred meters above the ground. If you use the mouse to position the camera it is automatically set 30 meters above the landscape. Since the nearest polygon (the one right under the camera) is only 30 meters away it will look very large (if it is within the field of view). If you raise the camera 300 meters it will look about 10 times smaller.
The Texture function breaks up nearby polygons into several smaller pieces and renders each at a slightly different shade- giving them higher detail.
Another method of hiding fat polys is Gouraud shading. Gouraud shading blends the edges of the polygons with each other, eliminating the sharp color change from one polygon to the next, and provides a beautiful artistic interpretation of the scene. Gouraud shading blends even very large foreground polygons into oblivion.
Finally, if there is a particularly critical need for a certain viewpoint, you may be able to move the camera very slightly forward to clear local obstacles. If there is still something in the foreground which you would like to remove, export the picture to an art program in order to pull out or modify the unwanted features. Texturizing and Gouraud shading can be combined to generate even more interesting details.
A note about aesthetics
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Remember, there is no more a right way to use Vistapro than there is a right way to use a camera. A child using a camera or Vistapro may derive a lot of knowledge and entertainment from a result which would not please a more professional artist. Like the natural world it imitates, Vistapro gives the artist an unlimited number of choices for portrayal. What looks great to one person may not appeal to the next.
Fractals imitate the way nature looks, but they carry no information about geology, plate tectonics or erosion. Pictures produced with Vistapro will be interpretive because Vistapro is producing an artificial reality. The philosophical and aesthetic ramifications of virtual reality construction are immense. Vistapro is an early forerunner of a medium of art and expression, as powerful and unique as photography for creative work.
For many years after their introduction, photographs sparked lively debate about whether they were art. Computer art and virtual reality simulation seem destined to foment a similar debate in the future.
Exploration with Vistapro
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As a virtual reality simulator, Vistapro allows people to explore landscapes they will probably never be able to explore first hand. While many people will have the opportunity to visit a few of the national parks, it is highly unlikely that any of us, except a few who are now children, will have the chance to tour the caldera of Mons Olympus on Mars.
As Virtual Reality Labs is able to convert more of the data already available from planetary probes and undersea explorers, Vistapro will allow exploration of forbidding and alien landscapes decades, or even centuries, before the first human explorer is able to take tourist snapshots. By giving its users the ability to wander about distant landscapes, rendering true perspective pictures of their choice, Vistapro and later progeny will free humanity from its current boundaries long before such explorations are economically feasible.