Section 1: Geomantics
	1.1 Who are we?

Section 2: GenesisII - General
	2.1: Who should use GenesisII?
	2.2: Who should not use GenesisII?
	2.3: How does GenesisII compare to other Landscape Visualization products?
	2.4: How does GenesisII use GIS data?
	2.5: What is the difference between the different versions of GenesisII?

Section 3: GenesisII - Techniques, Tips and Troubleshooting
	3.1: What is the optimal grid size to use?
	3.2: How do I join two or more tiles together?
	3.3: Can I use USGS DEM data?
	3.5: Which OpenGL settings should I use?

Section 4: GenesisII - Troubleshooting
	4.1: When I render a landscape with the overlay renderer the overlay is blurred
	4.2: Opening GenesisII fails with "A required .DLL file, HHCTRL.OCX, was not found"?
	4.3: Help does not display a table of contents or index - just an image of Ayres rock
	4.4: The images are missing from the action buttons in the Landscape Editor
	4.5: BMP files do not import correctly from Wilbur
	4.6: My Overlay rendering has strange green/magenta colors
	4.7: My image has a white or sky-colored space at the bottom that has not been rendered

1. Geomantics

1.1. Who are we?

Geomantics is a software development company specializing in the application of graphical solutions to real world, particularly geographical, problems. We are based in the Scottish Highlands where we have a great deal of landscape to visualize!

Geomantics was founded as WoolleySoft in 1995, as which it developed our Landscape and Visual Explorer range of products. We changed our name last year to reflect our increasing emphasis on GIS and other professional visualization systems.

2. GenesisII

2.1. Who should use GenesisII?

GenesisII is aimed at both the professional and amateur user who need to visualize real landscapes for a practical purpose. You may be a professional GIs user preparing a Visual Impact Analysis for a new project, an archaeologist wishing to see how a landscape looked like in the distant past, a home user preparing a walking guidebook for her local area. Or any one of a myriad of similar uses - GenesisII places the emphasis firmly on real landscapes and real results.

2.2. Who should not use GenesisII?

GenesisII is not a raytracer, and so cannot render details in close-up. Typically a GenesisII landscape will include a view of the horizon, and will probably be rendering an area larger than a golf course - and certainly larger than a football pitch. Although GenesisII does include facilities for rendering 3D models and some urban buildings, it is not suitable for use in an architectural context - although increasing support for urban environments is planned in future versions.

2.3. How does GenesisII compare to other Landscape Visualization products?

There are now several landscape visualization systems available on the market. However with the exception of GenesisII, these are all to a greater or lesser extent orientated towards artists producing graphics images rather than modeling real world problems.

Our aim with GenesisII is to produce photorealistic images for a practical purpose. We recognize that you want to take your data and see what it means in the real world, but you don't want to spend hours setting up each render or have to understand the intricacies of texture mapped 3D primitives. Systems like MetaCreation's Bryce or Amitek's WorldBuilder are great if you are a dedicated 3D artist and have several days to hand, but if you need a Visual Impact Analysis and you need it today then only GenesisII can deliver.

GenesisII's ability to use GIS data in a photorealistic way is unique. Our front page image of the Welsh borderlands with accurate hedge, fields, roads and other features imported from MapInfo simply cannot be obtained elsewhere. Indeed during development we decided that the difficult problem is producing images of rural agricultural or mixed landscapes - visualizing the Rockies is easy - it's the Chilterns that are hard!

2.4. How does GenesisII use GIS data?

GenesisII uses the concept of terrains to model GIS data. Terrains are roughly equivalent to the GIS layer concept of a layer, and each terrain has a set of properties associated with it such as surface color, texture and vegetation that control how the landscape surface is drawn. Terrains are mapped onto a landscape surface using shapes such as polygons, polylines or points and these shapes can be imported from GIS files such as ArcView SHP and MapInfo MIF. Our import facilities allow you considerable control over the import process, including filtering values.

