Strata 3Dpro v3.7 contains a surprisingly vast selection of pre-defined procedural textures.

Strata gives you the capability to use use Ambient, Specular color, Bump, Reflection, Environment, Stencils, Caustic maps to define your surface textures. Textures can be animated, either by changing their parameters over time, or by using an animated texture map such as AVI, or QuickTime. You also have the ability to blend and layer multiple textures, and use alpha stencils. With all these tools at your disposal, you have the capability to reproduce any real-world, or imagined texture to suit any conceivable project requirement.

Directional global lighting, Non-Directional point lights, and spot lights are the types of lighting at your control. In addition to the expected editable characteristics of intensity, color, position, and direction, Strata also provides a dizzying array of lighting F/X, and GELS. The FX options (see right panel) allow you to apply lens filters or atmospheric effects such as fog or mist to the light point.

Strata 3DPro contains very capable, and versatile renderers. You can render in all the OpenGL Modes, Raytrace, Renderosity, or Scanline. With Raytrace and Raydiosity you can choose between Draft, Quick, Good, or Best modes. Also selectable is texture detail levels from Coarse, Medium, Normal or Fine. Oversampling rates, Transparency recursion, Shadow, and Refection controls round out the rendering options. I found the rendering in both Raytrace, and Raydiosity to be very fast.

Everything in Strata can be animated. This includes 3D objects, cameras, lights, textures, backgrounds, and effects. Objects can be animated in terms of position, rotation, scale, and geometry. Animation is controlled by adding Event Markers (Keyframes) onto the familiar animation timeline and modifying the objects properties at each event time. Fine tuning of the movements between event markers is easily accomplished by modifying the velocity curves using IN and OUT slider on the Event Options PopUp. Animation along paths is accomplished by following 5 different path types - Bezier, TCB, Natural, Linear, and Spline. The TCB controls allow realistic simulations based on inertia, mass, and collisions.

Strata 3Dpro's animations can be exported to Flash for use on the web using Electric Rain's RAViX2 technology. The conversion of my few simple test animations worked as advertised, and produced some very efficient SWF files. The conversion of a 20 second animation of 2 objects moving, twisting and turning took only about a minute to produce the 44K Flash file. I was quite jazzed by this capability and will surely find some cool uses for it in my future web development projects.

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Strata 3DPro is an excellent, all-round 3D modeling, rendering, and animation program. With built in Flash conversion Strata will appeal to webmasters looking add 3D content to their web sites. I found the learning curve to be quite a bit easier than many other comparable packages I've used over the years. With a SRP of $895.00 (Academic: $499.00) for Strata 3Dpro v3.7, and $295.00 ( Academic: $199.00 ) for Strata 3Dplus v3.7 RME, Strata offers an excellent value. To get a taste of Strata, download the FREE Strata 3Dpro v. 3.7 DEMO at http://shop.strata.com/Product.cfm?Product=83