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Cover by Bill Perry
MyMac Magazine #63, July 2000

It’s not often I get to review software and its upgrade back to back (“Bill, It’s not often that you review software period!” – yeah, yeah, yeah…) but I have to say that I don’t mind it when the product is good and comes in at a good price.

“Talking about Animation Master again, Bill?”

None other.

“So, why the big hoopla?”

Well, before I get into that, let me get into the dry statistics:

Hash Animation Master 2000
1 CD with the program, tutorial files, and models
Animation Master Handbook
Registration Card
Cost: $299.00

Continue reading »

ProCreator
Cost: $149.00
Company: Strata
<http://www.strata3D.com>

I LOVE THIS GIG! I gotta tell you guys that doing this and getting responses is just really great! Thanks for making it just a blast!

This month I’m gonna be reviewing ProCreator (VERRRRY COOL!) for Strata StudioPro from Strata (no duh, Bill!)

Of course, for you impatient, greedy “What do I get for my money?” dudes and dudetts, we’ll start with the facts:

(1) ProCreator CD in a flimsy paper (I like plastic gem cases) case. Tutorial and Manual are PDF on CD. (These are cost-saving, I know, but still a pain to use when you’re working in the program, and personally, I HATE PDFs!)

Once again, this is really cool stuff, but I have to admit that I’m a little befuddled with one or two of the plug-in choices, and I would really like to hear some reader response on it.

The plug-ins work great and I had no problems running them on my machine. The tutorial was clear and easy to understand and didn’t take long to go through. But, OH BABY! This is some great stuff! Here’s what lies in wait inside this lovely little disk:

Concrete
“Concrete, Bill? What’s so special about concrete?” Glad you asked! If you’ve ever done 3D modelling before, you know that one of the pains is texture mapping (what you put on a model to make it look like wood, stone, or whatever—kinda like a virtual decal, but not quite) and making sure it looks “real,” that is, with no deformities that would give it away as not “real.” What this baby does is to take all the guesswork out of it by giving you seamless variable textures so you could, say, build a pool, a block, and a building and use the “concrete” plug-in to shade all 3. You could then have different textures and tints without all the hassle of doing standard texture map calculations.

Procedural Plank
Ever try and make a wood plank floor? This baby really helps when it comes to making them look nice and easy! It works the same as concrete, but with planks! No more trying to figure if it’s going to look good or worrying that the texture map will collapse because the area is too big! AND (BIG BONUS!!)—If the client comes back and says “(insert snivel here), but I wanted nails in the boards…” Instead of being brought up on murder charges, you can just hit the “Nail Heads” and “Recess Nail” Button and “Bingo!” your boards all have recessed nails in them! Other features include the ability to adjust the length, width, grain, knottiness, and joints of the planks! It don’t get much better than this (well, 100 Million and an island in the Carribean would be a *little* better)!

Procedural Tile
(I see a pattern developing….) Same as above, but with tile. You can create everything from ceramic tiles to beat up brick walls! Control everything from the surface texture to the width of the grout in between! No more hanging out at truck stop men’s rooms with a digital camera to shoot pictures of the floor while “Bruno” and “Cletus” decide whether or not you’re some sort of pervert who should have his clock cleaned!

Color Spectrum
This one is a neat feature, but for the life of me, aside from making variations of the planet Jupiter, mood rings, and the colored glass on the inside of marbles, I don’t know what else could be done. It allows you to create 3D color textures with absolutely stunning results. Very cool visually, but I would have much preferred seeing an animation cel shader over this one. If any of you have already puchased this CD and used this shader, I’d like to hear what you did with it.