2.5. What is the difference between the different version of GenesisII?

We produce three versions of GenesisII: Freeware, Light and Professional. The differences are itemised more full in our product features table, but basically the Freeware version is available for anyone to download and use to enhance their understanding of the world, evaluate when considering purchase of the commercial versions, or simply to have fun! The Light version offers some additional features for the serious non-professional user, and the Professional version is aimed at GIS and similar professionals.

GenesisII has now been through several point releases. Apart from minor bug fixes and enhancements the main features of each release were as follows:

• 2.0 First commercial release of base system
• 2.1 Added full atmosphere model
• 2.2 Added plugin SDK v1.0
• 2.3 Added enhanced procedural landscape texture mapping
• 2.4 2D bitmap vegetation replaced by 3D LSystem vegetation.
• 2.5 Basic urban modelling facilities.
  • Further improvements to landscape texture mapping.
  • Water rendering enhancements - reflections and surface properties

There are expected to be a series of minor 2.5.x releases over September/October 1999 as we implement a number of outstanding texture, vegetation and urban modelling improvements.

3. GenesisII Techniques and Tips

3.1. What is the optimal grid size to use?

GenesisII works best with square grid sizes between approximately 150 and 600 points in size (or the equivalent if a rectangular grid is used) and is probably optimal around 250-350 points. Larger grids are slow to draw and render, whilst smaller ones tend give less realistic results when fractalized. GenesisII is not restricted to regular square grids - but these are probably easiest to handle.

3.2. How do I join two or more tiles together?

Joining digital imports together requires a little work but is not generally too difficult. The steps are

1. If the data files to be imported are not in USGS, NTF or XYZ format import each and export in XYZ format first. This step is necessary so that you can set import offsets later.
2. Create a new map of the correct size and dimensions.
3. Assuming we're working at the corners of four maps it's usually best to start with the lower left import first. Choose import and when the import dialog box appears check 'load into current map' and set the 'origin X and Y coordinates' to 0 (the default). On subsequent loads you need to ensure that the 'overwrite existing data' box is unchecked but this doesn't matter for the first import. In most circumstances you'll also want to set the 'start from X or Y offset' values to some figure greater than zero so that only the top right section of the source map is imported. Click OK.
4. The data is imported into the bottom left corner of the map and the process needs to be repeated for the other 3 sections.
5. To import the bottom right section you need to import the source map with the 'Origin X Coordinate' in the import dialog set to the position of the first undefined height to the right of the previous import. The simplest way to find this is just to run the cursor over the map and read the x offset of the first null height. Once this value has been obtained choose import and in the dialog box set the 'Origin X Coordinate' to the value just obtained and the 'start from X offset' value to the value of the overlap in the source tiles. Ensure that 'overwrite existing data' is unchecked and click OK.
6. Import the remaining quadrants in a similar manner. The only complication for this arises (unfortunately) with 7.5 degree USGS dems. These files are not necessarily rectangular grids as the east/west edges are defined by longitude values. Often this results in the edge two or three columns on either side having insufficient values for a full column and the values that are imported may be placed at an incorrect Y position. Our usual way of handling this is to import as described above, set any incorrect grid points to null, and interpolate the missing values. The errors introduced by this fix are generally small enough to be undetectable under most circumstances.

3.3. Can I use USGS DEM data?

Certainly. GenesisII supports both the 1 degree and 30 Metre (7.5') dems. However there are several points worth keeping in mind to get the best results with USGS dem data.

Size: 1 degree USGS dems are very large - a 1201 x 1201 grid (hence 1,442,401 points) and loading and rendering times can be slow. It's suggested that you select a smaller section of a dem for rendering.

Aspect: USGS dem are based on circular (i.e. degrees) not linear (i.e. absolute spacing) grids, and the distances between grid points running North-South is different to that running East-West. GenesisII grid point spacing should be set up to reflect this.

