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When Painter 8 appeared, it was hailed as the breakthrough version that finally transformed Painter’s ghastly interface into something usable. The changes in Painter IX are less dramatic, but it’s still a good upgrade. Corel has put a great deal of effort into the documentation, help, and tutorials.
This drawing and illustration application has been in a crisis of identity recently. In the last couple of years it’s been called eveything from Corel Xara to Webster. This upgrade bears the name Xara X1.
For the creation of 3D vector animation and 3D Flash movies, Swift 3D, is one of the most successful tools on the market. This is largely thanks to its ease-of-use. It allows 2D designers to draw shapes using bézier curves, and then using the extrusion tool to add both depth and bevels, or the Lathe Editor to convert paths into radial 3D surfaces.
If you’re looking to invest in a top-flight 3D animation system, there are a few big players to look at – and Softimage|XSI would be included in the list. The reasons for choosing one 3D package over another are many and varied, and the top contenders all have their strengths and weaknesses. Feature lists don’t tell the whole story, and high-end 3D applications all have similar features ...
Flash is used mainly for creating vector animations, but recent upgrades have put increasing emphasis on its ability to use video content within SWF files. With the arrival of Flash MX, Macromedia introduced a new ‘flash video’ format (FLV) specifically for that purpose. Flash video hasn’t taken off in a big way as yet, but Flix Pro could be the program that helps to popularize the format.
For 2,000 years, mathematicians and scientists have been searching for a ‘super formula’, a single algorithm that can be used to describe any shape that can occur in nature. So, what did Johan Gielis do when he discovered this super formula during his botanical research? He turned it into an Illustrator plug-in, of course.
Studio Artist isn’t well known in the UK, but it’s an impressive piece of graphics software. The developers, Synthetik Software, refer to it as a ‘graphics synthesizer’, making comparisons with the way that music synthesizers work. But for people with a design background, it’s probably better to compare it to the artistic cloning tools in graphics programs like Painter.
The relative success of CorelDraw upgrades is inconsistent to say the least. CorelDraw was already at version 3 before anyone took any notice; version 4 was astonishing; version 8 was a blinder; version 10 was the dog’s bollocks. All the intermediate releases, however, have come across as fillers, as if they were produced by contractual obligation. This is how version 12 feels too.
PitStop Professional is a surprisingly versatile utility that helps the accurate professional printing of PDF documents. It's a combination of manual-editing tools with a comprehensive preflight checker, automatic fixing abilities, and Enfocus’ Certified PDF Technology for embedding file history and restoration metadata.
Mirage offers the widest and most creative paint-based toolset for compositors and animators available.
The TAB is a curious little animation tool from the maker of Toonz – the previously Softimage-affiliated product that was used in the making of Spirited Away.
Liquid Edition finally brings together Pinnacle’s prosumer and broadcast DV editing tools into a single application.
We’ve all been there. There’s an image that you absolutely, positively must use in a Quark document, but the client’s sent you a 300-pixel-wide Web ...
Premiere is back from the brink. Just when it looked like the video-editing product should be put out of its misery, it has been given ...
For many editors, compositing tools such as After Effects are a largely unknown area – too complicated to create all but the most basic motion ...
Edius’s main strength is its interface. Canopus has obviously put a lot of thought into its brand-new NLE, as it’s exceedingly efficient to use. All ...
For graphics artists fattened on a diet of Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand, the lure of ACD Systems’ Canvas has most likely passed you by ...
Most 3D programs these days are all-singing, all-dancing, modelling/animation/rendering applications. It’s rare to find one that concentrates on a certain aspect of 3D production, such ...
Final Cut Pro has come a hell of a long way since its launch in April 1999. Arriving shortly after Apple’s iMac-driven resurgence, the NLE ...
Paint Shop Pro has grown into what is probably the most versatile photo-editing and general-purpose paint package you can buy on the Windows platform. The ...
