VistaPro is 3Dscenery generator for theAmiga,Macintosh,MS-DOS, andMicrosoft Windows. It was written by John Hinkley as the follow-up to the initial version,Vista.[1][2] Theabout box describes it as "a 3-D landscape generator and projector capable of accurately displaying real-world andfractal landscapes." It was published byVirtual Reality Labs and developed byHypercube Engineering.[3][1] The latest versions were published and developed byMonkey Byte Development.[4]
Vista operates similarly to aray tracer in that light paths are generated. The user specifies light sources, and camera angles. The ground may be colored to create different ground styles. Vista has water, tree and cloud effects, making some images almostphotorealistic. The ground itself may either be generated from a random (or user inputted) number, or it may useDEM landscape files for real-world views, the software having come with a number of maps ofMars andEarth.[5][6]
Vista can load and save output images inPCX,BMP,JPG andTarga file formats. PCX files can also be imported as elevations and ground colors to allow third-party creation of landscapes in otherimage editors.
Trees can be placed on landscapes as either2D or3D objects. In 2D, the trees always face the camera and are fast to generate. 3D trees are created using fractals and can be given a variable bending of the branches to make them look more complicated.
The Amiga version of Vista works on all models of Amiga, however due to the low processor speeds generation of landscapes take a long time to complete. It was not unusual for a landscape generation to take several hours on a stock68000 based computer. Later versions, for 32-bit Amigas, support theMC68881/68882FPU, speeding up rendering considerably when such a chip is present.
The PC version runs inMS-DOS for the earlier versions, and from 4.00 onwards it runs on all versions of 32-bitMicrosoft Windows.
Its most famous use was for the landscape used in the opening credits ofThe Chart Show. This sequence involved a silver spaceship flying through a series of valleys that had been generated using VistaPro (Vista did not support generating animations until the Pro version was released). Vista was also used (both PC and Amiga versions) for the book byArthur C. Clarke calledThe Snows of Olympus, a picture book about terraforming Mars.[25][26][27] The 1996 PlayStation gameBlood Omen: Legacy of Kain uses pre-rendered footage created with VistaPro for the bat flight sequences.[28] The 1994 albumLandscapes bySusumu Hirasawa's experimental groupShun was inspired by and used images created in the software.[29]
