32-Bit 3D Graphics Software for NT

NT Goes Head-to-Head with High-End Graphics Workstations

As Windows NT Server charges into the server and enterprise computingmarket, Windows NT Workstation is quietly becoming a major force in computergraphics. The release of Windows 95 has given rise to a crop of inexpensive andaccessible 32-bit 3D graphics programs. Until now, these same features requiredhigh-end workstations and expensive, proprietary software.

3D modeling, rendering, and animation place tough demands on hardware andoperating systems, and the memory requirements and complexity of this class ofsoftware can easily cause system crashes. Windows NT has become the idealplatform for many graphics professionals because of its stability, memorymanagement, and multithreading capabilities, as well as its low cost andversatility. You can render images and animation in the background of your NTWorkstation while you work with other graphics in the foreground.

Before NT, all but the most high-end workstations could be tied up forhours while you tried to render a single image. The straightforward networkingcapabilities of NT help with distributed rendering, meaning you can farm out ananimation to a number of workstations and each one can produce different frames.

These new programs bring workstation capabilities to the average user andpower and flexibility to experienced designers. In some cases, you can evenperform modeling, rendering, and animation in a single view.

Any one of these programs is suitable for product design, architecturalvisualization, illustration, and short animation, and street prices are between$200 and $500. I tested these programs on a 133-MHz Pentium system with 32MB ofRAM and a 2MB video card, minimum requirements for this type of work. Althoughall the programs will run on a 486, they showed some strain even on the Pentiumwith 3MB or 4MB projects. With the exception of Visual Reality, these programsonly run on Intel platforms.

TriSpectives
3D/Eye's TriSpectives is a solid modeler. It is based on the ACIS engine, anew 3D file interchange standard developed by Spatial Technology, which makesTriSpectives an attractive addition to computer-aided design/manufacturing(CAD/CAM), scientific visualization, and games development. This standard allowsyou to retain your models' spatial and physical property information while youexchange them between programs.

The tutorials offer a good introduction to the modeling and placement toolsyou use to build accurate models. TriSpectives has two metaphors for theworkspace: Scene and Page (see screen 1). Scene is a 3D workspace where youbuild and render models and create animation. Page is a 2D view into a 3D world,where you arrange models to create illustrations.

You can store your objects, textures, and animation movements in "catalogs"and drag and drop them into a Scene. Users can even build their own catalogs sothat they can use elements in other projects. TriSpectives uses IntelliShapes,which are basic geometric objects that have innate "knowledge" ofgravity and position. This knowledge makes it easy to use them as buildingblocks for complex models. You can set anchors on objects to determine wherethey align with or link to other objects. You can then modify or combine theshapes with Boolean operations and Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS), whichare curves with greater control and complexity than Bezier curves. You can alsomodify the shapes by changing values in the property sheet, by dragging parts ofthe model, or by using 2D drawing tools. You can drag and drop textures onobjects or on individual surfaces, and you can drop animation on individualobjects or on the entire Scene.

Two nice features of TriSpectives are its abilities to bevel an object'sedges from the property sheet and to hollow out, or "shell," an objectto give it an inner and outer wall. You can add Smart Dimensions for preciseplacement of objects, but you are limited to technical drawings with thesedimensions because font, letter size, and arrow types are not configurableexcept by editing the Registry.

You do all your work in a 3D window, which you can split if you want tolook at more than one window at a time. Actually, split windows are essentialbecause you can't save camera angles or views. Once you zoom, pan, or roll theview, you need to manually enter its coordinates or play with the view tools ifyou want to return to it.

You can create multiple scenes, but you have to individually populate eachone with the objects. You can also use TriSpectives in a 3D Page mode to createa page layout with 2D and 3D elements. This is useful if you want to produceillustrations and brochures.

TriSpectives will import and export Virtual Reality Modeling Language(VRML) files, the new virtual-reality 3D format for the World Wide Web. You caneven configure the program with Netscape to act as a VRML viewer. TriSpectivesis Microsoft Office-compatible: This means you can embed data from any Officeapplication in the program, and you can embed TriSpectives data in any Officeapplication.

TriSpectives can quickly generate final output renderings. However, settingup a final rendering is confusing because the dialog for defining output sizeand resolution doesn't appear until after you choose File/Export Image and namethe output file. Other programs let you set the parameters first.

