ROT ver.0.5 ---------------------------------- Copyright (c) 04/04/87 C. French Non-commercial copying encouraged! All other rights reserved ---------------------------------- ROT is a program to generate and display 3D objects. It is made up of two sections: the OBJECT editor and the ACTION editor. The first is used to create the database of your 3D object- each point's coords, and the points used as verticies for each polygon. The second section defines an action of 24 steps. At each step the position or orientation of the object may be changed. When these steps or frames are replayed quickly the object performs your action. ---The Object Editor--- Choose a point to edit with the slider in the upper-right. Click on the arrows to move one point at a time, or anywhere with in the slider to skip to that point. The current point is highlighted in the three views of your object on the left of the screen. To see how these views fit together, imagine folding the Top and Front views away from you until their edges touch. You end up with a half-cube that surrounds your object. When rotated, the object is moved about the center of this cube. To change the current point's coords click in a view. Two of its coords will be changed so it ends up at the cursor's location. Which coords are changed depends on the view in which you click. For example, the Front view changes the X and Y coords. By clicking in at least 2 views you can position the point where you want it in all three dimensions. Any point with all zero coords is considered nonexistent and is not displayed. Sometimes two points will appear to be right on top of one another in a particular view. Carefully check all three views to make sure the point selected is really the one you want to modify. To zero out a point's coords, click on the 'ZERO COORDS' button below the point selection slider. There's another slider which is used to choose the polygon to be edited. A point can be used as a vertex of the current polygon by selecting the proper point with the point slider, then clicking on 'ADD ABOVE POINT'. A polygon must have at least three verticies, but no more than six. The edges of the currently selected polygon are highlighted in orange. The order in which you select the verticies is important. Go in one direction around the outside of the polygon. If you see the orange edges crossing you'll know the points are out of order. Hit 'UNDO LAST POINT' to back up through the vertex list until the problem disappears. To get rid of all verticies, you can click on the 'DELETE POLYGON' button. Down at the bottom of the screen is a color palette. The color which is highlighted is the one that will be used to fill the currently selected polygon. To change colors, just click on the one you want. The bottom 8 colors are shades of one of the top eight colors. Cycle through the available shades by clicking on 'CHANGE SHADES'. By using the shades for most of your object's polygons you can produce a nice 3D effect. This also makes it easy to change the object's color, just switch shades. Use the other colors for details or accents that you don't want to change. The three views of your object have their X, Y, and Z axes labelled. The arrows by each letter point in the positive direction along each axis. Click on an arrow to shift the whole object in that direction. Three of the arrows have minus signs next to them; they'll move the object back. Using the OBJECT menu you can save your object's database to disk, load a previously saved object, or erase the object entirely. The objects are saved to disk with '.ROTOBJ' added onto the names you give them. Don't type this suffix when loading an object, just the name itself. Better yet, just scroll through the list of objects, click on the one you want, then click on 'DO IT!'. ---The Action Editor--- The 'action' or mini-movie you will create is 24 frames or steps long. Select the frame to work on with the frame slider to the bottom-left of the screen. The object will be drawn according to the parameters you set in the Rotations and Translations gadgets. To change a value, click on it and type in what you wish. The values are checked to make sure they fall within acceptable limits. The object is then redrawn according to your new parameters. By making small changes from one frame to the next your object will appear to move. For example, suppose the Y-rotation is set to 0 in frame 0, 15 in frame 1, 30 in frame 2, and so on until you hit frame 23 when it will be 345. If you now click on the 'PLAY' button the object will rotate around the Y axis. You can adjust the speed of the action with the speed slider on the right of the screen. By changing other X, Y, & Z parameters you can make the object go through all sorts of weird and wonderful contortions. To make the action play continuously look in the ACTION menu and select 'Repeat at end'. A checkmark shows when this is activated. Now hit PLAY and the object will spin until you click on 'STOP'. Another option in the menu is 'Reverse at end'. With this activated, the frames will be shown from first to last and back to the first again. The last item in the ACTION menu is 'Calc between...'. With this you can have the program calculate and draw a group of frames. When you select it a requester will pop up asking for the first and last frame numbers of the group. Click on the digits to change them. For each frame between, the program will calculate the X, Y, & Z parameters to get from the first frame to the last. For example, set the Y-rotation of frame 0 to zero and frame 12's to 180. Select 'Calc between...' and set the start & end frame numbers to 0 and 12. Click on 'DO IT!' and each frame inbetween is given a larger & larger Y-rotation. Now set the Y-rotation of frame 23 to 345 and 'Calc between...' frames 12 and 23. You should now have a smooth rotation about the Y axis. When calculating steps of rotation, the direction ROT chooses is the one that will move the object through the smallest angle. If the starting frame is set to zero degrees and the last frame to 270, the object will be rotated -90 degrees, not +270. This is why the example above was done in two parts. If you tried to 'Calc between...' frames 0 and 23, ROT would have rotated the object -15 degrees. (Actually, due to rounding errors, all frames but the last would have had a 0 Y-rotation.) When the frames are played back each one is drawn on top of the previous frame, thereby erasing it. But if you use too large an X-translation with a large object, the frames will not overlap very much and a 'trail' is left on the screen. To fix this use smaller steps of X-translation or reduce the size of the object. (apply a Z-translation to make the object seem further away.) When you switch to the Object Editor and back to the Action Editor, ROT assumes you must have changed the object in some way, so the frames it has are not accurate any more. If you click on PLAY the program will first recalculate each frame before showing the action. This will also happen if you load an action from disk. Actions saved to disk have the suffix '.ROTACT'. Do not type this when loading it, just the name. ---ROT DEMO--- There should be a demo object and action on this disk. The object is called 'RobotHead' and the action is 'ShakeHead'. Try loading these to see what ROT can do. If you pass on a copy of this program, please be sure to also copy the demo stuff and this hint file/program. (ROThints & ROThints.txt) ---Coming soon to a ROT near you--- Future enhancements: Saving frames to disk as DeluxePaint brushes for use in DVideo etc, specifying the order of transformations for greater control over the object, and more! ***HAVE FUN!***