Category : Printer + Display Graphics
Archive : MORAY.ZIP
Filename : MORAYTUT.TXT
Output of file : MORAYTUT.TXT contained in archive : MORAY.ZIP
MORAY V1.200 POV
Monty the Modeller
(c) SoftTronics Lutz + Kretzschmar '92 '93
Date : 2 Mar '93
CIS:100023,2006
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This is a short and basic (read: quick and dirty
get you started with MORAY.
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Why? It's for those of you that don't like reading manuals. Just the
very basics are covered here. Please refer to MORAY.DOC for more
detail and all the features of the program.
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You should print this out and look at the program while reading.
I've put some keywords onto the left margin to make it easier
to localize them later.
Disclaimer
Please read the disclaimer in MORAY.DOC boefore starting.
Overview
The modeller is an interactive scenery designer. It is not a CAD
package. It will let you do nearly everything graphically with the
mouse. You can create a number of primitives that can then be
manipulated (you can scale, rotate, translate, assign textures,
bounding boxes to them).
Files
I've included a few scene files that you can manipulate or play
with.
AXIS.MDL is a scene with three arrows and labels.
PAWNS.MDL is a Q&D copy of the pawn GIF in the GRAPHDEV lib,
except that it uses rotational sweeps.
ALLOBJS.MDL is a scene that contains all object types that MORAY
handles.
KETTLE.MDL is one of those fancy designer kettles, done with
sweeps. KETTLE2 is nearly the same, except that the
handle is made of a quarter torus.
TEAPOT.MDL contains my rendition of the classic Utah teapot.
MAYFLY.MDL this file contains a mayfly. Created by Dan Farmer and
used in his Beethoven Bust picture (CIS, GraphDev).
MRYSTART.MDL is the default startup file for MORAY. If you don't
specify a filename, this file will be loaded. It
contains a camera and a light.
Input
MORAY uses the mouse and keyboard as input. The keyboard mainly
serves as shortcuts for mouse ops, e.g. you can press 'E'
instead of clicking on EDIT. But heavy use is made of the CTRL, ALT
and SHIFT keys *together* with the mouse (more later).
Startup
To start the program type MORAY. You can specify -g3 or -g4 as an
argument to select another resolution apart from 640x480. Use -g3 to
select 800x600 and -g4 to select 1024x768. 640x480 is not too coarse
and fine speedwise.
MORAY needs *lots* of memory! 525K and more is OK for not too large
models. The modeller currently supports EMS and it *needs* about 1.5MB.
Coordinate System
Bad news for POV users: MORAY uses the right-handed coordinates,
where Z is up, not Y.
Main screen
You should then see the main screen. It has four windows and two
menu regions. In the lower right corner are six buttons that
show cursor position and system resource usage.
The top three show the cursor position in 3D world space when in
one of the view windows (wait 'n see, just read on!)
The fourth one shows the amount of free conventional and EMS memory.
The fifth one shows how full the point list is. It shows how many
vertices and the percentage of the buffer used.
The fifth one shows how full the edge list is.
Views
The four windows in the upper left portion of the screen show 3
two-dimensional views and one 3D view. You will see the axis in
these windows. Don't look at the writing on the axis, it might
confuse you! Just kidding, the modeller uses a right-handed
coordinate system, where Z points up. It should be quite
intuitive however, as you'll see in a moment.
The three 2D-windows are editing windows. The world in each
window can be panned and zoomed with the mouse.
***** NOTE *****
These windows are only active when the main menu is active.
Move the cursor to the top left window.
Panning
Press and hold the CTRL key. Now press and hold the left
mouse button *and* (this needs coordination, huh?!?) move
the mouse about in the window. The axis will move with
the cursor. When you have placed the axis back in the
center release everything.
Zooming
Press and hold the ALT key. Now again press the left mouse
button and move the mouse up or down, *slowly* at first.
This zooms into (move up) or out of (move down) the window.
Enlarging
Each of the 4 views can be made to fill up the screen. To do this
move the cursor to the appropriate window and press *both* mouse
buttons, or, if you have a three-button mouse, press the middle
button. The view will now fill the whole screen.
To revert to the normal views, repeat the procedure.
