NAME

preview − view rendered wireframes on the Iris

DESCRIPTION

The animation must be rendered in wireframe mode, and the output placed in a file.  This file is read by preview and displayed in one of two modes. 

In interactive mode, preview displays the sequential frames as fast as it can. The middle mouse button is used to move back and forth in the sequence.  In frame mode, the frames are displayed one at a time; for recording onto tape as a pencil test, or saving to a series of pix files, or antialiasing the output wireframes.  Use the right mouse button to exit, and type gclear to clear the screen. 

USAGE

preview filename [ thin ][ height ][ width][ sleep ][ aaflag ][ file ]

filename is the name of the output file produced by the renderer.  Vectors shorter than thin pixels long won’t be displayed.  height and width are the dimensions of the rendered animation.  sleep is the number of seconds to pause after the frame has been drawn.  If aaflag is 0, no anti-aliasing is performed. If it is 1, then the program will draw anti-aliased wireframes for each frame of the animation.  When file is present, the program will save each frame of the animation in a run-length encoded pix file with the filename given as the root, and the frame number appended. 

Defaults

thin is set to one.  height and width are 640 and 486, respectively. The rest are zero, or null. 

Output device

Three devices are configured into the program. They are the lyonlamb, the minivas, and the abekas.  To select a device, type this line as input to your shell: setenv RECORDER device , where device is one of the three named above.  You can make this permanent by placing the chosen line in your .login file.  To turn off the record capability, for instance when running preview to create anti-aliased wireframes in pix file format, type unsetenv RECORDER . 

COMMENTS

Currently there is a limit of 300 frames for interactive playback.  The program no longer sets you into NTSC or 60 Hz. mode, you must do that yourself.  You may stack options on the shell command line, eg. 
setntsc ; preview file 1 640 486 1 ; set60 <CR> Type preview to see the usage statement. Type preview -i to get the version number.  Old (unnumbered) versions will not be supported after this release. 

Version .1  —  December 29, 2021