30 Metre dems: 30 metre dems do not usually contain exact square or rectangular grids as the edges are defined by longitude - the extreme 2-3 east and west columns will usually be incomplete. If you need to render the whole dem simply delete any misaligned grid points and interpolate.

SDTS dems: GenesisII cannot yet use dems in the new Spatial Data Transfer Standard format. Use the sdts2dem.exe utility included with GenesisII to convert into standard dem format.

3.4. Which OpenGL settings should I use?

By default Genesis renders images using the Silicon Graphics OpenGL implementation in software - this is supplied and installed with the program. It also renders in the background and periodically refreshes the rendering window.

Experience has shown that this is the most reliable setup to work across a wide range of PCs. However it's certainly not the best or fastest method to use if either your PC has a good quality 3D graphics card or can reliably render OpenGL direct to a window.

As rendering directly to a window significantly improves the usability and speed of the program we strongly suggest that you use the System|Preferences dialog to try this - revert to the default if GenesisII reports errors.

GenesisII differs from many non-CAD OpenGL applications in that it needs high quality output from your OpenGL driver and not raw speed. If you have a 3D graphics card installed that has OpenGL drivers available then it's well worthwhile trying to render in hardware as a performance improvement of around 30% can be expected. However be aware that this may have an impact on quality and you should revert to software is this is significant for you.

4. GenesisII Troubleshooting

4.1. When I render a landscape with the overlay renderer the overlay is blurred

This problem occurs with some 3D graphics cards, the overlay image being effectively reduced in size by the card and hence looses detail when used for rendering. A similar problem may be seen with very large overlays rendered in software.

By default GenesisII uses the Silicon Graphics software implementation of OpenGL into it's install directory. This is the two files opengl.dll and glu.dll. The maximum size of the rendered image with this implementation is 1024 x 1024 pixels - images of greater resolution will be sampled down accordingly. If you use a hardware OpenGL implementation this may be reduced further (for instance 256 x 256 with permediaII based cards.

4.2. Opening GenesisII fails with "A required .DLL file, HHCTRL.OCX, was not found"?

GenesisII uses the new Microsoft HTML help system. If the HTML help system is not installed on your PC you will see this message. This is the same system as used by all the newer Microsoft programs (including Windows98, Internet Explorer 5, Office 2000 and others) so if GenesisII is the first program you've loaded that uses it it's worth installing as you're certain to come across it again soon.

If you have Internet Explorer 3 or 4 already installed on your system then you simply need to install the help system upgrade from our own or Microsoft's site.

If you do not have Internet Explorer 3/4 installed we recommend that you install Internet Explorer 5.0. Although in theory installing the above upgrade should be suffcient, in practise we've sometimes had reports of additional missing dlls which are only solved by a complete IE5 install.

4.3. Help does not display a table of contents or index - just an image of Ayres rock

This happens if you do not have the correct version of HTML help installed. Usually installing IE5 will fix this problem, but occasionally we have had reports of it continuing after upgrading IE4 to 5 on Windows98, presumably because this upgrade has not successfully upgraded HTML help. In all cases reported installing the help system upgrade from our own or Microsoft's site fixed the problem

4.4.The images are missing from the action buttons in the Landscape Editor

You are using a old, bugged, version of comctrl32.dll that Microsoft supplied with IE4.00. This can also cause problems in Word and other programs. To fix simply upgrade Internet Explorer to 5.

4.5.BMP files do not import correctly from Wilbur

Wilbur does not export the BMP file format correctly. Import the image into Paintshop Pro (or similar) and save..

4.6.My Overlay rendering has strange green/magenta colors

This is a problem in some systems when running in 'high color' mode. Switch to true color.

4.7.My image has a white or sky-colored space at the bottom that has not been rendered

You have positioned the camera beneath the landscape surface. Raise the camera position a few metres and render again. This usually happens because GenesisII fractalizes the landscape surface when rendering and there is a degree on uncertainty about the actual surface height that will be drawn. This is most significant with rough surfaces.

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	Contact us at info@geomantics.com