Disabling
Each view can also be disabled, i.e. no refresh will take place
in that view, it's just drawn black. Do this by pressing '-' on
the keyboard, while over the view. Press '+' to turn it back on.
Useful if you're working on a complex scene, but find you only
need two views. You can then disable one 2D view and the 3D view.
Grid
You can have each 2D-View display a grid over the scene. To toggle
the grid for each view, move the cursor to the grid you want to
change and press Alt-G. The grid will appear/disappear.
Menus
The main menu and some other general menus are found on the
right, next to the four views. The menu region under the 4
views is used for object-specific menus. The buttons of
menus are operated by first depressing and then releasing
the mouse button while over the button (you knew that, right
***** NOTE *****
To leave a submenu the right mouse button should be
pressed.
To make this a bit more interesting we'll load a sample
file.
Loading
On the main menu click on FILES. Another menu appears
with a file selector. You'll notice that all buttons are
disabled. This is because no filename has been chosen or
entered (you can just start typing the filename if you
want). Select the SAMPL1.MDL file in the file selector
window. The name now appears above the file selector and
below the path. All buttons will now be active. Click on
LOAD. Confirm the deletion of the scene in memory with YES.
After loading you are back in the main menu and the 3
windows show the test scene.
You will notice the the 3D window is empty. This is because we
haven't defined or loaded a camera. (I specifically left the
camera out the SAMPL1.MDL file, normally it's saved too.)
We will do this now.
Defining a Camera
There are two ways of creating a camera. Everything can be created
from the CREATE submenu. Cameras and textures can also be created
from special submenus. We will use the second method.
Click on CAMERAS in the main menu. Now you will see a submenu at
the bottom open. All buttons except CREATE CAM are disabled. So,
press CREATE CAM. You will be asked for a Camera name (You can specify
up to 8 cameras). Enter a name, such as STDCAM. The
camera will appear in the list of cameras, in the three 2D
views and the 3D view window will show you what the camera is
seeing. The camera can be seen as a line from the viewer
position (where a viewing pyramid is also visible) and the look-
at point.
Moving Objects I
Objects can be moved, scaled and rotated in the 3 2D views.
Results can be observed in all four windows at the same time.
To move an object, it needs to be selected. All objects are
visible as grey when not selected. When you select an object it
turns yellow.
Selecting objects
There are two ways to select an object: graphically and by name.
If you know the name click on SELECT to bring up the object browser
and choose the object by clicking on its name. If you can't spot it on
the screen, you may have to use the scrollbars to pan the object tree.
It will turn yellow in the 4 windows. If the correct object has been
selected, click on OK. You can choose it graphically by moving the
cursor near a line in one of the 3 2D views that belongs to the
object. Then press and hold the SHIFT key. Press the left
mouse button and drag the mouse to open a rectangle that crosses the
line. Then release the mouse button. The first object that has an edge
that crosses the rectangle will be selected, i.e. turn yellow.
The selected objects name can be seen in the top right corner of
the main menu.
Move the cursor over the camera in any of the 2D windows, press
and hold SHIFT, press the left mouse button, drag the mouse to open a
rectangle over the camera, release the mouse button and release SHIFT.
The camera should be selected. It won't turn yellow, though, because
cameras are drawn orange. Check the top button of the main menu. It
should read "OBJ:STDCAM". Sometimes the wrong object of overlapping
objects will be selected. Either repeat the selection procedure in
another view, where they don't overlap or zoom into a view to increase
the resolution and the space around the edges of the object you're
interested in.
Moving Objects II
Move the cursor to the 'top' view of the scene, i.e. the bottom
left window. Now press and hold the left mouse button and move
the mouse. The camera position will follow the movement of the
mouse and the 3D window will show the resulting projection.
You will notice the line extending from the camera position to
the 'look at' point is anchored at the 'look at' side. To move
the LookAt point press 'L' on the keyboard. You will now move
the lookat point. Press 'P' for moving the position point.
Transformations
What you are effectively doing when moving the camera, is
changing the translation parameters.
You will notice the first 12 or so menu items are headings and
numbers.
All objects are transformed according to the parameters shown
there.
- First they are scaled,
- then rotated,
- and finally translated.
This may seem a limitation as opposed to the ability to concatenate
any number of scale, roatate, translate transformations, but we'll
see later that it's not.
