The Lexicor Demo Prepared by Lexicor Software Inc. How to view FLUTTER.FLM Simply run the program PLAYER.PRG (make sure that PLAYER.RSC is in the same folder), click on PLAY, then click on FLUTTER.FLM from the Fileselector. Click on OK to start the show. Pressing [Undo] will return you to the Player's main screen. A Preview of the Phase-4 Animation System The TinyToy rolls across the floor, frantically banging his drum and playing his accordion. A monster baby totters after him, gurgling and trailing a long stream of repulsive drool. The TinToy scoots under the couch, only to find himself in the company of dozens of other, frightened toys cowering in the darkness. Reflected in the TinyToy's shiny metal head is an image of the living room. The floor is hardwood with a deep grain. The sun streaming in through the living room window glints off the crinkled cellophane of the TinyToy's discarded package. The monster baby's movements are lifelike; its drool especially disgusting. Though everything appears as real as any movie, none of it has been near a camera. The Toy and the Baby exist only as numbers inside a supercomputer. "Tin Toy" was the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award. The Pixar Corporation produced it using their line of photo-realistic computer graphics products. Pixar's hardware and software cost tens of thousands of dollars -- much too expensive for an individual artist or animator to consider buying for himself. The Atari ST, on the other hand, is within reach of all but the most starving of artists. And now, so is realistic 3D animation. Although Antic Software's "Cyber" line of three-dimensional modelling and animation software gave Atari artists a taste of 3D graphics, producing animation of any complexity required hours of programming, and could only be crudely rendered due to the ST's limited resolution and palette. Furthermore, the ST was an "island" in the 3D world, unable to freely exchange objects and animation files with other, more powerful computers. Dissatisfied with these limitations, veteran illustrator Lee Seiler formed Lexicor Software to produce the next generation of 3D animation products for the Atari. Lexicor's "Phase-4" family of software, due to be released in November 1990, will enable a non-technical user to create animation just as photo-real as "Tin Toy". In keeping with the Atari philosophy of "Power Without the Price", none of Lexicor's offerings will cost more than a few hundred dollars. In fact, an entire professional system including a TT computer, a Syquest removable-cartridge hard drive, Lexicor's custom 24-bit color board and all the software will cost around six thousand dollars --less than the cost of the software alone for many comparable workstation-based animation systems, and far less than such a system would cost on either a PC or Macintosh. Seiler sums up the philosophy of the Lexicor system: "It's designed to be used by an individual artist on desktop hardware. Everything we do is designed for a person who's already an artist, who wants to use a computer because he wants to get into that market. We're not going to teach him how to be an animator; we're not going to teach him how to be a computer operator either. He needs to read the manual, but apart from that he needs to know nothing at all about computers." Lexicor developer Paul Dana knows a good bit about computers, but he's also an animator; STart readers may remember him as the creator of the Cyber Stars accessory and the award-winning animation created with it. Paul is now is one of Lexicor's key software developers. He explains why Lexicor chose Atari: "I figured the Atari ST was the very best computer to do animation on. The hardware on the Amiga may be better but the operating system isn't. The PC has absolutely no consistency in hardware and you have about this much RAM to work with (he holds his fingers an inch apart), and I personally can't afford a MacII. Most people are probably in the same financial situation I'm in. Also, the throughput on an Atari is just amazing. There's no wait states anywhere. It pumps graphics out at ridiculously high speeds." Dana is writing the CHRONOS animation program; Atari 3D veterans like Mark Kimball and Dave Ramsden are working on other applications in the Phase-4 series. To connect the Atari 3D "island" to the mainland, Lexicor has developed four inter-related graphics applications and two hardware products for the ST. Rosetta-3D Just as the original Rosetta Stone was the key to translating Egyptian hieroglyphics, Rosetta-3D acts as a universal translator for three dimensional objects. It not only reads and writes object files created with CAD-3D or CyberSculpt, but also models created in most of the popular Macintosh, Amiga, and PC-based 3D programs. Using Rosetta-3D, an object created on a Macintosh can be translated to CyberSculpt format, manipulated in that program on an ST, then exported as a DXF file for use in AutoCad on a PC. In addition, Rosetta can perform simple object manipulations in wire frame or "point cloud" mode for maximum speed. Draft animation can be created a frame at a time in a manner similar to CAD-3D 2.0 without Cyber Control. Creating really serious sequences, however, requires CHRONOS, Lexicor's key-frame animator. CHRONOS In traditional cartoon animation, a "key" animator draws only those frames necessary to describe a character's action. For example, if Bugs Bunny jumps into his rabbit hole, the key animator would draw a picture of Bugs crouched to leap, another picture of the Wascally Wabbit in midair, and perhaps another of Bugs diving head-first into the hole. Then another, less experienced (and less expensive) animator would "in-between" the sequence, drawing all the intervening frames required to make Bugs' action seem smooth and fluid. In a key-frame animation system on a computer, the animator sets up the key frames of a sequence, and the computer does the tedious job of in-betweening. To demonstrate CHRONOS, Seiler creates an animation of a space ship flying into