Electric Rain Swift 3D 4.0
| QuickInfo |
Swift 3D Version 4.0
3D Animation for the WebRequirements:
N/A
Rating:
 
Pros:
- Easy to Model Complex Objects
- Easy to Animate Objects
- Texturing
- Output quality
- Amazing ability to output vector content to Flash
Cons:
- No Booleans
- Simple Procedural Material Editor
- Would be nice to have ability copy object properties
- You'll spend all your time playing with Swift 3D instead of
designing Web sites!
Swift 3D Web Site |
Note:
This review uses terminology that may not be familiar to all of you.
Hover over any green text to see a definition.
Years ago, a new animation tool appeared on the scene. Not long after
that, Gabo Mendoza made waves through the entire Web development community with
his mastery of this tool. The tool was called Flash, and Gabo Mendoza's
site was www.gabocorp.com.
You might remember it from way back when, and it's still one of the most
impressive Flash sites on the Internet.
Flash is cool because it relies on vector graphics to perform its magic.
You can scale a Flash animation to any size you want and the
quality of the movie doesn't change. That's because vector graphics are
composed of mathematical algorithms that calculate the position of points that
comprise the image. Because it's all mathematical, it is quite efficient
to scale vector images to any size.
The other type of graphic you see on the Internet (and the most common type
of graphic) is the raster graphic. Raster graphics are made up of pixels,
small dots that are a specific color. Raster images don't resize well
because when they are resized, the computer either has to throw data away (in
the case of downsizing) or it has to extrapolate pixel data where none really
exists (in the case of upsizing.) The result is either a blurry image or a
pixilated image; the jaggies.
Vector graphics, for the most part, look 2-dimensional. That's because
in order to make vector images look 3-dimensional, you have to rely on
gradients,
and gradients don't always allow for impressive 3D effects. Enter Swift
3D.
Swift 3D is a 3D design tool. If you are familiar with 3D modeling
applications, Swift 3D will feel familiar to you. If you aren't, Swift 3D
will have a little bit of a learning curve, but it's designed to be easy for
anyone to use, and it delivers in a big way in that regard.
|