I've mentioned
before that for designers, particularly those who work in Flash,
skill with 3D is rapidly becoming a prerequisite. Last year,
the only tool on the market for bringing 3D content into the
Flash format was Swift3D from Electric Rain. Now, however, it
seems that every 3D publisher wants a piece of the Web, and
they're all either offering Flash expansion modules or are developing
export options for SWF animation.
As a subset
of these publishers, there are those who are not just expanding
existing applications to make them useable on the Web but are
actually tailoring them for use by those whose skills tend more
toward 2D design—print and the Web—but who are beginning
to need 3D for things like spinning logos, flythroughs and character
animation.
Enter Amorphium
Pro from Electric Image.
Now, many
of you probably remember the original Amorphium (from Play Inc.),
a 3D product also targeted toward designers that was introduced
a few years ago. If you had the chance to use it, you probably
weren't terribly enthralled by it. It didn't exactly deliver
on the promise of 3D for the masses. But Amorphium Pro is different.
Very different.
What
it does
Amorphium Pro is probably the first true 3D modeling and animation
package targeted toward designers that also happens to have
amazing features to back it up. This is a full-featured 3D suite,
one that includes numerous tools for modeling, painting, texturing,
masking, effects and rendering. I can't possibly cover it all
here, but I'll try to give you a general sense of what it does
and a few specific examples of how it works.
I say that
this package is targeted toward designers not because it's a
dumbed-down version of a high-end program. It's not. It's targeted
toward designers in that its workflow and tools are organized
in as close a way to 2D applications as possible while still
being able to produce 3D. It's like your favorite image editor
and painting program rolled into one and then extruded for 3D.
And it's not a "dumb" program. This is unquestionably
a professional tool.
By way of
example, consider the problem of masking and painting a model
while you're still in the process of building it. Say, for example,
that you just want to make some hair on a head and paint it.
You just click on the "Mask" tool, paint your mask
on the object, and paint color with a tool similar to Photoshop's
airbrush tool on the unmasked areas. Then just unmask you model
to go back and do some more modeling. Simple, right? We'll take
a look at masking later in this review. First let's take a look
at how it all works.
Workflow
Amorphium Pro is divided into 12 components for accomplishing
various tasks. By default, when you launch the program, you
get a mesh sphere in the middle of a blank scene in the Composition
mode. Composition is where you come to create new basic shapes,
arrange them in the scene, attach them to other objects, change
object attributes or animate objects using a timeline that's
very easy to understand. It's sort of the homeroom for all the
rest of the features.
The basic
single-window view in Composition mode. The toolbar on the left
can be expanded into individual palettes, and you can also view
numerous
windows for different perspectives on your object.
From here,
you can go into any of the modeling modes to shape a new model
or edit an existing model—one you previously created in
Amorphium Pro or one you've imported from a variety of common
3D formats. (You will also be able to export your work to common
3D formats.) Or you can do some painting, effects, masking or
any number of other compositing or editing tasks you need to
perform.
How
it models
To get a sense of what Amorphium Pro does and how it works—or,
rather, how you work with it—you need only contrast it
with the way most 3D programs work. Say you want to create a
face and animate it. How would you model it in a traditional
3D program? You might build up polygons point by point. You
might start with a cube and subdivide, removing polygons until
you achieve your desired result. There are lots of ways to do
it, none of them particularly intuitive for those who work primarily
in 2D.
2D art is
an additive process. You start with a blank canvas and add strokes.
It's the same in Amorphium Pro, only you're doing it in three
dimensions. For the face example above, you might start with
a sphere, then use your mouse (or pressure tablet) to build
up the object in some areas, reduce it in others, until you
arrive at your desired shape. Your mouse or stylus becomes a
sort of sculpting device. You can go into "Wax" mode,
which allows you to "drip" geometry onto an object
or scrape it away. You might use different tools that allow
you to pinch or pull or poke the object to achieve your results.
Or you might work with "Biospheres," which are strange
objects like metaballs that sort of link themselves to one another
in a way that resembles skin stretching from one object to the
next.
