Typewriter Help

Version

First of all: This is free software - see License.
Second: This is a beta version! Please do not expect it to be free of bugs...
Help me to improve the software by reporting bugs, possible improvements, etc. to: <rammelt@cs.tu-berlin.de >.

Rendering / Saving Images

This part describes what are the minimum steps to create an image:

In the Font section choose the Zip archive which includes the font descriptions for all characters which are included in that font

xyz

Write the text which should be rendered into the text field

Start rendering. A progress bar will appear on the image display. When calculation finished succesfully the progress bar will disappear and the rendered image will be shown instead.

Automatically restart calculation if a parameter has been changed (only restarts the relevant parts of the calculation while the start button Start
calculation

always restarts the whole calculation).

Abort rendering (only active while rendering) - hopefully you do not need this too often... :-)

Save the image. Supported formats are: PNG (supports transparency), JPEG (doesn't support transparancy)

Type-Writer / Font / Font-Type
This part describes what are the minimum steps to create an image:

Text	Write the text which should be rendered
ZipArchive	Choose the Zip archive which includes the font descriptions for all characters which are included in that font. The font-archive font01.zip is included in the package. It includes the following characters (only): You can create your own characters. Each one is defined in its own file named char_XX.des, where XX is the hex-code of the character. The file contains a number of points for each line of the character. Multiple lines are separated by an empty line. The following image illustrates the lines defining each character:
FontType	Choose a font-type:

Type-Parameters

bold

"boldness"

space

x-offset between two characters

radial
points

number of radial points used for all font types which create round shapes (which do all font types until now)

indent

this value is added to the radius of every odd radial point. Using quite a lot of radial points and a relatively small indent makes the segments look a bit like an old greek column or a calabash. Using just 4 radial points creates oval shapes (but you can't control the orientation). Some examples are shown here:


Font "Tubes" (30 radial points, indent = -0.2)	Font "Tubes" (30 radial points, indent = 1.4)	Font "Bubbles" (30 radial points, indent = 0.2)

	Font "Tubes" 4 radial points, indent = 1)

Bezier

density

number of columns / rows a bezier-mesh has per 1 pixel distance of the most distant neighbouring corner points. If the density value is too small you might observe holes in the object. On the other hand a density which is unnecessarily high might cause an "out of memory" error and also increases the calculation time. The example below shows a typical result for a density which is too small:

scale

Scaling factor (1 means original size, 0.5 means half the original size, 2 means twice the original size)

splits

This is experimental! By this value one can define the maximum number of times a bezier-surface gets split up into 4 smaller surfaces. Using this feature might introduce instabilities into the object. It might even cause errors, due to surfaces getting very large because of such instabilities.


splits = 0	splits = 1

min

If splits > 0 this value defines the minimum size a surface must have to be split up. The size is defined by the max. distance of two neighbouring corners of such a surface.

Font-Color

	Red channel
	Green channel
	Blue channel
	Alpha channel (0 means background is fully transparent, 255 means color is fully opaque)

Background Background color.

	Red channel
	Green channel
	Blue channel
	Alpha channel (0 means background is fully transparent, 255 means color is fully opaque)

HSB-Filter

Color filter

	Hue offset
	Saturation factor
	Brightness factor

Focus-Depth-Filter

Parameters for a filter, which blurs all points depending on their distance to a z-coordinate of highest sharpness.

	Max. blur radius
	Relative z-position (0 = front, 1 = back) of the highest sharpness

Color-Shift-Filter

Parameters for a filter, which "shifts" colors of all points depeneding on their distance (given by their z-coordinates). This filter could be used to create the illusion of very big objects.

	Blue-shift coefficient (0 = no blue shift, 1 = max. blue shift)
	Brightness-shift coefficient (0 = no blue shift, 1 = max. blue shift)

Rendering
In this section special parameters for the used rendering algorithm could be defined.

thickness	Thickness of the visible surface (e.g. a value of 10 means that behind every visible pixel there are 9 solid pixels assumed). This value might an effect on shadows only!
ground	Ground light. This defines the amount of light which depends on the distance to the light point only (the closer a point is the brighter it will be). For the following image a high ground-light value (ground-light = 0.8) was used:
reflex	Reflexivity. The higher this value is, the stronger is the effect of reflected light. The following image was rendered with a low reflex-value (reflex = 0.2):
diffusion	This defines a max. distance over which one "enlighted" point distributes light to points which are shadowed by this point. With a small value for diffusion you might see unwanted edges. This image illustrates this behaviour for diffusion = 1:
gloss	This defines the gloss of the object. The following image was randered with a high value for gloss (gloss = 15):
min. Light	The minimum brightness of a point which belongs to the object. This image was create with a high min-light value of 0.8:
mirror	Mirroring coefficient used for mirrored images

Image-Files

texture	One or more images which are used as a textures for all(!) bezier surfaces. Unfortunately it is not possible to define special textures for some of the surfaces. But if you choose more than one texture file it is possible to define a policy how textures are choosen for all surfaces out of these textures. Textures could have transparent parts. The object will be transparent at these areas. But only if an area is fully transparent (alpha=0) you will see parts of the scene which are behind this surface (normally hidden) (because at the end a 3D scene is defined by a simple Z-buffer which holds exactly one distance for each point/pixel it is not possible to have more than one layer of visible objects shining through each other...)
mirrored	An image which is used for the six sides of a box or for the one "side" of a sphere surrounding the object. The objects surface mirrors these image.
background	An image which is used for the background (if this image has (semi-)transparent pixels the background color has still an effect)

Texture choosing policy

forward

Uses the first texture for the first surface, the second for the second surface, ... start again at the first texture if there are more surface than textures (which is usally true).

backward

Uses the last texture for the first surface, the second last for the second surface, ... start again at the last texture if there are more surface than textures (which is usally true).

random

For each surface a texture is choosen at random.

split

Each image gets split up into several textures such that each segment of each character is fully covered by one image, no matter how many bezier surfaces are used for a segment (the first image is used for the first segment, the second image for the second segment). A segment is defined by two points in the font-file of a character. The following examples showing the results of using one image per bezier surface vs. using one image per segment:


Forward, Backward, Random: one texture for each bezier surface	Split: one texture for each character segment

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