Shadow Catcher
This defines cool! Say you get a client who comes in with a picture and wants it to be 3D and have some sort of 3D object inserted into the scene, but wants it yesterday and doesn’t want to spend the necessary funds to make it happen (typical). What do you do? Grab your scanner, StudioPro, and Shadow Catcher! What it does is create shadows cast off of 3D objects onto 2d backgrounds to make them look like they are both in the same scene. And this is not just for still shots, oh no, they’ve gone out and made it work with animation as well! This is so COOL! Just check out the PICT of the new 3D My Mac dude walking down the streets of Chicago!
Planetary
Got that itch to play God on a shoestring budget? Need to make a planet on a quick turnaround and don’t have time to mess with making a texture map work right? Me too, and Strata has heard the psychic cries of anguish from 3D dudes all over the globe, causing them to create Planetary! Create worlds of all sorts from earth-type to ice worlds to the Classic Star Trek red planets—all within minutes! With this little gem, you can control the amount of land, ice, and sea as well as how high you want your mountains! Terraforming was never this easy and stress-free! (Colonists and aliens not included, check the legal departments in your sector for any other restrictions.)

Silk
This is one of those “see-it-to-believe-it” plug-ins! It is just beautiful to behold as this thing can take any texture and give it a silky sheen that makes it look like a bunch of poor little silkworm larvae are just freezing their butts off after making your latest creation! Totally realistic, and with total control from graininess to sheen, this baby does it all!

Spline Reflection
You ever notice how some shiny objects when light hits them just right they seem to glow or get rainbow-like colors? Ever wonder how you might be able to accomplish that without popping about 30 blood vessles and 2 major arteries? Well, put that reservation to Club Rubber Room away and worry no more! Strata has outdone themselves with a beautiful shader that allows you to do just that without all the blood, sweat (bloody sweat?), and tears! This particular shader relies on the “Y” (UP) vector for orientation and you can control the color and color weight of the object. I would highly recommend (just do it!) heading over to Strata’s website <http://www.strata3D.com> and downloading the sample animation of this shader in action. It is just beautiful!

Well, true believers, in my opinion, for the price you just can’t charge for just one of the above listed features. In other words, Strata’s ProCreator for Strata StudioPro is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Until next time, ciao!

Cadmover 5.1
KANDU Software
Estimated Price: $495
(depending on whether or not you’re a student)
<http://www.kandusoftware.com>

“Alright, Bill, what do we do to fix the in-out problem temporarily?” Boy, you guys don’t let a man catch his breath! First I want to thank those of you who emailed a response… Thanks… and now… on with the show!

Last month I mentioned that I was going to give you a solution to limited in-out problems in software, not just Strata StudioPro. So, here’s what I’ve come up with:

First the dry run for you “What do I get for my money?” dudes and dudettes… Cadmover is made by KANDU Software <http://www.kandusoftware.com>

•Cadmover 5.1 on 2 floppies (What? They still make those things?!?)
•pdf manual on floppy (I HATE pdfs!)
•Hardware Key (I REALLY HATE these, but I also know the developer hates them, too. A sad necessary evil.)
•And you get, at no added cost, a box.
Cost: About $495 (depending on whether or not you’re a student.)

WHAT DOES IT DO?
Good Question! It translates most file formats to and from CAD-related software. Once again, this is a Mac original package and though it really doesn’t have a button bar, if you are going to translate several files to the same format, you can drag and drop them onto the icon (yep, that pretty button) and it will go to town translating the file for you.

I’m going to hold off on listing the in/outs until the end, so be patient. Although the program does a wonderful job of converting files, I would suggest you do your conversion overnight. Otherwise, expect to tie up your computer for quite awhile (it took nearly 90 minutes to convert a 700,000 poly .DXF file to an .STL (Strerolithography) format). It’s a cool program and the tech support dudes are some of the most helpful and knowledgeable people I’ve had the pleasure of working with (actually, maybe a little too helpful—I didn’t really want to go into ResEdit and open the IGES file and look for line 72 or whatever, but hey, it’s a lot better than dealing with Adobe or Quark!).

The problem with a program like this is that there is not a whole lot that you can say about a translation package other than “does it work or not?” and the answer to that quetion is it absolutely does, no question about it. There are no fancy bells or whistles with this package, it’s just a good, solid 3D format conversion package, plain and simple.