I found the program's initial performance painfully slow. I called thecompany's technical support and they told me to change the Registry setting forHKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/3DEYE/TriSpectives 1.0/Raster/DeviceRaster Type from5 to 6. Although technical-support representatives are helpful andknowledgeable, you are billed on a per-incident basis after the first free call.You can find free support and a 30-day trial CD-ROM on the 3D/Eye Web site. Thetrial product is free, but you will need to pay shipping and handling.

Visual Reality
Remember those times you've opened a new software package and discoveredthat the program was so huge it required seven floppy disks? Well, VisualReality 2.0 ships with seven CDs. The first one contains the program,and the other six contain 2.5GB of models, textures, animation, video clips, andcomplete projects.

Visual Reality includes a number of separate applications. The core isRenderize (see screen 2), which was the strongest rendering product I reviewed.Other modules are Visual Model, Visual Image, and Visual Font. Visual Realityhas a long pedigree of NT development, and you can see the results in theprogram's speed and output quality. Even though it's not a ray tracer, VisualReality produces more realistic renderings than do the other packages.

The Visual Reality interface is unusual, to say the least. At first it seemsconfusing, but excellent tutorials walk you through every nook and cranny of theprogram. You'll be able to produce beautiful images after you complete them. Thekeys to using the interface are three "wells," called View, Move, andEdit. You can drop objects, views, lights, materials, and animation into thewells, which will then bring up the modification options. With a littlepractice, the system becomes very efficient. Users can control every aspect of arendering, ranging from how an image is wrapped around an object (mapping), tothe transparency and reflectivity of a surface, to the degree of fog in the airand the density of the shadows. You can export your projects to VRML if all thetextures are .GIF or .JPG images.

The program offers alpha-channel masks for converting your 2D images into 3Dobjects. For example, if you have a photo of a tree against a solid bluebackground, you can make the blue transparent by setting blue as the alphachannel. The leaves and branches will cast accurate shadows, and you have giventhe tree the illusion of being 3D by setting the bump depth. You can createelaborate, detailed renderings from simple models with this technique and canpopulate them with realistic people, animals, and plants.

You've probably heard the adage: "A chain is only as strong as itsweakest link." Well, Visual Model is the weak link in the package. Althoughit's a competent and precise module, all the basic tools and some unusualfeatures (including the surface-deformation tools in the Munge menu) make itconfusing. Even experienced designers will need to keep the manual close athand.

All the packages I reviewed allow you to extrude text into 3D forms, butVisual Font is by far the most sophisticated (see screen 3). The well-designedinterface lets you instantly preview extrusions, bevels, offsets, and otherdeformations. You can fit the text to a path and export it directly intoRenderize. You can return to Visual Font and edit the text as long as yourRenderize session is open. Visual Font comes with eight predefined bevels, whichyou can invert and stretch. The information on bevels is stored in an ASCII textfile so it's available for user customization.

The animation features in Visual Reality 2.0 are vastly improved from theprevious version. Users can move any object, camera, light, or textureindividually or as linked items. You can assign separate texture and bump mapsto an object and animate them separately. For example, you can use one image asa texture map on water for the color and pattern while you use another as thebump map to create the waves. For some spectacular animation, users can set thetexture map to undulate slightly while the bump map moves diagonally. The manualis thorough, and Visual Software offers free telephone technical support if youdo run into problems.

Extreme 3D
Macromedia is preparing Extreme 3D, the successor to MacroModel. It shouldbe shipping by the time you read this. Extreme 3D is a polygonal surface modelerthat uses spline-based modeling and familiar 2D drawing tools to create itsmodels (see screen 4). Although it's billed as CAD-accurate to 15 decimalplaces, the strength of Extreme 3D is really in organic modeling. The accuracyand drawing tools in Extreme 3D are serious competition for the other programsin this mini-roundup, but the program's interface in the Beta 3 version Ireviewed seriously hampers it.

