Enviro

Startup Dialog

This simple dialog is the first thing you see when you launch Enviro.  There are a few things you can do:

• Choose which image to use to texture-map the earth in Earth View.
• Choose which terrain to view in Terrain View.
• Edit the terrain properties of the selected terrain.
• Open the Terrain Manager dialog (below).
• Open the Global Options dialog (below).
• Check your OpenGL Info
  • This is a good thing to check the first time you run Enviro on a new machine, to troubleshoot issues with your 3D card and driver, and to learn the largest texture your system can handle.

Terrain Manager Dialog

From this dialog, you can:

• Add and remove paths from your Data Path
• Create and delete terrains.

Another easy way to create a new terrain is to copy an existing one.  You can then Edit Parameters of the new terrain, including giving it a new name.

Global Options Dialog

These options affect the entire Enviro application, including both the Earth View and Terrain View.

• Display
  • Full screen
    • Enviro will attempt to open a full-screen window, with only the toolbar added to the immersive 3D experience.  You can also toggle this at any time after the main window opens, with the "View - Fullscreen" menu, or Ctrl-F.
  • Stereo
    • There are two kinds of stereoscopic rendering available: Anaglyphic (used with cheap red-blue glasses) and Quad Buffer (used with more expensive shutter glasses or polarized stereo display systems).  If you enable stereo, then at runtime in the Camera Dialog, you can control the Eye Separation and Fusion Distance.
• Window size
  • If you are not starting in Full Screen, then you can set the exact size and location of Enviro's main window.
• Texture compression
  • If set, then all textures which are applied to model created by the VTP software (instead of loaded from external 3D models) will default to compressed (S3TC compression).
• Disable model mipmaps
  • If set, then all models which are loaded from external 3D files will have mipmapping disabled on their textures.
• Selection
  • Use direct picking
    • When selecting objects in Terrain View, the object directly under the pixel of the mouse cursor will be selected.  This mode is experimental, and not all operations are supported.
  • Maximum radius for selecting models
    • If you have some very large 3D models in your scene, you may want to avoid selecting them.  For example, if you have two models: a long road 300m long, and a car 4m long.  You may want to avoid selecting the road.  You can set the maximum radius to 5m, and only the car will be selectable.
• Set Size Exaggeration for Plants and Fences
  • This will affect any terrain you open in Terrain View, and can be useful for working with large areas where these culture features are often small and hard to see.
• Show only species with available appearances
  • If you have a large plant library (species.xml), but not all plants are available, select this option to hide all the unavailable species.
• Global content file
  • Content items (models with metadata and LOD) in the global content file are available to all terrains.
• Show progress dialog during terrain creation
  • If set, you will see a progress dialog.  This is useful for letting users know that something is happening when loading large terrain.
• Fly in gradually from earth view
  • If set, when you click on a terrain in Earth View, you will be taken down to the terrain in a series of stages:
    1. The camera will orbit the earth until it is directly over the terrain, and zoom in close
    2. Enviro switches to Terrain View, with the camera still high above the terrain
    3. The camera flies down directly to the terrain's current view locaiton