“Why would I want this and how does this relate to your last article?” Good, legitimate questions. To answer the first one: if you are talking to a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of different computer programs or in the model-making industry, then Cadmover 5.1 is a must. With the exception of some high end (and high-priced) CAD and animation packages, most 3D software packages just don’t support enough input/output formats (this includes Strata StudioPro). Also, this program can convert 3D files into PICT, Illustrator, and EPS format files which is especially handy when doing technical illustrations or assembly directions.

To answer the second: for whatever reasons, Strata has not chosen to invest resources into providing a broader spectrum of input/output formats (and I have been begging for years!), therefore, you need some sort of secondary file translator to do the job for you.

“Hey, what formats does it take in and spit out?” Well I feel like doing an ABC Warehouse ad for all the input/export formats that it takes, and it does a pretty reliable job of translating the files, the only bug I’ve found is in translating ProE IGES files (which is a bug that is supposedly being fixed), but that is inconsequental to my review.

It takes:

3DGF
Adobe Illustrator v.1.1 – 7
Architrion II
CFF2
CGM
ClarisCAD
DDES2IT8.6
DWG v.9 – 14
DXF v.2.5 – 14
Dimensions
Dreams v2.0
ENVISAGE 3D
EPSF*
FOCUS (Text)
Gerber Plotter
HPGL/1
IGES v.5.1
MacArchitrion
MacDRAFT v.2.0
MacDRAW II
MiniCAD v.5.1 (Text)
PICT v.1 & 2
Presenter Pro
STL (Stereolithography)
Sculpt 3D v.1 & 2
Super 3D (Text)
WaveFront (.OBJ)
ZOOM (Text)
* EPSF Input from: AutoCAD (v.11 – 14), GPLOT, Harvard Graphics, ICIS, Mecca, Mentor Graphics, Mitre, Pro Engineer (vector), Schema

And spits out:
3DGF
Adobe Illustrator v.1.1 – 7
CFF2
CGM
DDES2IT8.6
DWG v.9 – 14
DXF v.2.5 – 14
Dimensions
Dreams v2.0
ENVISAGE 3D
FOCUS (Text)
Gerber Plotter
HPGL/1
IGES v.5.1
MacDRAFT v.2.0
MiniCAD v.5.1 (Text)
PICT v.1 & 2
PostScript (Printer)
Presenter Pro
STL (Stereolithography)
Sculpt 3D v.1 & 2
Super 3D (Text)
WaveFront (.OBJ)
ZOOM (Text)

Well, true believers, that’s it for this month! Go forth and build worlds!

•Bill Perry • <billperry@pobox.com>

Strata Studio Pro 2.5.3
Company: Strata
Estimated Price: $949.00
<http://www.strata.com>

The thing about writing an article like this is the desire to convey to the user (or potential user) the good, bad, cool, and uncool about a piece of software that they may or may not want to consider purchasing; and it all rests on my shoulders—a guy who’s an artist/animator/model builder/previsualization dude.

I could just give you the dry run facts:

Strata Studio Pro 2.5.3 (released Nov 10, 1998)
Package consists of:
1 CD (program disk and Power Module 1, plus a lot of sample goodies)
User Manual
Reference Manual
Power Module 1 Manual
Advertising
Reference card
Total Install on My Computer (Power Mac 6500/300 – 64MB RAM – 6GB HD): 277.3MB
Cost: $949.00 (possibly less if you’re a student)

…and then go into a tirade of dry graphics and commentary on why or why not you should have this program or want to allocate hard drive space for this, but that’s not my style. I’m an artist and my close friends say I have the gift of an evangelist, so we’re gonna see what happens together.

The short of it is, if you want to get the best bang for your buck, go buy this product. No, seriously, go call 1-800-STRATA3D right now and order yourself one of the best low-cost 3D modeller/animation packages that I have come across. Well? Go ahead. What are you waiting for? What? Details? The Whys? Ohhh… so you want information, reasons to part with your hard-earned dollars. You’re sure you want it, because I heard Tim’s articles and reviews were really good this month…. Oh, OK.

