A new version of Solidviews is hereby released. A number of bug fixes, interface changes, and new features have been developed. To get the new release type:

The documentation in SolidviewsManual.doc has not yet been updated. A message will be sent when the new version is available.

Shadows. The camera section of the edittool allows you specify that you want all objects to cast shadows. Click "Shadows:" to toggle between TRUE and FALSE. Click " ← " to set the shadows option in the selected viewer. No optimizations have been made for shadows yet. They slow done ray tracing quite a bit.

Background color. Background color is now stored as part of a pic file so this information is not lost. As a side effect, all viewers onto a scene must now use the same background color.

The pic file format now includes an "options" section in between the three header lines and the coordsystem list. This section should be surrounded by double <CR>s and should contain keyword: value pairs. The only available options so far are i.e.:

Right bugging RayCast generates only the black and white AIS file "Scene.ais" and draws it automatically when finished. This provides relatively rapid turn-around.

Left bugging a 3d object in a scene viewer stuffs its name into the Assembly: slot of the edittool.

Variable resolution. The camera section of the edittool allows you to specify the ray casting resolution (and thus resolution of the resulting AIS file) in samples per inch. The default is screen resolution (72.0 samples per inch). This feature can be used for quick ray casting (lower resolution) or for high resolution images.

The scratchpad is smarter about redrawing so it shouldn't make you wait while it catches up.

Solidviews should no longer have trouble ray tracing scenes where some of the nodes have less than two children. Some decisions have been made about what the intersection of an object with NIL should look like and so forth. Likewise, casting a ray at an empty scene won't make the world blow up.

SetColorArtwork will use the listed material (plastic or chalk) without fail.

Tori should look right when you ray-trace them (they still take a long time however since the root-solver allocates like crazy--we're working on it).

The viewerTool file commands act somewhat more like Tioga commands. You still have to type the name of the file in the Pic: slot (going away soon), but the commands are named Clear Reset Get Store and Save as they are in Tioga.

The new pic file parser won't accept a null options section. Add:

Background color: [1,1,1]

or something like to get your old files to load. Apologies. This will be fixed soon (I have a lot of old files to load myself).