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RelMo Design
The most obvious change is the introduction of a completely new 'look and feel'
to the RelMo environment. By default the Office 2003 theme is displayed, but
you can switch at will between several other themes. The available themes spill
across into the new Control Bar area. Until now the Control Bar was a static
4-pane design. Now the various components have been separated and you can
customise the display to show just what control bar panes you require and where
you require them.
Customisation has been introduced for all toolbars as well. Now you can set up
exactly the tools you want. Just use the right mouse button to click on a
toolbar and launch the Customise dialog.
Although
the most obvious change may be in the style of the RelMo interface, the biggest
changes are less obvious. Lighting has been completely revamped and you can now
have multiple lights in 3D views. With multiple lights has come greater control
over the type of light produced and the introduction for the first time of
lights which cast shadows. Not only all this, but lights are now modelled as
special types of objects which means that they can be animated, just like any
other object. Moving car headlamps, casting moving shadows, during real time
animations is now not only possible, but easy to implement too.
Users asked
for the ability to export RelMo files to other programs so we have now included
a facility to generate DXF files. DXF is not really designed for a lot of the
features used by RelMo, so we've also designed a completely new file format,
the RelMo Extended File format. This allows files to be exported and imported
by RelMo yet maintain the majority of the features used, including animation.
For the first time this opens up the possibility of other manufacturers
generating files containing animation which can then be imported into RelMo. At
the moment there are several data recorder manufacturers who are actively
working to generate RelMo XYZ files.
We've added
other items to the feature list too. 3D Survey text is available for the first
time, considerably enhancing your presentations. Also included to assist in
presentations is a scribble tool which allows you to draw over the surface of a
3D view to highlight points of interest.
Dimension
Objects are now available for inclusion in a 2D plan. Simply select the points
you want to dimension and a new dimension object will be created which can be
offset or dragged to make the survey more legible.
To make
editing easier, we've added a tool tip box which pops up when you're editing
points and lines in 2D. This little box appears whenever you pause the mouse
over a point or line and supplies useful information about that item. Line
selection is improved too as this is now performed by clicking directly on the
line itself, whether it is curved or straight.
We've added
the ability to select multiple points by clicking on an entire line, or by
choosing a particular style. Once selected, you now have the option to clone
the entire area covered by the points, or to change point style of all the
points.
Panel
display has been enhanced with the addition of a new feature which permits the
display of one side of a panel only. This will be great for objects such as
road signs as it completely removes any break-through of background panels.
The
analysis tools have been improved with the addition of the ability to display
slope direction arrows in the active object. A new angle measuring tool in the
Query menu, together with the updating of some of the other query tools has
increased their usefulness too.
We had a
lot of positive feedback concerning the select fill style dropper tool, so we've
extended this to allow the selection of point and line styles as well. While
still on the editing theme, we've enhanced the undo feature so that you now have
an effectively unlimited number of undo levels. Undo has been incorporated into
the Layout Manager too.
The Layout
Manager has seen a complete revamp in both style and functionality. Text box
handling in particular has been dramatically improved. A completely new
toolbar, mainly for text box control has also been added which adds a much
higher degree of control than previously possible. New tools on this bar
include drop down colour boxes and a drop down line spacing tool. We've
included too a new zoom tool for the Layout manager. Naturally the mouse wheel
zoom function as used in both 2D and 3D is now available in Layout pages as
well. Printed pages themselves have also been enhanced to allow finer control
over the way in which the border is printed.
The
animation side of the program has been updated too. You will now find tools to
delete individual control points and add pauses into an animated sequence.
These can both be found in the context sensitive menu when you're animating an
object. The preview animated sequence function is now available in both 2D and
3D and there is now a new feature where you can freeze the display of an
animated sequence at a specified time. This will be especially useful when
displaying the locations of objects at particular times on printed plans as this
feature has been carried over into the embedded views in layout pages too.
On the
performance side, animated sequences are now only rebuilt when necessary. This
should result in a faster display and re-display of animations.
Another new
feature, useful to animation, but also available in the Transforms menu, is the
ability to auto-level an object. This feature automatically adjusts the pitch
and roll of the object so that it matches the underlying terrain. When used
with animated sequences, objects can now not only automatically adjust their
height above the ground, but also their attitude too.
One area
where users will always have concerns is security and accountability. The log
file system has been extended to cover other items too such as the deletion or
movement of points. This now provides a complete audit trail of your editing of
points in particular. We've popped in the ability too to password protect your
survey files to prevent any unauthorised interference.
Quite a lot of work has been
done on the background functions too. We trust that most of these are largely
unnoticed by you, in which case we've succeeded. If something doesn't work as
expected however, please contact us for advice. It may be that we've introduced
a bug, or it might be just that we expected you to perform an action in a
certain way, but you've found another way. Either way we welcome your reports
and will endeavour to rectify any of the problems you encounter in the use of
RelMo.
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