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.