Look, this is one of those Mac-original software packages, you know, where it comes with the icon-based menu bars that can actually help aid you in figuring out what it’s supposed to do [as well as a small "definitions" bar that tells you what it is if you can't figure it out (Hey, Strata, make the definitions come up ALL the time not just when the option is available!!!)]. So why is that important? Well I know certain programs are coming over from that OTHER platform that are 3D and they still look like something off the mainframe with goofy interfaces. Listen, I’m busy and time is money, and when you get into 3D, it’s really like you’re getting married to the software you choose (ask my wife) because you spend a lot of time learning the intricacies and nuances of the software. So I ask you, do you want something where you can get a good idea of what’s going on by pictures, observation and logic, or would you rather spend your time trying to figure out what’s going on by telepathy and the >ahem< “logic” of the PC programmer? (You know, those guys that always want to argue with you about how great their platform is and that DOS is really the best system and everything else is crap.) Personally, I would prefer to spend my time making money than losing it trying to figure out what one of these guys meant, but hey, three button mice are nice and having spent time working on Alias/Wavefront, you can get the hang of it, just not as fast.

QuickDraw3D or Open GL the eternal question…

I can already hear some of you saying,” OK, so I get the idea, the tool bars have pretty pictures on them, is there any really good reason I should part with my hard-earned dollars?” Oh, true believers, I have not even scratched the surface! Let’s start with the work windows.

First, you get a choice of QuickDraw3D or Open GL. This is very cool, especially if you have a hardware acceleration card that supports Open GL, because that means speed (shorter redraw time)! You can choose to view your model as a pointcloud (just like it sounds, a cloud of points), outline (the model is viewed only as control points and the lines running between them), wireframe (shows all the polygon meshes in the object-think vector graphic like you see in the “Making of Jurassic Park” specials where they show the computer dudes working on the dinosaur models), flat (shaded with little squares), hidden line (wireframe, but only seeing the side toward you), or shaded (smooth, “plastic” surface).

The models (that is the 3D primitive shapes that are provided to you) can be converted into a Skin, Bezier Surface, Polygon Mesh, or Polygon Group. This may not seem like much, but utilizing the Skin and Bezier Surface models, I have been able to create 5.5 Million (yes, MILLION) polygon models and use only 475k of disk space storing it (a friend of mine who is a 3D Studio Max Guru said that his dual-processor Pentium would roll over and die trying to run a model that big on 3D Studio Max).

I should mention here that a really nice feature is the ability to import Illustrator files and convert them for extrusion (say, logos) or as guides (like a blue print when you’re building say, a ship).

Another great feature is texture preview, that is, if you have placed a texture map on a model, it appears on the model as a grey image and you can then adjust the position of the texture to the way you want it (this did take a little getting used to). While we’re on the subject of texture mapping, you get MIP! What’s that? Oh, sorry, that means Multiple Image Placement, which is the ability to place more than one texture on an object and have it show up on the object. MIP goes very well with another recent feature called “Stencil.” Simply put, Stencil is a cookie cutter for texture maps that allows you to see what’s underneath. For a more detailed understanding, I would recommend the article “Clearly Opaque” in Stratauser #1 <http://www.stratauser.com> – I would highly recommend getting all issues, past and present, because the info is absolutely 100% useful).

You get resources! Useful, cool, modifiable resources! Like Fountains! Fountains is that plug in that allows you to make water fountains, lava spewing out of a volcano, or machine gun shell casings ejecting out of a machine gun and bounce off boxes or whatever… What? Shell casings? Well, yeah, you see in THIS program, they thought you might have more ideas than just making pretty fountains of water so they gave you the ability to specify the shape that you are using so whatever shape you specify will be the objects that spew out of the fountain and with collision detection it will bounce off the objects around it rather than passing through them.

You get Lens Flare! I don’t think I need to go into a long treatise on this one, but needless to say, they give you incredible control on how you want it to look from the flash and glare color to how much chaos and opacity you want. You also get Aura which allows you to add a fuzzy soft “glow” to objects (say around a planet or a lightbulb).

Fog/Mist is another tool feature which again is a very cool atmospheric effect that can add a lot of mood to your renderings or animation.

