Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved. nimaTek's 'World Builder Software' version 1.0 is a DOS based professional product that is currently being distributed on CD-ROM by Digimation for $995. This 4 star product allows the user to create photorealistic worlds and animations. A 486 math coprocessor equipped computer with 8 MB of RAM is required. Digimation is a distributer/producer of a number of plugins for 3D Studio. Check Digimation's web page for details on the many products they offer. They can be reached at 1-800-854-4496 and 150 James Drive East, Suite 140, St. Rose, LA 70087. The dongle protected software with a moderate learning curve is created in Russia. According to the manual AnimaTek has 45 programmers, ten with Ph. D's in their 70 employee company in Russia. KPT Bryce for the Mac and Vista Pro for the IBM PC are the only competitors that I know of. nimaTek's World Builder installed easily from the CD-ROM under Windows 95. They include a driver and instructions on how to modify your system.ini file. The application supports 256, 32K, 64K and 16 million colors in a variety of screen sizes. It takes up about 160 MB and requires a 40 MB swap area. The manual states the application supports many popular video cards and the VESA standard. I have a dual boot computer that uses software that allows me to boot into numerous operating systems and I was never able to get the software to run with my Matrox Millennium video card when I booted into MS-DOS 6.22. A call to tech support at Digimation revealed that this software is incompatible with the Matrox Millennium unless it is installed from Windows 95. The 400 page manual is very well written with only a few minor mistakes that shouldn't cause anyone any problems. The first 100 pages consist of five tutorials. he interface consists of top, front, right and user viewports however several options are available that allow you to tailor the viewport layout in any manner you may prefer. Each viewport can be rolled up or made full screen. The interface has icons on the left side of the screen. Each icon's purpose is displayed in text at the bottom left side as the mouse pointer is placed over an icon. These icons allow you to save a project, save a project under a new name, load an existing project, render a view port, draw a new skeleton line, add new light sources, etc. Six render methods are available. Phong, flat, wireframe and skeleton have icons while bounding box and gourand do not. All the rendering methods can be accessed from the render drop down menu at the top of the interface. The interface has an object tree area on the upper right side. This is a list of the various objects the project is using such as camera, camera target, light source, water, sky, etc. You can edit any of these objects by selecting it with the mouse and then using the tools that are associated with the object. The edit menu appears just below the object menu and this is where the tools appear. Below the edit menu in the extreme lower right corner of the screen is the view control panel. This panel has several icons that allow you zoom in or out, rotate any view, etc. utorial one requires you to create a 3D scene using the existing libraries. After you drag and drop a skeleton selection from the library area at the bottom of the screen onto any viewport, you get something that looks like the adjacent figure. The skeleton icons appear to be Phong rendered so you don't see the skeleton lines until you drop them into a view port. The nearby image is a top view of six skeleton lines that comprise a canyon that will be skinned with material, flooded with water, covered with grass, trees, snow, etc. The skeleton library consists of preset skeletons for 10 canyons, 10 dunes, 11 hills, 10 icebergs, 3 lakes, 40 mountains, 3 reefs, 6 rocky areas, 10 volcanoes and you can add your own. All the libraries are displayed across the bottom of the screen and can be either text, icon or both. Each line can be edited in any manner desired including scaling, rotating, moving, etc. This can be done in all 3 planes of the 3 dimensional world by editing the skeleton lines in any of the 4 views. Next you set up a camera view by selecting the camera from the object tree and then selecting viewport from the edit menu. When you select the camera, a cone appears on all 4 view ports that represents the camera's view. When you select the camera's viewport, you get a fifth viewport that shows the view the camera will see. This viewport can be positioned any where you wish. The camera has controls for field of view, perspective, roll, position in all planes, etc. The camera can be dragged around manually with the mouse or can have all of its parameters adjusted numerically. In other words, you have total camera control. Next you select the material library from the drop down menu. Sixty different materials are available and you can create your own. Then you select landscape0 in the object tree area and then click on material in the object editing window. This gives you the area editor which is the sixth viewport you now have open. All of these view ports can be rolled up so this isn't as cluttered as it may sound. he area editor gives a top view of the landscape and allows you to add, delete and edit the various materials you select. The sixty materials available have many colors, textures, reflections, etc. and all parameters can be controlled to any degree desired. You then drag and drop a material from the material library to the right side of the area editor. The left side of the area editor has several icons that allow you to preview the area your material is covering, draw areas to confine material coverage, zoom in and out, etc. The purpose of each icon is displayed in the lower left corner of the screen as the mouse is moved over it. Next you add a sky. The sky library has 46 skies. A sky icon is dragged and dropped into a viewport and the camera viewport is then Phong rendered. he next step is to add water to the scene. This step is flawed. A total of 14 different water choices are available. The tutorial requires you to drag and drop a water icon onto a viewport then render it. As the tutorial correctly states the water is not visible because it is at the same level as the landscape. The tutorial then instructs you to raise the water level by selecting it then pressing the up arrow once. When you render the scene after following these procedures you discover the water is in the center or top of your scene thus rendering the image unusable. I had several conversations with tech support at Digimation about this. The tech support guy kept insisting that I was raising the water level too high. I knew I wasn't and I finally figured out that he had never done the tutorial! When I challenged him on this point he admitted as much. I told him if he did do the tutorial he would immediately see what I was talking about. I heard from him a few days later and he confirmed there is a glitch in the application. It is important to note this only occurs when you use World Builder's