An important consideration Macromedia developers had when designing Extreme3D was its compatibility with the Macintosh version and Macromedia's otherproducts. Thus, the product is a good choice for anyone who uses Director orFreehand or works in a mixed-platform environment. It uses an old Macintoshinterface that has trouble adapting to the 1024 x 768 or higher-resolutiondisplays most designers use for their graphics. Dialogs and the status bars usea painfully small proprietary screen font, and important commands are buriedbeneath several menus. These commands are available via hot keys, but some ofthe key combinations, such as Ctrl+Z for undo, come from the Mac background andnot from Windows. The developers are aware of these problems and promised to tryand address some of them in time for the final release.

A single window can support multiple render styles for different objects.This means that once you've set the textures for an object, you can switch it todisplay as a bounding-box or a wire-frame for improved display speed while youwork on other objects in shaded mode. The animation tools are easy to use andallow you to have independent control over any object, light, camera, ormaterial property. Users can edit all the paths and objects in their animations.For example, paths can be edited as splines. The program also supportstime-based and frame-based animation, as well as cross-platform distributedrendering. This means that an animation can be rendered across multiple machinesin a network, including the Mac and Windows. Extreme 3D uses the same "score"as Macromedia Director to control the time and frame aspects of an animation andwill produce high-resolution images, up to 8000 x 8000, for output to print.

If developers bring the interface up to the usability level of CorelDream(see the sidebar "3D by Corel" on page 87) and TriSpectives, Extreme3D will be a strong competitor. For instance, CorelDream and TriSpectives allowusers to click on an object and bring up an editable properties dialog whereusers can scale, move, rotate, stretch, and otherwise modify the object. Extreme3D allows some of this in a properties box you can access with a hot key, butthe other two programs offer more control. All three programs offertree-structured hierarchical views of the objects, lights, and cameras in aproject, but CorelDream and TriSpectives let you edit the objects directly fromthe tree.

Challengers
There are other 3D products that are ready to challenge these four. RayDream did not sit still after letting Corel have the core of its Designer 3.0.The company has just shipped its latest offering, Ray Dream Studio 4.0. Theproduct is designed around the Windows 95 user interface and features asimplified command structure, improved camera and light manipulations, and avariety of wizards. The wizards include a Modeling Wizard and a Scene Wizard,which are used to create indoor, outdoor, and studio scenes ready for theplacement of objects. Studio incorporates Ray Dream Animator and featureshigh-end tools such as rotoscoping and inverse kinematics. With rotoscoping, youcan use movie clips as texture maps or backgrounds to create sophisticatedanimations. Inverse kinematics is a method of linking objects so that pulling onone will pull another. For example, if you pull a dog's leash, its head willturn toward you and it will dig its feet into the ground to resist you.

TrueSpace 2.0 from Caligari is a well-designed and well-rounded product. Itincludes Boolean capabilities, rotoscoping, procedural textures, Adobe Photoshopplug-in support, and interactive rendering with Intel's 3DR applicationprogramming interface (API). It has excellent surface deformation tools, andnavigating the 3D workspace is easy. Similar to TriSpectives, TrueSpace 2.0 willproduce VRML files. Its unusual interface is almost entirely based on icons, thesheer number of which can cause problems if you're trying to use the program ona high-resolution display. This 16-bit application requires a fast machine fordesigners who want to use it under NT. The company is also working on a Windows95 version of TrueSpace 2.0. Unfortunately, Intel is steering away fromdevelopment of 3DR in favor of Microsoft's Reality Lab/Direct 3D, and this couldleave Caligari in the lurch.

Real 3D Version 3 from Realsoft International is a 32-bit that program thatincludes extensive modeling, animation, and rendering features, including splinemodeling, rotoscoping, collision deformation, and inverse kinematics. You candraw a spline on an uneven surface and build a new object from it whileconforming to the initial surface.

New Horizons for NT
Each of these programs has its strengths and its weaknesses. TriSpectives isbest at quickly creating accurate and complex models, is well-suited forengineering and architectural visualization, and can quickly output rendering.Visual Reality is best suited for creating stunning renderings and animationsfrom its 3D clip art and images or from models you create in other programs. Theoutput it generates will rival that of any product available on any platform. Acombination of Visual Reality for rendering, and any of the others for modeling,will bring excellent results.

Windows NT is taking over where the Commodore Amiga left off and goinghead-to-head with the high-end graphics workstations. A $4000 computer canproduce the same graphics you used to output on a $30,000 workstation just ayear or two ago.