If you want to put the camera at a certain place, just click on
the X, Y or Z coordinate shown under the TRANSLATION header and
enter the number.
The same goes for scaling and rotation parameters.
***** NOTE *****
Scaling and rotating the camera, however, is different than
doing that to other objects. The camera uses the ScaleX value to
extend the viewing pyramid and ScaleZ to change the aperture
(which is currently set to 30 degrees). Rotation is not used for the
camera.
Cursor View-Mode
We just used the cursor in the 3 2D-Windows to *move* the
camera. The cursor can, however also be used to scale and rotate
objects.
[ Since this works differently for cameras we'll try this with a
cube. Select the big cube.]
The button showing the transformation that will be changed when
you move the cursor about in the 3 2D-Windows is 'pushed in' on
the main menu. At the moment the TRANSLATION button should be 'in'.
Either click on the SCALING button or press 'S'. 'T', 'S' and 'R'
select the translation, scaling and rotation mode, respectively.
Now the TRANSLATION button has popped out and SCALING has been
pushed in. Thus cursor movements will now affect scaling.
Scaling Objects
Scaling objects is a bit difficult because the mouse has to be in the
correct quadrant of the view in order for the scaling to follow the
mouse and not go off in opposite directions. Move the cursor into the
top left 2D-View. In *that* view move the cursor into the top right
quadrant. Now press and hold the left button and move the cursor
towards the top right corner. The cubes scaling should follow the
cursor (if it doesn't *call* me
too. With scaling always use the top right quadrant.
Typing in Values
Of course, you can just type in the values at the appropriate buttons,
if you know them. Do this by clicking on the button showing the value
you want to change. Try this by clicking on the first value under
TRANSFORM. A line editor will pop up offering you the current value as
default and you can then type or edit the new value. Press ESC to
cancel or ENTER to confirm. Pressing the right mouse button (CANCEL)
or the left mouse button (CONFIRM) also works, allowing you to keep
your hand near the numbers and not having to dash for RETURN
everytime.
Rotating Objects
Rotating objects is just like scaling them. Move to the same quadrant,
drag the object in a circular motion. Try it.
These are the very basics of object manipulation. Try the other menu
points to see what they do.
Of interest may be the CREATE submenu. Here you will see the
primitives that are supported. Specifically have a look at the Sweeps,
and the Patches. Both of these editors will be described later.
Editing Objects
You can edit the selected object by pressing 'E' on the keyboard or
clicking on EDIT. You will see an edit submenu appear in the bottom
bar. Try it. Select a cube and press 'E'. You'll see two listboxes,
showing defined textures and bounding boxes. Some lists may be empty.
With other objects, buttons and/or listboxes are added to this menu,
according to the object.
You leave this submenu by pressing the right mouse button or clicking
on DONE.
Object Names
You'll also see a few other buttons. One is the NAME button. You
can click on this to change the name of the object, which is
displayed in the depressed button right next to it. The name
is limited to 16 characters (or was it 15?).
Object Visibility.
Also, you'll see a '+' button, a number and a '-' button. This is
used to assign a level to an object. You can blend out objects that
have a level higher than one you specify. This means you can assign
a high level, say 9, to small details of a scene and 1 to rough,
big objects. Then when you set the visibility level, by pressing
Alt-1 to Alt-9 or from the options menu, you can blend out things
you don't currently need to see, so that the screen refresh speeds
up. This is especially the case when moving the camera in a complex
scene. You press Alt-1 to blend out unimportant objects, move the
camera about, then blend in more by pressing Alt-8 (or whatever).
Extended Edit
Some objects have an extended editor. These are the bezier patches
and the sweeps. These two editors are activated by pressing the
EXT. EDIT button and will be explained later.
Texture creation
The modeller directly supports a few textures, and the ones in the
INC files.
When you create a texture (from the Main menu, press CREATE, then
TEXTURE, or from the Main Menu press TEXTURES, then CREATE), you will
be presented with 4 options. If you want to use Textures you have
defined in an include file use the PREDEFINED button. You cannot
change any parameters of this texture. If you select OPAQUE you can
edit all of the parameters.
The ImageMap type may be of interest, since it can be manipulated in
3D- space. Currently only planar projection is implemented. You can
select an imagemap texture just like an object and move, scale and
rotate it. It will only appear when assigned to an object though.
