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Product: 3D vector graphics animation

Developer: Electric Rain

Minimum Requirements: 400MHz PowerMac, Mac OS X v10.2, 128MB RAM, 25MB available disk space, 1024x768 monitor resolution

Retail Price: $189.00, $99.00 upgrade

Availability: Out now

Over the years, I've written so many reviews of graphics programs and extensions designed to supplement other programs and technologies that most of them all blend together to me now. I look book at my past reviews and sometimes have to take a moment to recall what certain programs were even supposed to do. Justifiably or not, some have disappeared, some have been bought up by bigger companies, and some are still trudging away, attempting to find their audience.

Such is not the case with Swift 3D. What I originally felt was simply a decent thing to have around when working in Flash, it has now progressed to the point where I wouldn't want to do any Flash work without it. To me, that would be like working in Photoshop without having access to the Unsharp Mask tool.

Swift 3D, for those who haven't yet experienced it, is a 3D vector graphics animation tool developed for graphic artists and designers who primarily never stray from their 2D world. The majority of these people are going to be Macromedia Flash users, of course, but they aren't restricted to that.

As with the upgrade before it, the jump from v3 to v4 focuses mainly on the feature set. The difference here is that the v2 to v3 upgrade mostly brought it tools that should've been there from the start: transparency, reflectivity, multiple shadows, etc. The v4 upgrade brings about much more powerful features, such as an advanced 3D modeling environment, bezier path animation controls, hierarchy control over cameras and lights, and a ton of new gallery tools and features. Swift 3D has hit the big time.

The trick, of course, is that once the Swift 3D file hits Flash, it's no longer a true 3D image (Flash has no 3D capabilities built in, after all). That's part of what helps your Swift 3D images perform so well in Flash. The trouble has been that, in the past, these files didn't perform very well in Swift 3D itself. Rendering could take quite a long time on slower systems. Has that problem been fixed here? To be honest, I don't know...we no longer have a 400MHz G4 on which we can test it. If your system is around that speed, be wary of performance problems (although it deserves to be mentioned that a hardware acceleration option is now available to increase rendering speed). If your hardware has caught up with the software technology, however, you should experience no problems. Swift 3D v4 performed wonderfully on our 1GHz G4 test system.

One of the great new features of Swift 3D v4 is the Advanced Modeler, which supplements the standard lathe and extrusion tools that allow you to turn two-dimensional objects into complex three-dimensional objects. The Advanced Modeler allows you to directly alter your mesh by simply clicking and dragging (a great animated sample of this can be seen at the Electric Rain website.

Swift 3D's drawing tools are quite handy and easy to learn, but they're not your only option. 2D images can be imported from Adobe Illustrator or EPS formats, while 3D images can be imported from 3DS or DXF formats.

The animation tools are as great as ever, providing a powerful "tweening" feature that makes simple animations quick and relatively easy. Where it really gets helpful, though, is in the fact that you get separate timelines in the extrusion and lathe editors, allowing you to separately control individual aspects of your animation. This provides greater fluidity and more realistic behaviors. A lot of this may be beyond the needs of many Flash animators, but it's not beyond their capabilities as it's fairly simple to do.

The people at Electric Rain know that not everyone wants to tinker with tools, though, so they've included some great samples in their various galleries. Professionally designed lighting schemes, models, shapes, animations, bevels and more are a simple drag and drop away, so it's possible to create fantastic 3D animations without actually drawing anything. Drawing not a problem? Swift 3D has excellent animation and lighting effects ready to go to bring that drawing to life. Any of these, whether created by you or provided by swift, can be saved to custom galleries for easy retrieval in future products.

When you're done with your animation, Swift 3D v4 gives you a variety of output options. Aside from exporting as an optimized Flash file (.swf), Swift documents can be exported to JPG, TGA, BMP, PNG and TIF file formats at up to 3200 x 3200 pixels. Although I'd like to see MOV added to that list, it's probably an unreasonable request (and Flash files can be converted to QuickTime movies with third party programs, anyway).

I do want to mention the manual again. All of these features, new and old, are well documented and explained in a by-god printed manual that's actually entertaining to read. It's not written from the point of view of some for-hire tech writer sitting all alone in the bowels of an office building, but with the joy of a developer explaining it at an expo. I've mentioned that Swift 3D is fairly simple to figure out (assuming a working knowledge of Flash or another animation tool), and this is mainly because of the great documentation. The online tutorials are helpful, too.

I could talk about Swift 3D's new features and capabilities for a few more paragraphs, but actual examples will more effectively tell the story. You can see a full gallery of them here, so browse through and see if these are the results you'd like to achieve. If so, you can download a trial version that won't allow you to save your work, but is otherwise fully functional. The Swift 3D Xpress Flash MX 2004 plug-in is now also available for the Macintosh, providing 3D capabilities from directly within the Flash environment ($129).

Again, there are a lot of tools available out there that claim to enhance the capabilities of Flash MX. Some of them actually do. I can't claim that Swift 3D is the best of these, as I haven't used them all, but it's certainly the most useful and well designed of those I've tried. Give it a try now and see what Flash MX has been missing.