[Editor's
note: In order to follow along with this tutorial, you may download
a demo version of Amapi 3D 4.15 for Mac or Windows from our
sister site, Creative Mac. Later this week we will provide our
readers with an exclusive authorization code to turn the demo
into a full working version of this professional-level modeler.
Please click to download either the Macintosh
demo (15.7 MB) or the Windows
demo (9.6 MB).]
This week
we're going to be taking a look at Amapi 3D and learning some
of its basic workings. We're presenting the Windows interface
for this tutorial, but all of these tips apply to the Macintosh
version as well. (On the Mac, substitute COMMAND for CONTROL
and OPTION for ALT. If you want to right-click on the Mac, just
hold down the CONTROL key while clicking.) Future installments
will mix Macintosh and Windows interface shots.
Getting
started
Begin by downloading Amapi 3D (Macintosh and Windows) here.
Once you install it, launch it. You'll be presented with a dialog
box where Amapi wants you to choose one of the two available
user interfaces—the Standard floating tool palette at left
or the original workshop interface, also known as natural design
interface. We'll use the workshop interface for this tutorial.
It is faster and much more fun, outright addictive!
The same
dialog also asks for a password. That's essentially the license
key, a long hexadecimal string starting with '2'. Click on the
text box for that password, and enter it. Be sure not to add
trailing blanks or leading whitespace.
If for some
reason your installation doesn't accept the password, don't
worry. You'll just be in what Amapi calls 'Demo Mode', in which
everthing still works, except for saving your 3D model to Amapi
file or exporting it to other formats, but rendering to image
and animating to AVI movie file still will work even in demo
mode.
In addition
to a choice of user interfaces, Amapi also offers five different
display modes. From the default Basic Wireframe (which is not
based on OpenGL and thus works well on laptops and slower machines
without good OpenGL video cards) to several modes offering shaded
appearance. There are lit wireframe and shaded modes and the
Wire-shade mode, in which a smooth shaded display is combined
with a wireframe overlay to help you identify holes and openings
in surfaces. The shaded modes work best on good systems with
good OpenGL cards and 32-bit Zbuffers and most recent drivers.
Let's therefore start initially with the basic wireframe mode,
just the way Amapi starts up by default. If you want to try
the other modes later, look in the Edit > Preferences menu
for Workspace Settings.
Finally,
let's configure Amapi for how many levels of undo we can use:
Select the Edit > Preferences > Recovery Settings menu
and select 20 for the Undo Level. Note that you can also designate
an automatic Backup file and for every 'N' minutes saving (e.g.
every five minutes). When
you're done with this, you should see a screen similar to the
one shown in picture 1.
