Swift 3D V2 is a standalone application that lets you create vector-based animation in Shockwave Flash and other vector formats. These low-bandwidth presentations are accessible to almost all browsers, and can have greater impact than a simple GIF animation. While not the fullest-featured 3D app around, Swift 3D provides a respectable complement of modeling, surfacing, and animation tools that are easy to learn and simple to use.

The Scene Editor

The program consists of four modules or editors: Scene, Extrusion, Lathe, and Preview/Export. Most of the work is done in the Scene Editor (see Figure 1), which consists mainly of one or two resizable windows into the 3D workspace. You can set these to show any combination of front, back, top, bottom, left, right, and perspective views. Display options are shaded, fast-shaded, outline (wireframe), and bounding box, and you can set window dimensions in pixels, inches, or centimeters.

For basic modeling, a versatile array of 3D primitives is available from an icon-based toolbar: sphere, box, pyramid, cone, torus, plane, polyhedron, and text. Clicking a primitive's button adds it to the workspace, after which you can set various properties from a panel on the side. For instance, with the polyhedron, you can specify the family-tetrahedron, cube/octahedron, dodecahedron/icosahedron, and two types of stars-as well as P and Q settings, which determine the number of faces and vertices. With text, you can specify the font and justification, and a convenient drop-down list lets you choose special characters with the mouse.

Once you have objects in the workspace, you can move them around parallel to the view plane by dragging them in a window. If you drag in an empty space, you move the view instead, and right-button dragging zooms the view or moves an object perpendicular to the view, depending on where you click. A large trackball below the viewports lets you rotate objects or the view; nearby buttons let you lock the rotation axis and reset object position and orientation. One powerful new feature in V2 lets you position an object's pivot independently, so the object doesn't necessarily rotate about its center.

You can scale objects uniformly interactively, or non-uniformly with numeric settings. The scale properties remember the different amounts of scaling, and multiple undos are available for all operations. You can also group objects, and manipulate group members independently without ungrouping.

Lights and Cameras

Swift 3D offers two different lighting paradigms; one senses committee-based decision-making at work here. Fortunately, each can be used by itself, or in combination with the other. You can add free or targeted point lights and spot lights from the toolbar; these are visible in the viewports, and can be manipulated like other object. Alternatively, a second trackball lets you shine distant light sources from any angle. Its usage, like most controls in Swift 3D, is fairly intuitive. The lighting buttons let you add point lights and spot lights, and delete lights. Lights don't have an intensity setting; instead, you control a light's brightness by its color. Additional options for spot lights let you overall angle, hotspot angle, and how quickly the illumination falls off between the two.

You can also add free cameras and targeted cameras, which are visible and manipulable in the viewports. You can pan a camera by moving it in a viewport; if it's not visible, a handy toolbar Camera Pan toolbar performs the same function (but you can't select objects while it's in effect).

More Modeling Options

For those whose modeling needs go further than combining primitives, Swift 3D offers a number of options. You can import 3D objects in DXF and 3DS formats; the latter format can come in only when you use the New From 3DS command. You can also bring in 2D shapes in AI and EPS formats, with the option to retain or discard fills from the original files. Be sure to save artwork in version 8 format or earlier; Swift 3D doesn't recognize the version 9 formats.

When you import 2D artwork, it appears in both the Scene and Extrusion editors (see Figure 2). Alternatively, you can draw and edit shapes with the latter's fairly rudimentary tools. Essentially, you click to place points, each of which can be corner, smooth (linked Bezier handles), or tangent (independent Bezier handles). The editor also lets you add points anywhere on an existing edge, move points, and change a point's type. If you press and hold the Shift key after you start moving a point, you create temporary vertical and horizontal snap axes emanating from the point's location; or press Shift before you click to use the last point's snap axes. The latter is handy for aligning vertices.

After creating a shape, to extrude it, you simply return to the Scene editor. Here you can set the extrude depth (and overall size) as well as square edges, or various types of bevels: standard, outer or inner round, or stepped. You can also set the bevel depth, whether it appears on front or back faces or both, and the smoothness and mesh quality. If you nest shapes in the Extrusion editor, you can create cutouts.

The Lathe editor works almost identically, except that shapes are lathed around the central axis rather than extruded. Settings include sweep angle (you can't cap the ends), the number of radial segments, and a radial smoothing option. You can't save shapes independently or even copy and paste them between the two shape editors, but they are saved with the scene.

Materials and Animation

Back in the Scene editor, you can apply materials to objects by dragging them from a palette of presets, categorized as Blue Colors, Green Colors, Glossy Colors, etc. Typically a material colors the entire object, with one exception: You can apply three different colors to an extruded object's front, side, and bevel. You can edit materials, setting ambient, diffuse, and highlight colors, as well as highlight size and switches for self-illumination and two-sided. Texture maps aren't supported, which really isn't a problem; they're not appropriate for vector animation.

A second palette provides a selection of drag-and-drop animation behaviors, mostly of the rotation variety. These are nice in that they're set to end in more or less the same orientation as they begin, so that animations can repeat seamlessly. For more elaborate animation, you can use Swift 3D's relatively painless keyframe-timeline method. The only quibble I have with Swift 3D's implementation is that the timeline shows all of the selected object's properties, whether they can be animated or not. For example, you can't animate an extruded/text object's bevel, even though it appears in the animation editor.

On the plus side are more advanced features such as the ability to copy and paste keyframes and to animate materials. And real mavens can take advantage of the animation editor's ability to set three keyframe properties: tension, continuity, and bias.

Rendering

When it comes time to see the final result, you switch to the Preview and Export Editor (Figure 3), where the entire animation is available as a scrolling filmstrip in which you can select one or more frames. You can render a single frame, all selected frames, or the entire animation, and export in one of four formats: Flash, EPS, AI, or SVG. The seven available fill options, of which the choice applies to all objects, range from Cartoon Single Color Fill to Mesh Gradient Shading; the more elaborate the shading, the larger the output file. You can also choose to render outlines or wireframes, in which case you can set line weight and several other options.

As I noted previously, in my review of the Swift 3D Max plug-in, the renderer performs shading on a per-polygon basis, so if your objects are low poly, you can get some jagged edges between shading areas with certain fill options. Also, if you render with outlines, you get lines between all shading areas, not just on the outside edges. The RAViX renderer still isn't the fastest around, although for most purposes it's fine.

Conclusion

The informative manual comes in two electronic formats, both available from the Help menu: as a PDF file, suitable for printing, and as compiled HTML, which is better for finding a particular topic. If you buy the boxed version, you also get a printed, spiral-bound manual. I could do without the author's cutesy writing style ("Hi, my name is Nick"), but some might find it amusing.

At $159, Swift 3D represents an excellent value for those who want to create simple, Flash-format 3D animations for the Web. If you use 3ds max, LightWave 3D, or Softimage, get the respective Swift 3D plug-in instead. Ironically, the plug-ins are more expensive ($295 each for the first two, $450 for the forthcoming Softimage version), but the fact that you can use any of those programs' far more powerful modeling and animation tools makes them well worth it. Otherwise, stick with the Swift 3D app's low cost and ease of use, and you won't go wrong.

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