Model
in progress. Here you see a quad view of an unfinished model
sculpted
from the sphere above. Essentially, it was a process of simply
pushing and pulling
the sphere in the right places to make the face emerge. The
hair was created
in three simple steps. First, I masked out the head except for
a line on top.
Then I used the "Spikes" effect to pull spikes out,
and the "Bend"
effect to stretch them into the shape you see.
You can
work just as you would if you were sculpting clay, or you can
turn on one of the many symmetry modes to save you a little
time and ensure that eyes and ears are symmetrical, if that's
what you want.
In addition
to organic models, you have an equal amount of control over
text. This mean you can not only make some 3D text that rotates,
but you can also paint it, deform it, add spikes and noise,
texture it and otherwise tweak it and animate it. You can even
animate paint strokes over time.
Working
with text in Amorphium Pro is like working with any other
object: You can paint, mask, distort and otherwise tweak text
freely,
with each change keyframable for animation.
There's
one more particularly cool tool available in the Composition
mode. It's called Interactive Decimation and Interactive Quad.
You can simply click on an object to increase or decrease its
polygon count. Or, what's even more impressive, you can mask
off an area of an object and then just increase or decrease
the polygons of the unmasked areas. Amorphium Pro automatically
increases the polygons in that area and feathers out the polygon
count toward the masked areas to provide a smooth transition
from low polygons to high polygons.
Amorphium
Pro allows you to increase the polygon count of
unmasked areas of your object. Note the denser polygons around
the ears, nose and mouth, where more detail is needed.
You almost
have to see the modeling process in action to appreciate it.
We'll post some QuickTime demos in the near future to illustrate
the point. Until then, you'll just have to take my word for
it: This is so shockingly intuitive that you have to wonder
why all 3D modeling didn't start out this way. (You really should,
at the very least, download the demo to see how simple this
whole process is. You can get it from http://www.amorphium.com.)
Tools
and effects
The
toolset in Amorphium Pro is particularly impressive. Picture
the toolset in Photoshop, then multiply it by 12 and add in
options for 3D brushes, interactive effects, etc. As I've said,
the program is divided into 12 modes for performing various
functions. Each mode has its own set of tools. Common tools
include move/rotate and interactive preview lights. (The lights
let you rotate light around an object to check detail, but they
don't change the composition's lighting.)
In the primary
modeling area, called "Tools," you get the option
of several very easy to use tools for pinching, pushing, pulling
and smoothing your object. (See the tool palette on the right.)
You also get a separate palette offering you a variety of shapes
to work with, from rounded buttons to hollow cylinders. (See
the palette in the left margin.) You also have options for several
styles of symmetry, tilt, pressure, radius and flux. (Flux is
what determines how quickly a tool behaves—basically repetitions.
You can set it low for delicate work or high for times when
you want to do things quickly.) All of these tools can be used
to shape mesh objects, including text, and all Tool functions
can be keyframed. (See the "Animation" section below
for more.)
You can
also take your object into the FX mode to perform a number of
effects designed to save a little time for common operations.
These include bending, twisting, marble painting, adding spikes
and a lot of other options as well. To get an effect to work,
you just select it, edit it where appropriate and click your
mouse on the object's window for the effect to occur. Dragging
your mouse right or left will increase or decrease the intensity
of the effect.
For
another type of modeling mode, you can also convert a mesh object
into a "wax" object, which will allow you to do a
few different thing. "Wax" is a modeling mode unique
to Amorphium Pro that essentially allows you to model as if
you were literally working with wax. You can drip wax onto an
object to build it up in areas. You can melt through wax objects—all
the way through, if desired—to create sockets or holes
or punctures or whatever else your sick little minds can think
up. Or you can smooth it out with a sponge tool. What's also
cool is that you can keep adding divisions as you need them.
You might start out with an object that has 24 X, Y and Z division,
but you can just Control click or right click to access the
object's properties and change the values for X, Y and Z divisions
individually. (See the Wax toolbar on the right.)
You also
get a Paint mode, which allows you to paint directly on your
object with a variety of brushes. You have a masking mode for
creating masks (simply by painting them on the object). You
have a Material mode, which helps you texture your object. (You
can see the palette in the left margin.) There's morphing, which
will even let you morph objects that do not have the same number
of polygons. There's a Mapper function, a Height Shop—basically
way too much to talk about here. (We will be posting separate
tutorials and feature tours to explain certain features in more
depth later on.)