And speaking of rendering and animation, Strata has one of the nicest sets of renderers to choose from. You have a choice of Open GL (renders pictures in one of the above-mentioned formats), Radiosity (really cool photorealistic renderings, especially when using several glass objects of different color, thickness, and texture), Raytracing (for accurate shadows and photorealistic renderings of objects), Scanline (fast, and a good way to see the model rendered without shadows and the glass effects), and custom (build your own from one of the above by varying the settings provided). These renderers have been very fast in my experience and are quite powerful. The only drawback that I found was in rendering animations, I would like to see them develop an every “nth” frame renderer so that I can sample animations by rendering every few frames rather than having to render the entire animation to look for bugs.

A quick list of some of the standard features that many packages have (including, of course, Strata Studio Pro) are:
Metaballs; Path Extrude; Boolean Union, Subtraction Intersect, and Cut; Skin/Unskin; Lathe; Extrude; Scale; Pen; and a selection of 2D and 3D primitives as well as Lights and Cameras.

Now the drawbacks, I would be amiss if I did not say that Strata Studio Pro is lacking in some way, and that way would be the limitations on import/export formats. Though they do have several formats available, the lowest common ones are 3Dmf and dxf which take a long time to output and can take up a huge chunk of drive space. BUT help is on the way, so tune in next month to see what I’ve found to temporarily help solve the problem for not only Strata Studio Pro, but other 3D software packages as well (no, it wasn’t human sacrifice!).

But wait! There’s more! (Heh, always wanted to say that.) Strata Studio Pro also ships with Power Module 1! “OK, what’s that?” I’m glad you asked, O inquisitive one. Power Module 1 is the first (they didn’t send me any others, so I’m not gonna tell you about those) in a series of plug-ins that Strata has developed to make our jobs easier and more profitable.

Power Module 1 consists of:

•Deformation Lattice – This gives you the ability to “squash and stretch” models so that you can make them animate more easily ( say, for example, a rubber ball bouncing; or as their book shows, a teapot hopping) without having to move points.

•Inverse Kinematics – This is that plug-in that allows you to build skeletons to make your models (people, birds, whatever) move realistically.

•Hair – We’re talking MAJOR time saver here! Whether it’s putting hair on a person you’ve made, or grass in the ground, this was a welcome sight to be able to develop a texture map to make thing hairy. This does, however increase rendering time.

•Fire and Smoke – OH YEAH! Let’s go burn down the city! No more animating semi-transparent metaballs to do smoke and no more modifying “glowing” primitives! Just point, click, and modify! (Well, maybe a little more complex than that, but you get the idea.)

•HotSpot – For that glowing eye “Wrath of God” look that you always want to use on late-paying clients.

•Pixie Dust – Tinkerbell has come ‘a callin’ and needs you to create some magic pixie dust for her deep space probe’s engines (she tells you Wendy wants to take a long vacation from Peter) and now you can help her do it before Wendy can find the door!

•Mirror – OH YEAH! Save Time? OH YEAH!! Make Life easier? OH YEAH!!!! build twice the model in half the time! Say a car, build half of it and then mirror the other half! It has definitely kept me from going insane!

“Y’know, that does sound like a good deal, but two things: 1) If I do get it, is there a really fast way to get up and running on it, and 2) I can’t afford it right now and was wondering if there was some other package that Strata produces that I could get to get my toes wet with?”

Those are excellent questions, and I’m glad you asked—
1) Stratauser has produced an excellent video called “Jump Start” for $29.95 + $4 S&H to help you speed up your learning curve. Also, Strata has a news group where you can post questions and receive answers from some of the best in the field.

2) Strata sent me a copy of StrataVision 3D 5.0, which is basically their previous version of Studio Pro with some features taken out. The price for this little baby is only $279.00 plus S&H, or you can get version 4.0 for free (well, you will have to pay S&H)!

Now, I’m sure that there is a good possibility that I may have missed a few things, so go to <http://www.strata3D.com> and download the demo version to mess around with. See you in a month (barring death, fire, or Tim killing me for making this review so long).

•Bill Perry • <billperry@pobox.com>