Virtus WalkThrough is a powerful modeling and visualization package lhai takes the concept of virtual reality from esoteric experiment to practical tool. Virtual reality makes it possible to explore worlds and interiors dial exist only in the mind of their creators and, with Virtus WalkThrough, in the bits and bytes of Mac software.
Spatial Experience
Virtus WalkThrough lets architects and interior designers create conceptual designs of buildings and interiors and then move through and around them on-screen. It's an ideal tool for the pre-CAD, visualization phase of spatial design.
WalkThrough is the only program currently available that provides a completely interactive spatial presentation. Several modeling programs for the Mac let you animate fly-throughs, but you're restricted to a fixed path through the design. Only WalkThrough lets you move about freely, viewing the design from many different perspectives, in real time. And it doesn't limit you to wire frames. The program renders scenes, and it renders them with astounding speed, so you can move through a suite of rooms in seconds. It does all this with files no bigger than word-processing documents. By comparison, 8-bit PIC animation files of a two-bedroom house can easily grow to 150 megabytes. A similar WalkThrough file, on the other hand, is 15K, or one ten-thousandth the size of the animation file.
The program uses two types of viewing windows for navigating through models: a 2-D Design View, which is also used to create designs, and a 3-D Walk View, which creates the rendered perspectives as you move through the model. Although Walk View rendering is not photorealistic, it does have advanced features such as translucent surfaces for glass or water; 24-bit color: and, as mentioned previously, impressive speed.
You maneuver through a model by using a mouse or a trackball. We found the trackball superior for navigation, but either method is simple and intuitive. If you're using a mouse, you hold down the mouse button and move the cursor up to move forward, down to go back, and right and left to rotate. The farther the cursor is from the center cross hairs, the faster you go. You can also move up and down or just look around in all directions wiihoui changing position. The focal-length tool adds a wide-angle or tele photo lens to your view.
Observations
As you move around in Walk View, a round object called the Observer also moves in Top View, one of the 2-D Design View perspectives. The Observer represents your position and the direction you’re facing in the model. If you want to view another room without moving through the model to get there, you can activate the Top View window, grab the Observer, and move it to your destination.
A third way to change your position is to rotate the Orientation Cube on the Tool palette. Each surface of the cube is labeled with a direction: front, back, left, right, top, and bottom. Like the Observer, the Orientation Cube moves as you navigate in Walk View. You can change your orientation in 3-D space by using the cursor to rotate the cube.
You can also record the path you take through a model by clicking on the record- path tool on the Tool palette before walking through your design. Tills is handy if you plan to use WalkThrough in a presentation.
Creating and editing models in Virtus WalkThrough is almost as quick and easy as moving around in them. Top View, the default 2-D Design View, is where you do most of your drawing. You can also open windows for the Front, Back, Left, Right and Bottom Views. An object drawn in Design View immediately appears in Walk View as a rendered 3-D object.
Each time you create a room, you create a 3-D box by drawing rectangles in any of the 2-D Design Views (Front, Back, and so on) and use an extrusion marker on a ruler to set the room height. The interiors of boxes are rendered. Then you can place objects such as furniture inside the rooms. Boxes can overlap, and you can make unwanted walls invisible.
On the Surface
To create doors and windows, you cut holes in the walls, using the surface tool, which we found to be one of the most versatile and useful tools we've encountered in 3-D modeling. It ingeniously isolates wall surfaces from the rest of the floor plan. To use the tool, you click on a wall in the Top View and a separate window opens to display the elevation of your wall. You can then draw shapes on the wall using one of WalkThrough's opacity modifiers. If you choose the transparent modifier, the rectangles you draw will be doors. Translucent gives you windows and screens, and solid gives you rugs, molding trim, and colored walls.
Virtus WalkThrough has all the basic tools for creating the 2-D and 3-D shapes you expect to find in a modeling package. It also includes a unique tool for inserting or deleting the handles needed to stretch existing shapes. This tool comes in handy for tasks such as adding a bay window to a square room.
WalkThrough implements layers usefully by listing them on the Tool palette. You can rearrange the list by clicking and dragging the names. When you click and hold on a layer name, a pop-up menu gives you choices of how to display and color a layer. For example, you can display objects in inactive layers with dotted lines,
Virtus WalkThrough comes with small libraries of 3-D furniture, and you can creale your own objects and add them to the libraries. You can walk around a 3-D library object and view it from any angle, just as you do in Walk View,
WalkThrough's Lighting Editor lets you set the color, intensity, and direction of interior lighting. Each object (or room) has its own lighting model. The default allows three sources of light for each room, but you can add more. Light sources can be ambient or directional, and you can change lighting direction with a simple click and drag of the mouse or trackball
To its credit Virtus WalkThrough avoids most problems common to early versions of ntw software. Still them is room for improvement. One annoying quirk occurs with doors that am cut through the walls of two adjoining rooms. If you move one of the rooms so that it is not exactly aligned with the wall of the other room, any doors cut through both rooms disappear. We got around this by zooming all the way out in Top View and moving the wall.
WalkThrough's biggest deficiency is in its import and export capabilities. The program exports files only in standard DXF formal. This feature is handy for exporting models to CAD programs, but it would also be nice to export files in PICT, TIFF, or EPS formats so WalkThrough designs could be used in presentations. We would like to see DXF import as well for visualizing existing floor plans created in various CAD packages. The current version has no import capabilities whatsoever. Other missing features are the ability to create text in a model and to see wall thicknesses, Virtus is considering all of these features for future releases.
The Bottom Line
Virtual reality is an exciting concept that has generated little in terms of concrete products. Virtus WalkThrough changes that. For less than $1,000, the program lets you experience on your Mac what not even the most expensive graphics workstation can reproduce, Virtus WalkThrough is truly amazing in several ways. Its ease of model navigation and creation speed, and minute file size (so it can run on any 2-megabyte Mac including a Plus) are most impressive. It's not a drafting tool by any measure, but it is an outstanding conceptualization tool. For those who need to look at a design from all angles, Virtus WalkThrough is indeed a breakthrough product.
Rizzo, John. (July 1991). Virtus WalkThrough. MacUser. (pgs. 72, 74, 76).
Virtus Corporation
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
10 / 
2021-12-03 / 
1196306e45164578575490a9b1ec070fed834633 / 
/ 
Virtus_Walkthroughtm.sit_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