Animation
The animation capabilities in Amorphium Pro include numerous
huge improvements over the original Amorphium. More than this,
the animation stands on its own as exceptionally easy to use
and feature-rich. Want to animate an object's shape? Just change
the shape and add a keyframe. Want to animate the process of
painting an object? Same thing. Just paint it and add a keyframe.
Not happy with your keyframe position? Click and drag it to
a different spot in the timeline. Want to increase or decrease
the length of your composition? Just click and drag the composition
length icon. (You can also change composition settings in the
render dialog box.)
Amorphium
Pro's timeline. Virtually anything can be animated simply by
making a change to an object (or camera or light) and creating
a new
keyframe. You can also lengthen or shorten your composition's
duration
just by dragging the red triangle on the top right. Or you can
move
the whole active portion of the timeline to the right to allow
you do perform pre-animations.
Basically,
you can animate anything you want. Just change something with
your mouse, and make a new keyframe. Or move your timeline to
an existing keyframe, and any changes you make will be added
to that point in the timeline, with all inbetweening handled
for you on the fly. Plus, you can do numeric transformations
for more accurate rotations, moves, etc. And animation doesn't
apply only to objects. You can also animate cameras and lights.
And, just
as in other programs, you can use the timeline as a shortcut
to selecting objects, hiding them, etc. Very handy.
Output
and export
Electric Image has an extremely beautiful renderer. (Regardless
of platform prejudice, most would agree Electric Image is at
least in the top two or three for render quality.) Amorphium
Pro does not include all of the great rendering capabilities
you would find in the company's high-end EIAS or Universe products,
but it does offer some nice output. Plus it has tons of options
for exporting to the Flash format, from the large and lush to
the small and cartoonish.
Renders
can be output to any number of file formats, from still TIFFs
to uncompressed or compressed QuickTimes to SWF files.
Rendering
can be really zippy or pretty slow, depending on your output
options. I found the slowest rendering to be with the Flash
export when I cranked up the output quality. At maximum quality,
it will almost seem like your computer has frozen (but it hasn't).
With Flash output, there's no progress bar, so you only get
a reading of the particular frame rendering at the time. A future
minor release will likely take care of this. Electric Image
has proved pretty reliable when it comes to releasing updates
to fix whatever minor problems might exist. (Hence the program's
already at 1.1 and only a month old.) The final render, however,
is quite nice.
In addition,
the program can output to a huge number of 3D and 2D formats,
from LightWave objects to PNG.
Performance
One of the things that impressed me the most about Amorphium
Pro—and there are tons of things that impressed me about
it—was its speed. Even on just an old G4 400 running in
quad view with full OpenGL, I never felt a slowdown for most
tasks. Strangely, the default in Amorphium Pro is a software
renderer that is considerably slower than OpenGL. But a quick
trip to the program's preferences will fix this up.
On occasion,
particularly when working in Wax mode with a high number of
divisions (say 80 x 80 x 80), you will notice a marked decrease
in performance, but this can be overcome simply by switching
your display mode to the most basic setting.
My final
comment about performance I has to do with stability. This thing
doesn't crash. It just doesn't. I don't even get OpenGL errors.
Nothing. I can't faze this thing. There was only one time I
thought I had crashed the program, but it turned out it was
just taking longer than expected to render a scene. I think
this just might be the first invincible program for the Mac.
(I can only assume it's equally stable under Windows.) Bravo
for that!
The bottom
line
I'm so impressed with this program that I get all scatter brained
just launching it. There's finally a 3D program for designers—and
a great one at that. On top of all of that, it's pretty reasonably
priced at $379. This is a thorough effort, one that delivers
more than promised on every front. You will master this program
in a couple weeks of heavy use, but you'll never cease to be
surprised by the results you can achieve. I highly and wholeheartedly
recommend this program. For more information or to download
the demo, visit http://www.amorphium.com.
Also be
sure to stay tuned for some tutorials to help get you going
in this versatile program. We'll be working with Electric Image
to provide original feature tours and tutorials, and we'll be
generating some on our own as well.
