| Description: | Macromedia is preparing Extreme 3D, the successor to MacroModel. It should be shipping by the time you read this. Extreme 3D is a polygonal surface modeler that uses spline-based modeling and familiar 2D drawing tools to create its models (see screen 4). Although it's billed as CAD-accurate to 15 decimal places, the strength of Extreme 3D is really in organic modeling. The accuracy and drawing tools in Extreme 3D are serious competition for the other programs in this mini-roundup, but the program's interface in the Beta 3 version I reviewed seriously hampers it. An important consideration Macromedia developers had when designing Extreme 3D was its compatibility with the Macintosh version and Macromedia's other products. Thus, the product is a good choice for anyone who uses Director or Freehand or works in a mixed-platform environment. It uses an old Macintosh interface that has trouble adapting to the 1024 x 768 or higher-resolution displays most designers use for their graphics. Dialogs and the status bars use a painfully small proprietary screen font, and important commands are buried beneath several menus. These commands are available via hot keys, but some of the key combinations, such as Ctrl+Z for undo, come from the Mac background and not from Windows. The developers are aware of these problems and promised to try and 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 to display as a bounding-box or a wire-frame for improved display speed while you work on other objects in shaded mode. The animation tools are easy to use and allow you to have independent control over any object, light, camera, or material property. Users can edit all the paths and objects in their animations. For example, paths can be edited as splines. The program also supports time-based and frame-based animation, as well as cross-platform distributed rendering. This means that an animation can be rendered across multiple machines in 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 and will 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, Extreme 3D will be a strong competitor. For instance, CorelDream and TriSpectives allow users to click on an object and bring up an editable properties dialog where users can scale, move, rotate, stretch, and otherwise modify the object. Extreme 3D allows some of this in a properties box you can access with a hot key, but the other two programs offer more control. All three programs offer tree-structured hierarchical views of the objects, lights, and cameras in a project, but CorelDream and TriSpectives let you edit the objects directly from the tree. |