Groups

A group is a collection of silhouettes. Very often a project contains a single group of silhouettes, which are used to together to infer the shape of the object or objects in the scene. The part of the model created using these silhouettes is labeled with the group's number. If a second or subsequent group of silhouettes are defined these do not interefere with the model parts generated by the first, but form their own model parts. In this way a complex model may be built up from simpler sub-parts, with each sub-part being defined by silhouettes from a distinct group.

When a silhouette cue is drawn it is placed in group 0. Change this using the Silhouette Properites dialog, to any number between 0 and 99 (inclusive) to set an alternate group.

Group's must be defined so that each group contains at least 2 silhouettes from different images.

Group Properties

Groups have properties, these are displayed by choosing the View->Group Info menu option, the following dialog is displayed,

Select one or more groups and then press Properties to view the group or groups' properties. Select Add to add a new group, or select one or more groups to remove and select Remove. If the Remove Unused button is enabled then this means that one or more groups has no member silhouettes and is therefor redundant, select this button to remove these.

Note that removing a group removes ALL the silhouettes in that group.

The group property dialog is shown below,

Use the Exclude from build checkbox when you wish to build a model without this group present.

Select the Hide Silhouettes In This Group checkbox to make the silhouttes in this group invisible. This is used to reduce the amount of clutter in the scene when performing silhoutte definition. See also the menu options View->All Groups and View->Selected Groups which toggle this parameter.

The group will by default use the models parameters defined in the Project->Settings Model tab. Deselect the Use Model Settings check and then fill in the Group Appearance parameters to overide the default look - and give this group a look of it's own.

Note that you can copy the main model appearance to this group by pressing the Copy Model Settings button.

Group Appearance Settings

The Texture settings defines how the surface of the model will look for this group. Select No Texture, for a plain surface of the colour specified above. Select Texture Map, to map the surface with texture from project images (that are designated texture sources). Or finally, select Uniform Texture, to apply texture from the image file specified in the Texture Source group, over ALL surfaces irrespective of viewing direction. The last option is useful for applying texture effects such as wood grain uniformly over a model or model-part.

If Uniform Texture is selected, specify a texture scale in each image direction Scale X, and Scale Y. If the scale is 1 then the texture in the image covers the object once. For a value of N, it covers the object when tiled N times. For N<1 only a fraction of the image is used.

If the image is used to tile the object then best results are obtained if the image is a tile, i.e. the image may be repeated without the image borders being visible - try using 'Wallpaper' images.

The model's subpart defined by this group will have a colour which covers all of it's surface. This colour will be visible in all regions that do not have texture. The colour may either be chosen automatically based on the colour of texture mapped areas, or be specified.

Choose Auto Select in the Colour group or provide RGB values of the colour. RGB values are specified using numbers between 0 and 1 (inclusive), to represent the intensity of each component of the colour. Note : To find the colour of a particular image point, select it with the mouse, the RGB values are shown in the colour-pane on the Status Bar.

The Smoothing settings allow smoothing to be applied to the group. Smoothing rounds off sharp corners. To do this the builder will convert the surface into a Mesh of small triangles which will peice togother to form smooth curves. To enable smoothing select the Do Smoothing checkbox. Then choose the level of detail in the mesh by setting the Mesh Triangles value. This is the number of triangles that will be used to span a distance as large as the model's largest side. A large value corresponds to a high level of detail. The second parameter is Smoothness this dictates how much smoothing will be applied to the mesh. Small values of smoothing will change sharp corners into tightly curved edges, whereas larger value will created more gradual curves.