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Text File | 1990-09-03 | 12.8 KB | 300 lines

*** README.DOC *** This file contains last minute information which is not included in the printed documentation. *** ACKNOWLEDGEMENT *** The installation routine used to install BIG D, INSTALL, is licensed software provided by Knowledge Dynamics Corporation, Highway Contract 4 Box 185-H, Canyon Lake, Texas 78133-3508 (USA), 1-800-331-2783. INSTALL is Copyright (c) 1987-1989 by Knowledge Dynamics Corporation which reserves all copyright protection worldwide. INSTALL is provided to you for the exclusive purpose of installing BIG D. *** HARDWARE KEY *** A hardware key is provided with all versions of BIG D. The key must be connected to any parallel port on your computer in order for BIG D to operate. When inserting the key into the port, treat it as you would any other peripheral device. Power down the PC and printer if connected, and insert the device. Make sure all connections are secure, and then turn power back on. If a printer is plugged into the back of a key, be sure to power the printer on and put it on line after bringing the PC up. *** NOTES ON THE RENDITION II ADAPTER *** If you are running BIG D on the Renaissance Graphics' Rendition II board, you must configure BIG D to use the TIGA 340 interface. Be sure to set the TIGA environment variable and load the TIGACD driver program before running BIG D. IMPORTANT! The Rendition II must have a minimum of 512K VRAM and 384K DRAM on board in order to function properly with BIG D. *** NOTES ON VERSION 5.13 *** *** NEW RENDERING DEVICE DRIVER FOR THE ATVISTA *** BIG D now supports the ATVista video adapter as a rendering device. To use the ATVista driver, you must load the STAGE.EXE driver program before you run BIG D. You must also copy the file SSERVER.OUT to the current directory. Both of these files can be found on the Demonstration Disk which is supplied with the ATVista board. In addition, you may need to set the environment variables DISPLAYCFG and VISTACFG use the DOS SET command. Refer to the ATVista User's Guide for more information. *** NEW RESOLUTION FOR STANDARD VGA RENDERING DEVICE *** A new higher resolution mode has been added to the standard VGA rendering device driver. The new mode supports a resolution of 360 pixels horizontally by 480 pixels vertically. This mode has two advantages: It more than doubles the standard VGA resolution of 320 by 200 pixels and it should work on any VGA board, not just extended VGA boards. The disadvantage of this mode is the fact that it is an oddball resolution: There are more pixels vertically than there are horizontally. This means that the screen pixels are not square, they are stretched out horizontally. You can compensate for this in the Rendering File dialog box by setting the relative pixel width to 178 and the relative pixel height to 100. Do not forget to set the horizontal resolution to 360 and the vertical resolution to 480 in this same box. Do this BEFORE you generate the rendering and it will correct the image for the weird aspect ratio. *** NOTES ON VERSION 5.12 *** BIG D now supports 2D polylines, including polylines with varying widths, bulges, and thicknesses. A closed 2D polyline with zero width will create a solid plane (or extrusion if it has a non-zero thickness). Support for traces has also been added. *** NOTES ON VERSION 5.06 *** *** ATTENTION BIG D/386 USERS! *** BIG D/386 requires at least 1 MB of EXTENDED memory to operate. BIG D/386 cannot used EXPANDED memory. So if you are using an expanded memory manager such as QEMM/386, you should either disable it or configure it so that it converts only part of your extended memory into expanded memory. Also, expanded memory managers which are not VCPI compatible (such as 386/MAX) can conflict with the Phar Lap DOS extender and may cause your machine to hang. If this happens, you should disable the expanded memory manager. *** 8 BIT TARGA FILE BUG FIX *** PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF BIG D STORED THE COLOR MAP FOR 8 BIT TARGA FILES INCORRECTLY. THIS PROBLEM ONLY SURFACED IF YOU TRIED TO USE AN 8 BIT FILE GENERATED BY BIG D WITH ANOTHER PROGRAM WHICH CAN READ 8 BIT TARGA FILES. BIG D NOW CORRECTLY WRITES 8 BIT TARGA FILES AND A UTILITY IS INCLUDED TO FIX OLD 8 BIT TARGA FILES GENERATED BY BIG D. THE UTILITY IS NAMED FIXTGA8.EXE AND CAN BE FOUND IN THE BIG D DIRECTORY. TO FIX AN OLD 8 BIT TARGA FILE, TYPE "FIXTGA8 FILENAME" AT THE DOS PROMPT. FILENAME IS THE COMPLETE NAME OF THE TARGA FILE (ALONG WITH ITS PATH IF NECESSARY) INCLUDING THE .TGA EXTENSION. *** NOTES ON VERSION 5.01 *** *** KEYBOARD CURSOR KEYS NOW ACTIVE *** The keyboard cursor keys can now be used to move the mouse cursor. A mouse is no longer required to use BIG D, although a mouse is strongly recommended. The functions of the keys which move the cursor are summerized as follows: KEY FUNCTION Up Arrow Moves the cursor up. Down Arrow Moves the cursor down. Left Arrow Moves the cursor to the left. Right Arrow Moves the cursor to the right. Home Moves the cursor up and to the left. Page Up Moves the cursor up and to the right. End Moves the cursor down and to the left. Page Down Moves the cursor down and to the right. Insert Same as pressing the left mouse button. Delete Same as pressing the right mouse button. Initially, each cursor key moves the cursor one pixel in the appropriate direction. The F9 and F10 function keys can be used to adjust the distance the cursor moves with each key press. Each time you press the F10 key, the amount of cursor movement doubles. Each time you press the F9 key, the amount of cursor movement is cut in half. If the current cursor movement is one pixel, the F9 key has no effect. IMPORTANT NOTE! In order to add the cursor keyboard enhancement, we had to sacrifice some control of the text cursor used in some of the dialog boxes. The text cursor is used to type in alphanumeric data. Here is a summary of the changes: The keypad keys (home, end, the arrows, insert, and delete) no longer affect the text cursor. The Tab key can now be used to move the text cursor to the next field. Since you rarely need to type