Shaded Graphics Support

OrcaFlex has two distinct types of graphical presentation:

• Wire frame, isometric shows an isometric projection of the model
• Shaded, perspective draws the model as solid objects with lighting, shading, perspective and hidden line removal.

The contrast between these methods can be seen on the OrcaFlex screenshots page.

Software and Hardware Requirements

To use the shaded graphics mode you must have DirectX 9 or later installed. Most modern machines will meet this requirement; otherwise the latest version of Direct X can be downloaded and installed from the Microsoft website.

In addition you will require a DirectX 9 compatible graphics card. In our experience the most important factor to consider when choosing a card to work with the shaded graphics is the amount of memory. We would recommend using a card with 256MB or more.

It is also important to make sure that your computer's graphics settings specify a colour mode of 16 bits (65536 colours) or better.

Notes:

1. If your machine's graphics capabilities are insufficient then the shaded graphics mode may fail to function properly or indeed fail to function at all. For example, low quality, blocky images usually indicate a graphics card with insufficient memory. This problem can also manifest itself by failure to draw the sky which appears plain white.
2. For best results you should centre your model close to the global origin. The Move Selected Objects facility can help you do this.

Video Export

Just as for wire frame views OrcaFlex can export video files of a replays in shaded views. When producing videos it is very important to use compression, otherwise the video file size becomes unreasonably large. The software that performs this compression is called a codec.

For wire frame replays OrcaFlex uses a built-in codec called run-length encoding. This codec is not suitable for shaded replays and in fact there is no suitable built-in codec in Windows. We would recommend using an MPEG-4 codec of which many are available. In our experience the freely available XVID codec performs very well.

The XVID codec can be downloaded from http://xvid.org/.

Once installed we recommend that you make the following minor configuration changes to the XVID encoder:

• Set Target Quantizer to 2.00.
• In Other Options on the Encoder page uncheck the Display encoding status setting.

The XVID encoder settings can be found in Start Menu | Programs | XviD | Configure Encoder.

Should you wish to use a different codec you can select this from the OrcaFlex Preferences form.

Showing Exported Video in Microsoft PowerPoint

An XVID encoded AVI file (and possibly other codecs) added to Microsoft PowerPoint slides as a Movie Object may not play correctly (displaying a blank screen on replay, or the video only appearing in full screen mode). To avoid these problems, an XVID AVI file needs to be inserted as a Video Clip Object. This can be done in two ways:

1. Drag and Drop the AVI file onto the PowerPoint slide, or
2. From the PowerPoint menu, choose Insert | Object. Select 'Create from file' and Browse to your file (do not select the 'Link' option).

To set options such as auto repeat, right-click on the image in the slide, then select Video Clip Object | Open, this displays the video player window and menus. The Video Clip Object links to the AVI file (it is not embedded within PowerPoint) so the file location needs to be accessible when running the presentation. The computer running the presentation must also have the XVID codec installed.

Importing 3D models

OrcaFlex has the capability of drawing objects using details 3D models. For examples of this see the OrcaFlex screenshots page. We have supplied with OrcaFlex a very basic selection of generic models which you are free to use. However you may wish to use a detailed model of a project specific vessel, buoy, template etc.

OrcaFlex uses Microsoft's ".x" file format and to produce such a file you need a specialist package. There are many 3D file formats in common use and an even larger number of 3D design packages. Not all of these packages will export to “.x” format, and a third party file converter may be required. You should be aware that the quality of these converters is not consistent, and may not correctly convert your model from one file format to another. Microsoft, as part of its DirectX SDK, supply a “.x” file viewer that can be used to check the files before importing them into OrcaFlex.

Warning: If you are importing a 3D model into OrcaFlex you should make sure that it does not contain too much detail. Otherwise the drawing performance may be very poor. This is because there are limits to how much detail a graphics card can render efficiently. The largest model that we have provided is 350KB and we would recommend that you aim not to exceed this size significantly. You may need to reduce the level of detail of any existing 3D models before exporting them. Please do contact us if you need more advice on this subject.

The following packages claim to be able to export 3D models to ".x" format. Note that we have not been able to test these packages.

We are also able to recommend companies that provide 3D model generation services. Please contact us for more details.