Until recently, only expensive and difÞcult-to-learn graphics programs gave artists the ability to build three-dimensional objects. Microspot USA, a small company out of Saratoga, California, is changing that with a 3-D modeling program that is simple, agile, and cheap.
3D World is faster than massive high-end programs, hundreds of dollars cheaper, and wa-a-ay easier to use. Even I, a marginally talented 3-D artist, could create a beautiful goblet (well, almost beautiful) in a few minutes, drag on a satiny texture, and tip and turn it to watch the shadows slide down the inside and across the bottom. With more expensive packages, this took hours. Artists, amateur designers, and desktop publishers unwilling to climb the learning curve of more complex programs will love this one.
3D World comes with a set of primitive shapes and a lathe for quickly turning out symmetrical objects, from pie plates to models of human DNA. It doesn't have a thousand settings for shading, texture mapping, inÞnite lighting, or tweaking complex Bezier curves (but it does pretty good curves just the same). Those things take up memory and CPU cycles, even on a Power PC. Textures in 3D World can be imported from any PICT image, desktop pattern, or background texture you have lying around just drag them onto the object and they wrap around it. An included lighting director plug-in lets you click where you want the spotlight to shine. You can add text, sounds, even URLs. With Net addresses, just click on the object and your browser will take you there.
3D World makes all this happen so quickly and painlessly because it's one of the few consumer 3-D graphics programs based on QuickDraw 3D, Apple's Power Mac system extension for creating, viewing, and manipulating objects in three dimensions. Rendering is real time no waiting required. If you have an Apple QuickDraw 3D accelerator card, it even happens full screen. 3D World runs a bit chunky on slower machines without accelerator cards.
Send in your registration for plug-ins, including a fractal mountain generator, a bomb (that blows up your work), and random color.
Playing with 3D World is almost as good as being with Homer Simpson when he was sucked "into that hypothetical third dimension" and dropped into an erotic bakery.
3D World for Power PC Macintosh: US$139. Microspot USA Inc.: (800) 622 7568, +1 (408) 253 2000, fax +1 (408) 253 2055, email microspot1@aol.com, on the Web at microspot.inter.net/microspot/.
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