information into BIG D, we believe these changes will not be too inconvenient. *** ATRONICS PIB RENDERING DRIVER *** A rendering device driver for the ATronics PIB and PIB+ image boards is now included with BIG D. To use the driver, simply select the PIB from the BDSETUP rendering device list. When you select PIB, BIG D will ask you for some additional information about your PIB board configuration. IMPORTANT: You must run the PIBINT.COM program before you run BIG D. Otherwise, BIG D may freeze the computer. *** SHOW PROPERTIES OPERATION DISABLED *** The Show Properties operation button of the Material Properties dialog box has been disabled. Since it did not account for texture maps, reflections, or transparency, the operation seemed to cause more confusion than it was worth. A future release of BIG D will include a more comprehensive show properties function. *** NOTES ON VERSION 5.00 *** *** PLACE BIGD.BAT IN THE SEARCH PATH *** If you do not want to place the BIG D directory in your search path, you can instead copy the file BIGD.BAT from the BIG D directory into another directory which is in the search path. *** SPEED TIP: USE BLOCKS! *** You can dramatically improve BIG D's rendering time by grouping adjacient objects into blocks. Here we define an object to be a 3D face, a 3D mesh, an extrusion, a surface of revolution, or a block insertion. As a rule of thumb, any time you have more than about 5 to 10 objects located in the same general area, you can improve rendering speed by creating a block of those objects (using the BLOCK command in AutoCAD) and then inserting the block (using INSERT) so that the objects are relocted in their original positions. Here's why: As a ray tracer, BIG D spends about 90 percent of its time calculating intersections of rays with objects in the scene. When BIG D generates a ray, it must compare that ray for intersection with every object in the scene. This is why a scene with many objects will take longer to render than a scene with just a few objects. When you combine a group if objects into a block, the group effectively becomes one object and BIG D calculates a bounding box for the group. A ray is first checked for intersection with this bounding box. If the ray intersects the block's bounding box, then the program must check for intersections with each object which is in the block. If the ray does not intersect the block's bounding box, then the ray cannot intersect any object which is in the block and BIG D can ignore those objects. This can save a bunch of processing time. A simple example may help to illustrate. Suppose we have 64 cubes arranged in a square array, 8 cubes on each side. Each ray that BIG D generates will have to be checked for intersection with all 64 cubes. Now in a new drawing suppose that we create a block of 16 cubes arranged in an array with 4 cubes on each side. This block is inserted 4 times so that we have 64 cubes in the same pattern as in the first drawing. Each generated ray will now be compared for intersection with the bounding boxes of each block. Only if a ray intersects a bounding box must it be checked for intersection with each cube in the block. Assuming that an average ray will intersect one of the four bounding boxes, each ray in the second drawing will be checked against 4 blocks and 16 cubes for a total of 20 objects. Each ray in the first drawing must be checked against all 64 cubes. The second drawing cuts the number of ray-object intersection calculations by a third over the first drawing. In a actual test, the first drawing required 12 minutes 45 seconds to render. The second drawing took 7 minutes 22 seconds. That is a 42 percent decrease in rendering time without changing the appearance of the model. *** SETTING DEFAULT PARAMETERS FOR BIG D *** When BIG D first opens a DXF file, it creates another file with the same name as the DXF file but with a BDX extension. This BDX file contains the 3D model, rendering options, all defined lights and views, and material assignments. BIG D supplies a prototype BDX file (similar to AutoCAD's prototype ACAD.DWG file) named BIGD.BDX. Whenever you load a new DXF file into BIG D, the initial options, lights, views, and material assignments are taken from BIGD.BDX. You can change the initial defaults by loading the BIGD.DXF in the BIG D directory. Loading BIGD.DXF also loads the prototype BIGD.BDX file. You can now change any options, lights, views, or material assignments in the BIGD.BDX file and save the changes. The next time you load a new DXF file, its defaults will be taken from the new BIGD.BDX file. This is useful if you wish to set a default resolution that is different from standard VGA 320 x 200. You can also have default materials assigned to layers which you frequently use. Load BIGD.DWG into AutoCAD and add your frequently used layer names to the drawing. Save the drawing as a new DXF file and load it into BIG D. Assign the default materials to the new layers and save the changes in BIGD.BDX. Now when you load a new DXF file, your most frequently used layers will have your default materials automatically assigned to them. *** NEW BDSETUP PROMPT: GENERATION MODE *** A new prompt has been added to BDSETUP which is not documented in the user manual. The generation mode specifies the mode which BIG D uses to display status when compiling a DXF file and when generating a rendering. This is similar to the generation mode prompt which can be found in the Generate Image dialog box. Three settings are available: text mode, graphics mode, and render mode. Normally, you will want to specify render mode. This will allow BIG D to display the rendering as it is generated. However, some ADI drivers have a problem with graphics and render mode and will have a tendency to lock the computer. If this happens to you, configure BIG D to use only the text generation mode (using BDSETUP). The only ADI driver known to have this problem is the Metheus ADI driver. By the way, do not use the UGAADIEM driver with BIG D, only the UGAADI driver is compatible. If you are using BIG D/386, only the text generation mode is available and BDSETUP does not prompt you for generation mode.