Using the TSIPP Workbench
While 3-D drawing on a computer may appear difficult, 2-D drawing is familiar
to users of word processors. The GUI of the TSIPP Workbench presents three
orthogonal 2-D views of the scene, together with additional views for defining
colors, textures, motion and overall control.
When the program is initiated, the GUI appears as a set of frequently
used controls with a "tabbed notebook" widget below it. 
The
first page of the tabbed notebook displays the program icon and provides
three buttons for information display. The "License" and "Warranty" buttons
provide the information as required by the GPL license under which this
software is distributed, and the "Environment" button displays a listing
of the key standard global variables of the Tcl interpreter, often invaluable
in diagnosing installation problems.
The next four pages of the tabbed notebook are used as follows:
-
the Load/Save page controls the loading
and saving of source for the image, and the pbm files for rendered images.
-
the Rendering page controls how the
final image will be generated.
-
the Shader/Light page focuses on the components
of the scene such as the shaders used to give solid objects color and texture
and to control the intensity and other characteristics of the lights used
to illuminate them.
the Edit page allows operations to
be performed on all items selected in the orthogonal views.
The frequently used controls are:
-
the Mode Select radiobuttons determine what
type of operation will be performed by mouse actions in the orthogonal
views.
-
the "Render" button can be used at any time to see how editing is progressing.
In fact, you may want to do this so often that the Automatic
Mode may be required.
-
the "New Picture" button is used initially, to
create a new drawing, or to create a scratch pad to copy components to
and from.
A separate Perspective view is created to display the rendered result.
For each drawing, a "MultiView" widget, comprising three orthogonal views
and a Motion View area is created. The Front,
Plan and Side views show the image as if projected onto three orthogonal
screens. Editing of the image can be carried out in whichever view is easiest.
The Motion view allows the image to be defined
differently for different frames, and controls the interpolation process.
A MultiView will be created when:
-
the "New Picture" button is hit;
-
for each file loaded on hitting the "Load" button; and,
-
for each file loaded by specifying the filename on the command line when
starting the program.
Internally, the TSIPP Workbench knows which MultiView you are editing at
any one time, known as the "active MultiView". Whenever you click the mouse
on a MultiView it becomes the active one, so you do not usually have to
think which MultiView is active. Just perform an operation in any MultiView
and it automatically becomes the active one. The title of each MultiView
contains the name of the source file that was last loaded into it or saved
from it. For the active MultiView, " - ACTIVE" is prepended to this title,
so you can tell at a glance which one is active. The common areas of the
GUI, such as the tabbed notebook pages and the Render button, will affect
the active MultiView.