a black hole, with the camera following on its own path. A nightmare to program in the old Cyber Control system, Seiler does it from scratch in two minutes using CHRONOS. Working in wireframe mode, he drags his spaceship model to a point high above his black hole model. A wire-frame box indicating the spaceship's object boundaries moves in real time to indicate changes of perspective and orientation. He drags the built-in camera model to the other edge of the ST's monitor, points it at the spaceship and sets this as the starting frame of the sequence. He drags both models to new positions, rotates the spaceship model slightly to give it a banking motion, then sets another key frame. He repeats the process three or four more times, until the ship and camera are both at the bottom of the black hole. After telling the animation program how many frames are to come between each of the key frames, he instructs the computer to generate the scene in wireframe. In a few minutes, the machine has written a stunning 80-frame sequence to the hard disk. In addition to moving objects around, CHRONOS can perform several different types of metamorphic animation. A sphere could transmogrify into a mermaid and back again, with CHRONOS computing the intervening objects. CHRONOS also uses a simple yet extremely powerful technique known as "cycling." To make a bird fly using cycling, the animator would first sculpt several different versions of the same bird, each with its wings in a different position. Let's say it takes twelve different models to smoothly show the wings flapping up and down. As before, the animator defines a path for the bird to fly along and sets key frames. He also tells CHRONOS that the bird is a cycled object; in each successive frame the next bird is used. When the twelfth bird is used, the cycle returns to the first bird model. Any number of objects in a scene can be cycled, at different rates, and each cycled object could include another cycled object (a bee buzzing around the bird's head, for instance.) CHRONOS renders sequences in more mode s than CAD-3D: wire-frame, wire-frame with depth-cue (distant parts of the object are rendered with darker lines), hidden face, solid face, Gouraud (smooth) shaded and Phong shaded (smooth shading with highlights.) PRISM While good-looking images can be produced with CHRONOS alone, truly realistic animation requires the PRISM rendering package. "Rendering", the process of actually computing how each pixel on the screen will look for a given frame, is the most time-consuming and crucial part of creating realistic-looking 3D animation. Sophisticated rendering can turn a crude wireframe sphere into a delicious-looking orange, complete with tiny bumps and "Sunkist" label. Lexicor's PRISM rendering program takes files created in CHRONOS and renders them as realistically as possible. Objects can be made to look like chrome, glass, wood, and a variety of other substances. Light sources can be refined to behave like the sun, room lamps, colored spotlights and so forth. Even the atmosphere in a scene can be made hazy. PRISM will work in all of the Atari's resolutions: 16 colors on an ST, 256 colors on a TT, or 16,000,000 colors on any Atari equipped with a 24-bit colorboard. PRISM Paint Since an animation sequence often requires tweaking after the animation has been rendered, Lexicor has created PRISM Paint, a full-featured painting program that can also be used for frame-by-frame animation, much like Cyber Paint. PRISM Paint can also use the same hardware as PRISM Render for painting in millions of colors. Renderman Though PRISM renders quite capably on STs equipped with a 24-bit graphics card, Lexicor's software can also export animation files in Pixar's RenderMan Interface Byte stream (RIB) format. The set ext-only files function for 3D animation much as PostScript does in the 2D world; providing a standardized way of describing a three-dimensional scene, including light sources, object motion, and what materials the objects are made of. These files can be transferred to other PCs, workstations, or even supercomputers running Pixar's rendering software. With Lexicor's hardware add-ons, it may not even be necessary to go that far. Hardware To faithfully reproduce the many subtle variations in shade and color seen in the real world, photo-realistic computer graphics require a virtually unlimited number of colors on screen. Neither the ST's 4-bit (16-color) limit nor even the TT's 8-bit (256-color) limit come close, so Lexicor is making a graphics card that will allow the Atari to display 24-bit color (up to 16,000,000 colors simultaneously.) PRISM Render and PRISM Paint will be able to take advantage of the hardware immediately, and since the card plugs into the computer's cartridge port, it can be used with any ST or TT. Lexicor is also creating an image capture/genlock board to output images to video tape. Not only will this board allow animation to be recorded on videotape, it will also provide a means to bring an image from video into the Atari for manipulation. The board can output images in American NTSC, European PAL, or RGB "stream" format, over scanned and with sufficient simultaneous colors for realistic images. With the genlock feature, images can also be overlaid or "keyed" onto existing video images. Like the 24-bit color board, the genlock/image capture board also plugs into the cartridge port of any Atari. The video board includes an expansion port for future products such as a single-frame controller for videotape decks. Says Seiler, "We are setting new standards for Atari. We're setting new file format standards, new application standards and we will be putting the Atari user into true photo-realistic animation. Our developers have created stuff for the Atari that no one's ever seen, that you could never imagine possible." What possibilities can you imagine? With enough imagination, next year's Oscar could be waiting for you, inside that Atari on your desktop. LEXICOR SOFTWARE 58 Redwood Road Fairfax, CA 94930 (514) 453-0271