The JAVA applet used to show the
crystals can use up a lot of computer power and memory.
Please close any other applications before starting the
crystal shape laboratory !
Before you can use the menu
on the left side of the page you must stop the animation
by double clicking with the left mouse button into the
crystal !
To reduce the workload you can reduce the size of the
applet.
If you play arround a longer time with the applet your
computer may get slower as memory resources get used up.
It may be necessary to restart your browser or even to
restart your computer to get back to normal.
The applet itself is copyright of Dr. Steffen
Weber
homepage : http://www.jcrystal.com
.
If you want to use the applet in your own projects please
ask for permission. You can also buy a JAVA programm to
generate such applets yourself.
The Javascript to modify the applet has been developed by
me and can be used freely as long as you leave the
copyright note in the script itself untouched. The script
must not be used on comercial projects or CD-ROM´s
without written permision. (If I ever will decide to
charge any fee it will be more then moderate !)
You are also encouraged to place a link to my website if
you are using the script in your own projects. However
that is just optional.
Known
bugs, problems and FAQ
The "no show" bug : Sometimes
if you click on the "action !" button nothing
happens and the applet area stays blank.
Solution : Click on the "action
!" button several times rapidly until the crystal
pops up or try the reload button. This is most likely to
happen if you start your first custom calculation).
However if you have many faces in your crystal,
calculation may take some time, so be patient and wait a
little bit before clicking like crazy on the "action
!" button.
This may also happen when you try to open a saved crystal.
The "distance" bug : There
is also an evil bug which came realy up when I introduced
the output of POV-RAY files.
As you increase the central distance of of a crystal form
or face it should get smaller and smaller and then
completely disappear at a critical distance. But for
example look at that : activate in the cubic-hexoctahedral
class the cube {100}, the octahedron {111} and the
rhombic dodecahedron {110}. Then set them all to 1.000
central distance. Now try to shrink the dodecahedron by
increasing its central distance to 1.100 and then to 1.200.
All okay so far then set it to 1.220. It becomes very
small. Then set it to 1.225 ! Oops, its back again ! This
is wrong it should have been completely disappeared, the
created POV-RAY file shows that correctly. If you set the
distance value somewhere between 1.220 and 1.225 the
applet may even "crash" e.g. produce no output.
However if you change for example the distance value for
the cube or the octahedron the "critical" value
for the rhombic dodecahedron changes, too. This problem
is likely to occur with all faces in all crystal classes.
To avoid this problem you should start with all d-values
at 1.000 when constructing a new crystal and slowly
increase or decrease the values.
Note that the sample crystals may already have this bug
so that rendering them under POV-RAY may give different
results.
Please note that if you are using the JAVA program
provided by Steffen Weber to generate the HTML code, you
wan´t have this problem. The program figures out when a
face disappears and such faces are not listed in the
generated HTML code. Its just a problem of the JAVA-applet
that does not "realize" when a face disappears
as it never was designed for that purpose.
How can I save a crystal ?
Java and Java-Script can not have access to your
hardrive to save a file. You can make a screenshot (any
simple graphic program can do that) or you can save the
generated HTML-code by right click with the mouse into
the output window ( you must click under the applet, not
on it). Using the Internet Explorer a menu pops up and
you choose the option "show source" or
something like that. This opens the Notepad from which
you can save the HTML-code as "my-crystal.htm"
for example. You also must have the applet "JCapplet.class"
on your harddisk this can be usualy found in the cache.
Take care for the correct path ! The HTML-code presumes
that the applet is one folder instance above it. For
example create a folder "java-crystals" in that
folder you store the applet. Within this folder you
create a subfolder lets say "my-crystals" in
that subfolder you store your HTML-files.
What is the "POV-RAY output" for ?
POV-RAY is a cool and free raytracing program
available on almost any computer platform. Download it
under www.povray.org .
Crystal Shape Laboratory produces a pov file which can be
moved by cut and paste into POV-RAY and be rendered
immidiately.
POV-RAY is a very elaborate and complex programm, just
the instruction book is over 300 pages. It allows you to
do almost everything with your crystal you can imagine.
For example you can order the crystal to be made out of
glass of any color or it can have a polished chrome
surface. You can combine and arrange crystals in groups
and put them in any kind of landscape etc. Its also
possible to create cool 3D animations. It was not
designed just to draw crystals.
The crystal classes which are offering the generation of
POV-Ray files have the POV-RAY output ! label in the above list !
To get an idea what you
ca do with POV-RAY take a look at this little POV-RAY
Galery
.
NEWS
BREAK
JAVA
CRYSTALS GO COMERCIAL !
At December 1 st 2000
the commercial release of JCrystal will
be out. Believe me, its much better and with much more
options then the CRYSTAL SHAPE LABORATORY. The price will
be $ 80.00 and you will get a CD-ROM full of goodies. Its
promised easy to install. No JAVA stuff to download from
the internet. To take a complete look and for ordering
information check it out under :
www.jcrystal.com
Here is
an actual screenshot click on the thumbnail to see a
larger JPEG-file.
Other crystal
drawing programs
There are some other
crystal drawing programs on the market like :
SHAPE by Eric Dowty
Go to http://www.shapesoftware.com to find
more information and a downloadable almost fully
functional trial version.
As SHAPE was one of the first crystal drawing programms
and many crystals may have been created as SHAPE-files I
have written a little
JAVA-Script to
convert a SHAPE output-file into a Java Crystal.
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The next trick is
a converter script to produce cool looking
wireframes (like the one on the left side) in POV-RAY
from a SHAPE output-file.
GO TO WIRE-FRAME CONVERTER
click on the
thumbnail picture to view a 800x600 pixel PNG (121
KB)
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Okay, you want to
have real faces, too ?
Check this converter :
WIRE-FRAME
CONVERTER II
click on the
thumbnail picture to view 800x600 pixel PNG (37
KB)
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Download
For your convenience you
can download an offline version ( betatest 0.01 August 9th
2000) of the crystal shape laboratory. Note that this is
not the actual online version !
crystal-lab.exe (self
extracting zip archive 340,248 bytes)
crystal-lab.zip (zip
archive 320,656 bytes)
When extracted you will
find a folder "crystal-lab". Within this folder
there is the file "crystal-lab.htm", usualy if
you doubleclick on it in your windows explorer you will
open this file in your default browser. Otherwise open
"crystal-lab.htm" with your broswer manualy.
Note that there
are still bugs in there as applet my crash or memory of
your system gets used up...
Any comments and suggestions how to solve this problems
are quite welcome.
If you develop the script further or find any bugs or
problems please feel free to
contact me here.
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