VISTAPRO STATUS WINDOW



THE VISTAPRO STATUS WINDOW
The Status Window is the area just above the topographic map. Vistapro uses this area to give you messages about what it is doing while rendering. It also indicates the mouse position while in the Camera / Target placement modes. The following sections describe the messages that will be displayed in the Status Window.
X, Y, Z
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You can see the X, Y, and Z values in the Status gadget while moving the mouse pointer over the landscape. These are the X, Y, and Z coordinates of the landscape surface at that point. If you think of North being the top of the screen, the X coordinate represents the distance in meters East of the left edge of the topographic map. The Y coordinate represents the distance in meters from the bottom of the topographic map. The Z coordinate represents the elevation above sea level in meters of that point of the topographic map.
Generate
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Vistapro is generating a new fractal landscape or fractalizing an existing one.
Color
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Vistapro is calculating the colors of the polygons comprising the landscape based upon their altitude and the topography of the terrain. Vistapro does coloring whenever you modify the snow line, tree line, or sea level, or if you render an image at a smaller polygon size than before.
Cliffs
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Vistapro is placing cliff colors on the steep areas. Recalculating cliffs takes place whenever you change snow or tree lines, or if you render an image at a smaller polygon size than before.
Shade
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The Shade function is calculating the amount of light reflected by each polygon. Vistapro recalculates shade when you draw a river or lake, select a smaller polygon size, smooth the landscape, or vary the light position.
Palette
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Vistapro is calculating a 256 color palette for the VGA display. Palette colors are selected based upon the colors used to color the landscape (the CMAP), how often these colors appear in the landscape, the current haze value and haze colors, the position of the sun, etc. Since calculating a palette takes a fair amount of time, and at times you may not want to recalculate the palette (e.g. while previewing an image), you can inhibit the re-calculation of the palette by selecting the LockP (lock palette) button.
General
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Vistapro calculates steps such as coloring or shading only to the level of detail required for the current polygon size. Vistapro saves the results of these calculations in memory, so that it will not have to recalculate them. The program doesn't recalculate these tables when switched from a small polygon size to a large polygon size. It uses the data from the small polygons to draw the larger polygons. Therefore, Vistapro will not have to recalculate tables if you re-select smaller size polygons. Once Vistapro has made the calculations for small polygons, it will not produce color or shade renderings with large polygons precisely. This is preferable to recalculating because it saves time. Large polygon sizes are usually used for previewing, so it doesn't matter if the image generated is not precise. But, you can force Vistapro to recalculate the color tables for large polygons by changing the tree line or snow line. Even entering the same value again will force recalculation. To force reshading, reset one of the values or buttons on the Light Sub Panel.