by
David Nagel
Executive
Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
A little note before we
get started: I don't want to give you the impression that this site is all about
the Web. Yes, our last three reviews have been on Web graphics software, but this
has been more of a function of the order in which I receive materials to review
than any editorial direction toward Internet-based design. Too many sites these
days are covering software and hardware for the Web at the expense of content
designed for print professionals. This will not be the case with Digital Media
Designer. That said, let's get on with this week's look at a software package
that promises vector-based 3D for Flash.
One of the features lacking
in any Flash content creation tool, at least for the Mac, is the ability to generate
vector-based 3D animations. Granted, you'll find this feature in some of the high-end
3D packages, like LightWave 6.5, but we're talking about a couple thousand dollars
there, not to mention a lack of consideration for file size. So
along comes Swift3D from Electric Rain to fill the void.
What it
is
Swift3D is designed to generate simple 3D animations with a minimum of effort
and output them either directly in the Flash (.SWF) format or as a sequence of
EPS or Adobe Illustrator files for importing into Flash applications like Macromedia
Flash 4/5 or Adobe LiveMotion.
The program has very limited
modeling capabilities. You can create text and primitive objects like spheres
and cones, and the program lets you apply common transformations to them, but
you can't go in and create complex objects except by using primitives as blocks
and stacking them together.
You can, however, import
3D Studio Max files, and Swift3D will even retain your animation paths, color
and lighting. (FYI, 3D Studio Max is not available for the Mac and won't be available
for the Mac for some time, if ever, but many programs can export files to the
.3DS format, such as LightWave 6.x.) However, even if you do import .3DS files,
in my experience Swift3D's memory requirements are so extreme as to make their
use impractical. In fact, I couldn't even give the program enough memory to render
out more than 18 frames (1.5 seconds) of an animated Gundam model at 320 x 240,
even though my G4 has 512 MB of RAM. (See below.) Swift3D would not even launch
if I assigned it a memory partition larger than 256 MB, which just happens to
be the physical size of my largest single DIMM. So that's an odd little quirk
that could make this program utterly unusable by many of you.
Swift3D's other limitation
is its 3D feature set. "Textures" in Swift3D consist of flat color and
lighting. That's pretty much it. No texture mapping. The reason for this is, simply,
file size. Swift3D is geared toward outputting small files based on the assumption
that people who work in Flash need small files for the Web.
Working in Swift3D
At any rate, the main point of Swift3D seems to be text, and, in this respect,
it has some nice features, not the least of which is its ease of use. Simply type
in the text, choose your font face, size, bevel, etc., and you're on your way.
To animate text, you just move forward in your timeline and interactively apply
your transformation. Keyframing and "tweening" are automatic. If, for
example, you move ahead to 30 seconds in the timeline and then rotate your text
720 degrees, you will have an animation that spins your text around twice in 30
seconds. It's that simple.
I also have to give high
marks to Swift3D's interface, which is incredibly clean and easy to understand.
It's just great design.
Swift3D's
Mac interface. Click to see it at 1,024 x 768.
As you can see from this
screen shot (if you click to enlarge it), all of Swift3D's features are readily
available to you. Objects (text, sphere, cone, torus) appear in the top toolbar.
Timeline and transformations appear just below that, with scene elements at the
ready to the left. Your options for each scene element appear in a pane to the
left of your working window. Cameras are accessible through a pull-down menu within
your working window. The blue balls at the bottom there are your texture previews.
This pane can also be used to display predefined animation paths, such as "Fly
in Left" or "Rotate Right." And the gray balls are trackballs,
the one on the left for rotating or moving your object, the one on the right for
rotating or moving your lights. Menus are all where they should be.