Grouping Objects
The modeller has the ability to group objects together. This is like
a composite in POV. Since the transformation of each object is
'limited' to first scaling, then rotation, then translation, grouping
offers a way to concatenate transformations. You define objects in
their own coordinate system, with respect to each other. Then you
group them and scale, rotate or move the group.
You can select groups either in the Object Browser or by selecting
one of the children object with the mouse and then pressing Alt-P
(Parent). The editor now has an extra listbox containing all the
'subobjects' or children of that object. Press right mouse to leave
the edit submenu.
If a group is selected you can move the whole group. All subobjects
that belong to it stay put in relation to the others.
CSG Objects
The modeller does support CSG objects, but does not (currently?)
display the wireframe accordingly.
***** NOTE *****
The sweep primitives cannot currently be used in CSG. This is because
they are output as unions of triangles and not as primitives.
There are extra buttons in the CSG Edit menu, allowing you to specify
the operation between the objects.
Texture Assignment
You will see in the Editing submenu of the objects that there are
two buttons above the listboxes. The top one says 'NO blabla' and
the one beneath has a name in it.
Hierarchial values
This name *can* have an asterisk ('*') in front of it. If it does,
this means that the texture comes from the *Parent* object. This also
means that you don't have to select each primitive and assign a
texture to it. You select the whole object, assign a texture to that
'Group' and all subobjects that have *no* texture assigned to them
will become white! The subobjects that need to have another texture
will have that texture assigned to them and will not use the parent
texture.
The same goes for Bounding Boxes and Levels. If the level of a
subobject is 0, it will assume the level of its parent, if it
has one (if not, then of *its* parent etc.), and put an asterisk in
front of the level.
Other editors
The modeller incorporates a bezier patch editor and a sweep editor.
Sweep Editor
Load PAWNS.MDL. This is a quick and dirty copy of an image that
was on CIS some time ago. Select a pawn. Press 'E' or click on EDIT.
From the presented submenu select the EXT. EDIT button.
Go wild
You will see a single coordinate system replace the 4 views.
This is where the sweep is defined. All sweeps (rotational,
translational and conical) are edited here. For rotational sweeps,
keep the outline to the right of (or on) the vertical axis.
You can move knots (control points, or rather end points) just like
in the 4 views. Same goes for panning and zooming.
You don't select the points however, just press and hold the mouse
button near to the point you want to move.
The 'handles' can be rotated to create curves. Normally the two
handles are locked together, but if you press and hold SHIFT before
moving a handle, only the one handle will be moved.
The slider in the menu determines how many subdivisions will be
created for the wireframe and for the output to POV.
This, of course, has a direct effect on the memory requirements
After selecting INSERT KNOT, DELETE KNOT or SAME ANGLES the program
will wait for you to click near a control point and will then do that
operation on the point you click nearest to.
Patch editor
Go to the files menu and press NEW to clear the scene.
Click on CREATE. Click on BEZIER PATCH. You will be presented with
three choices, specifying the kind of patch.
Sheet patches
SHEETS are, as the name implies, flat sheets, like paper. You can
specify how many Bezier patches you want to join together (each
patch being the POV primitive, i.e. 16 control points).
MORAY handles the smoothing between adjoining patches, so that
there are no 'ridge seams' (it doesn't let you directly influence
those shared points).
Cylinder (2-Patch)
This is a cylinder-type patch. Two 'sheets' (bezier patch
primitives) are joined at two edges, forming a cylinder-like form.
HEIGHT specifies how many of these 2-sheet combos to create.
Cylinder (4-Patch)
This is basically the same as the two patch type except that four
patches are now joined to form a cylinder. The classic Utah teapot
(body and lid) is made of this type of patch. The file TEAPOT.MDL
contains my version of the Utah teapot.
Select the SHEET option and make sure it says 1x1.
Editing
Once you have specified the type of patch you want to create click on
the OK TO CREATE button.
You will see the patch appear in the views and will be placed in its
editor. Select the EXTENDED EDIT button. Aaaahhh, the patch editing
mode!
Lotsa lines, huh? The three views stay, but a labeled grid or
coordinate system is overlayed. All zooming and panning functions
remain active.
The menu at the bottom:
the slider selects, similar to the sweeps, the number of subdivisions
each patch undergoes while drawing.
