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Now in its thirteenth incarnation, Corel Graphics Suite seems confident enough to take on Adobe’s Creative Suite 2, armed with a stack of new functions and an attractive price. Its features are strong, but there’s obviously a desire not to tempt fate – the company decided against naming it CorelDraw 13.
Adobe hasn’t taken its foot off the pedal for AE’s seventh major release. High-end users working on digital intermediate (DI) and digital film projects will love the expanded colour space, with support for HDR 32-bit media.
Entry-level workstations are usually based around high-spec desktop chips: either Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 processors. The latest low-cost system from Scan, however, uses a single Opteron chip.
Liquid is like the gift in a lengthy game of pass-the-parcel. First it was developed by Fast, then purchased by Pinnacle. Now that the latter has in turn been consumed by Avid, Liquid is in its third pair of hands, but the music has stopped for the time being.
Kinemac is refreshingly simple to get to grips with. Anyone who has used a timeline-based program will instantly recognize the usual conventions. The interface is split into four main areas – the Stage, Sprite, Inspector, and Bezier windows...
Boujou was the first automatic matchmoving solution on the market back in 2001. However, it cost as much as a small hatchback, so it wasn’t within reach of most 3D artists and smaller studios. 2D3 released the cut-down version, Boujou Bullet, to address the affordability issue.
Version 5 of Carrara Pro fleshes out the 3D modelling, animation and rendering suite with a terrain generator, native support for Poser scenes, and improved modelling and material tools – making this a 3D suite that's worth looking at. However, we encountered some stability issues on Mac OS X.
Given that the last full version of Freeway was released six years ago, you can’t accuse Softpress of issuing upgrades on a whim. Freeway 4 is certainly a significant upgrade.
RealViz’s MatchMover Pro is one of the leading matchmoving programs, and version 4 has an all new engine called SMART. The manufacturer claims it’s between six and ten times as fast as the old engine.
Apple’s first dual-processor, dual-core (DDC) Mac workstation offers many architecture improvements over its predecessor, and delivers huge leaps in performance. The G5 Quad matches its DDC AMD Opteron-based PC rivals, and in many cases the Mac costs less. Dual-core Intel Xeons haven’t shipped yet.
An After Effects plug-in that creates charts and graphs is not the most creatively exciting effects tool you’ve ever seen, but the huge time savings that Data Animator offers over building graphs manually is a great bonus for corporate work.
It used to be the case that Macs looked great and PC workstation were ugly beige boxes. Now G5s look like air-con units and it’s left to PC makers to take the lead in case design.
The newly-released version 8 of Media Studio Pro adds features in an attempt to take on its old adversaries such as Premiere Pro, but it’s still happier with the needs of home users.
The recent news that Autodesk has agreed to buy Alias came as a shock to 3D users. Both companies have made assurances that in the foreseeable future no plans are afoot to kill or merge Max and Maya, but no-one knows what the companies will do long-term. Amid this confusion, Autodesk has released another upgrade to 3DS Max, bringing it to version 8.
"Laptop" and "notebook" are misleading words when it comes to describing the D900T-U. It’s too big and heavy to be whipped out at a moment’s notice – and it certainly gets too hot to put on your lap.
MotionBuilder's workflow is straightforward. You create the character model with bones in your normal application, export it as a FBX file, and open it in MotionBuilder. The application ships with a number of updated FBX plug-ins so you can transfer your work with ease. You then characterize the model – adding a structured template to it that MotionBuilder understands.
Stitcher 5 is a panorama assembly program that can blend multiple overlapping conventional photographs to produce a seamless ultra-wide image. It can work with anything from just two or three originals to ultra-wide panoramas up to seamless 360 degree views.
As SketchUp has matured and expanded its feature set, it has also widened its appeal to more general-purpose 3D work, though it’s still best suited to building hard mechanical objects such as buildings and machinery.
When Softimage|XSI was initially launched as a next-generation 3D animation program, it showed a lot of promise but fell short of the initial hype surrounding its advanced animation capabilities. XSI 5.0 is at last the “next generation” 3D suite Softimage has always promised, thanks to some very important advances.
This 2D-to-3D software is an updated and upgraded version of Canon’s Software Object Modeller. It was originally developed in the UK at Canon’s Research Centre.
