Geist3D requires a good processor and graphics hardware; especially for the planet demos. The recommended configuration is a dual core processor and a graphics card with at least 256MB of RAM and 16 shading processors, including support for floating point textures and framebuffers. Unfortunately, the software has only been tested on a few different platforms and chances are that it will not work with some configurations. Please help diagnose any problems which you may encounter by reporting the symptoms on the forum. Also keep in mind that Geist3D has to generate some large noise textures when it starts up for the first time and it will therefore take longer than expected for the application to appear.

So far, there is no official user manual, but you can find a simple guide here.

Planet Viewer

This Planet Viewer (9.4MB) demonstrates seamless real-time travel between the surfaces of two earth-sized planets. Once you start the application it will automatically load a model containing a red and a blue planet. Both planets are generated procedurally up to 1.5m resolutiom, using a Rigded Fractal Noise function which is further transformed by a user defined cubic mapping. Different parameters for the noise function and mapping produce distinctly different types of terrain and water distribution. A number of GLSL shading programs combined with 2D noise textures and color gradients generate atmospheric scattering and reflective, animated water. This verison has been updated on (03/13/08)! Planets now contain characters, trees and simple physical effects.

 

Terrain Viewer

The Terrain Viewer is a limited version of Geist3D (100MB) that demonstrates the real-world terrain rendering capabilities. A preprocessing step generates a seamless terrain up to 1,000,000 km² from a continuous set of 23m or 93m digital elevation data published by www.geobase.ca. This download contains an approximately 40,000 km² patch of central British Columbia, located about 400 km north of Vancouver. A number of GLSL shading programs and color gradients generate the surface detail and animated water. This download demonstrates seamless, real-time travel between any two points of the landscape.

 

 

Geist3D Alpha

This download contains the full version of Geist3D (40MB) including a number of models that demonstrate the different features of the graphics engine. This version is not yet stable and will be updated frequently. Some of the features are also not fully implemented and tested, and there is no manual available yet. However, the models included provide a good sample of the different capablities. Please post any question about how to use the editor on the designated forum.