There are five modes while editing patches.
1) You can move control points in the TRANSLATE mode.
2) You can scale control points relative to the origin.
3) You can scale control points relative to one another.
4) You can rotate control points relative to the origin.
5) You can rotate control points relative to each other.
You will see the patch is green and the control grid is cyan. You can
move one or more points of the control grid to alter the shape of the
patch. You can also hide the control grid (even while moving control
points) or the mesh (then you just work with the control grid).
Selecting/Deselecting and moving points
Again, there are a few ways.
One point
To move one point, make sure no points are marked. This is shown
in the middle of the menu, it has a 'MARKED' button and next to it
a number, showing the amount of points marked.
Move the cursor near to the point you want to move (to within 1/20th
of the screen widthto be exact
cursor.
This may not always work, especially with the cylinder patches. This
is because MORAY looks how many points are 'near' enough to your
cursor. If it's more than one, you can't use this mode of moving
points.
More points
To move multiple points (or one if more than one overlap) you need to
select them. This is done similarly to the method used in the main
views. You can move near to the point press LEFT-SHIFT, press and
release the left mouse button. All points that qualify for a 'near'
will be marked (check the indicator to make sure).
You can also define a rectangle in which to select all points. Do
this by moving the cursor to one corner of the rectangle in which
you want to select points. Press and hold LEFT-SHIFT, press and
hold the left mouse button and drag the mouse. You will see a
rectangle open, when all the points you want to select are in the
rectangle, let go of the mouse button.
Exactly the same method can be used to deselect points. If the
points in the rectangle you just defined are *all* selected, they
will all be deselected, else they will all be selected.
Here the main operation is selection.
If you want the main operation to be deselection you proceed as
above, but press RIGHT-SHIFT instead. If the points in the rectangle
you just defined are *all* deselected, they will all be selected,
else they will all be deselected.
You'll need to experiment! Basically this selection thing is a toggle
operation, but you can influence the outcome of a selection operation
that is ambiguous.
Once the points are selected move the mouse into the view, press
and hold the left mouse button and move the points. When you release
the button the patch will be updated, unless you turn off the control
point display.
When done editing the patch, press the right mouse button to leave
the extended editor and then again to leave the editing submenu.
Keys recognized in the Main Menu
Alt-B Selects the bounding box of the currently selected object.
Alt-C Makes Copie(s) the currently selected object.
Alt-D Deletes the currently selected object, without confirmation.
Alt-E Calls the Edit screen of the currently selected object.
Alt-F Same as clicking on FILES.
Alt-G Toggles the grid of the view the cursor is currently over.
Alt-N Same as clicking on CREATE.
Alt-P Selects the parent of the currently selected object.
Alt-T Selects the texture of the currently selected object.
Alt-R Redraws the screen.
Alt-O Brings up the Options screen.
Alt-U Deselects all objects.
Alt-V Verifies the objects (checks that all have textures)
Alt-X Quits the program.
Alt-1 Set the visibility level to 1.
Alt-2 Set the visibility level to 2.
...
Alt-9 Set the visibility level to 9.
Alt-0 Set the visibility level to 10.
L When selected object is a camera, changes the thing being
translated to the LookAt point.
P When selected object is a camera, changes the thing being
translated to the Camera location.
U Changes the cursors View-mode to proportional Scaling.
S Changes the cursors View-mode to non-proportional Scaling.
R Changes the cursors View-mode to Rotation.
T Changes the cursors View-mode to Translation.
- Disables updates of the view the cursor is currently over.
+ Enables updates of the view the cursor is currently over.
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That's it! That's a quick walk-through. If there was not enough detail
here, please refer to the MORAY.DOC file, it details all the features.
Any ideas, suggestions, criticisms, however wild, let me know
to contact me can be found on the first few pages of MORAY.DOC.
Lutz Kretzschmar
The SoftTronics Team.
Very nice! Thank you for this wonderful archive. I wonder why I found it only now. Long live the BBS file archives!
This is so awesome! 😀 I’d be cool if you could download an entire archive of this at once, though.
But one thing that puzzles me is the “mtswslnkmcjklsdlsbdmMICROSOFT” string. There is an article about it here. It is definitely worth a read: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/mtswslnk/