VistaPro is 3D
scenery generator for the
Amiga,
Macintosh,
MS-DOS, and
Microsoft Windows. It was written by John Hinkley as the follow-up to the initial version, Vista.[1][2] The
about box describes it as "a 3-D landscape generator and projector capable of accurately displaying real-world and
fractal landscapes." It was published by Virtual Reality Labs and developed by Hypercube Engineering.[3][1] The latest versions were published and developed by Monkey Byte Development.[4]
Graphics Generation
Vista operates similarly to a
ray 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 almost
photorealistic. The ground itself may either be generated from a random (or user inputted) number, or it may use
DEM landscape files for real-world views, the software having come with a number of maps of
Mars and
Earth.[5][6]
Vista can load and save output images in
PCX,
BMP,
JPG and
Targa file formats. PCX files can also be imported as elevations and ground colors to allow third-party creation of landscapes in other
image editors.
Trees can be placed on landscapes as either
2D or
3D 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 stock
68000 based computer. Later versions, for 32-bit Amigas, support the
MC68881/68882
FPU, speeding up rendering considerably when such a chip is present.
The PC version runs in
MS-DOS for the earlier versions, and from 4.00 onwards it runs on all versions of 32-bit
Microsoft Windows.
Popular culture
Its most famous use was for the landscape used in the opening credits of
The Chart Show. This sequence involved a silver spaceship flying through a series of valleys that had been generated using VistaPro (Vista didn't support generating animations until the Pro version was released). Vista was also used (both PC and Amiga versions) for the book by
Arthur C. Clarke called "The Snows of
Olympus", a picture book about terraforming Mars.[25][26][27] The 1994 album "Landscapes" by the
Susumu Hirasawa's experimental group
Shun was inspired by and used images created in the software.[28]