pre-made skeletons. It does not occur with skeletons you create yourself. he next step in tutorial one requires you to add plants to the scene. The very thorough plant library has 184 different plants that include trees, flowers, cactus, ferns, shrubs, etc. This step also requires you to use one of the most superb features of any graphics application ever made. Take a look at the adjacent image. This is the landscape I created. I didn't include the water since that would mess up the scene. You would not want to render this complex image every time you made some minor addition to it. World Builder has an icon the left side called Step Forward. When you click this icon the rendered scene is frozen and the only thing that gets rendered is whatever you add to it. This procedure allows you to add numerous small plants to the scene, edit their appearance, move them around, etc. and then quickly observe the result since you only render the plants and not the entire scene each time. After a plant is added, copied and the copy placed in the scene you click the Return to First Step icon and Phong render the finished scene. You then produce a finished render and save it in pict, bmp, tga, jpeg and/or tiff. I say and/or because the software allows you to save the image in five different formats simultaneously. The output image may be skeleton, wireframe, flat or Phong. You also specify the width and height in pixels and a few other details. utorial two has you create a mountain range from scratch by drawing the skeleton lines, fractalizing them, adjusting the altitude, etc. Fractalizing is an option available any time you are working with one of the skeleton lines. When you click on the fractal button in the edit menu a node is inserted between each pair of nodes on the skeleton line you are working on and each inserted node is offset a small amount in the X, Y, and Z direction. You can easily control the amount of offset in each direction. This allows you to add more detail to a skeleton line. While this is acceptable I would prefer nodes that support bezier curves. All the lines that are associated with these nodes are straight and it requires many nodes to achieve realistic detail without unnaturally straight sections of terrain. Furthermore it can require a huge amount of individual node manipulation. Bezier curve type nodes, as are found in many drawing and illustration programs, would substantially reduce this node glut and greatly simplify the production of realistic landscapes. The x/y/z coordinates of each selected node are displayed in the lower left so any node can be placed anywhere you wish. Unfortunately it is not possible to select more than one node at a time. ne of the things you do in tutorial two is edit the landscape with the land surface parameters. You select landscape0 in the object tree window then select parameters in the edit area. This brings up a dialog box that allows you to change the evolution and roughness of the mountain. When the evolution parameter is increased the base of the mountain gets wider. When the roughness is increased the terrain gets rougher. You also edit the landscape settings by increasing the number of points in the landscape mesh and observing the increased detail. This adjustment makes the mesh that lays over the skeletal lines smaller thus providing greater detail. You also move the camera and target around using the variety of methods available. You change the light's color and it's angle. You then perform quite a bit of work using the area editor. You select different materials and adjust the altitudes and slope angles they are placed on. You edit the materials to change their appearance and you can add some grass, snow and fog to the scene. World Builder comes with a built in paint program to perform some of these functions. You add a sky and edit it by changing its colors, gradient depth, horizon angle and cloud density. You add a lake and edit the water's color, ripple, wave length and amplitude. Next you add grass and trees. The grass attributes can be edited to specify height, height variance, maximum and minimum blade length, clump radius, clump spacing, colors, etc. The trees are edited to specify maximum and minimum height, distance, shadows, length, width, etc. In other words you have total control of the environment's appearance and you get to adjust many of the settings.   utorial three covers the incremental design feature in depth. It also has you work with the z-buffer which is where the incremental rendering information is stored. The value of the incremental feature becomes very apparent when working on a scene with many plants. You can add a plant, render just the plant then step up and add another plant. Since you are only rendering a plant or two each time, the work goes quickly.               utorial four has you create an animation. You animate the grass, water and camera. World Builder does not produce an animation but instead produces a sequence of images that are automatically numbered in sequence. These images can easily be imported into Adobe Premiere, which is not provided, to create an animation. It took my 133 MHz Pentium with 64 MB of RAM six hours to render 110 bmp images that were 320 X 200 in size. The finished 24 bit color animation had the camera flying over grass that waved gently in the breeze then crossed a pond with rippling water that reflected the mountains in the background. utorial five is the final tutorial and it has you load a pre-made river valley which you then block with a dam that was created in Autodesk's 3D Studio. You position the dam then adjust the landscape so the dam blocks the water flow. You also edit the 3DS material in an emulated 3DS material editor that is part of World Builder. This makes the concrete dam appear more realistic. fter the 100 pages of tutorials are completed, the rest of the book consists of detailed instructions regarding the features of World Builder, including network rendering, and all the dialog boxes. The tutorials are not the only way to learn World Builder. The help drop down menu provides access to numerous demos of the various features of World Builder. The software also has a landscape library with 60 landscapes that include 11 aquarium landscapes and 1 moon crater landscape. It also has a stone library with 16 stones. It will import digital elevation map (DEM) files. I had to call tech support because I couldn't get a correct image from some DEM files I had. I e-mailed samples and the tech support guy called back a few hours later and advised me to resize the DEM mesh to match the existing default landscape mesh. Once I did that I managed to get a usable image. This software is hampered by a DOS environment. It should be ported to Windows as soon as possible. Curve type nodes should added and drawing primitives would be welcome. The water problem should also be corrected. Roger A. Moncrief e-mail All pages copyright© Roger A. Moncrief, Indepth Reviews, 1997 Thanks to Judy Gefter, !LuM! and Charles Blaquiere for their advice and counsel, some I heeded and some I didn't.