3D For the Rest of Us: Part 2

By David Em

June 5, 2006

(3D For the Rest of Us: Part 2 :  Page 1 of 1 )

In my last column, I took a look at how Adobe's gearing up to make the electronic distribution of interactive 3D content commonplace with its new $995 Acrobat 3D software. This week I'll discuss how New Zealand's Right Hemisphere is taking Acrobat 3D to the next level.

Going Deep

The core of Right Hemisphere's contribution to Acrobat 3D is their Deep Exploration 4 software, which Adobe has bundled and rebranded within Acrobat 3D as 3D Toolkit. Deep Exploration is a 3D asset management, authoring, and publishing program. It comes two flavors, the $149 Standard Edition and the $1499 CAD Edition. 3D Toolkit includes about eighty percent of the functionality of the CAD Edition.

Deep Exploration has an easily navigable interface similar to Windows Explorer. The program does an outstanding job of displaying all manner of 3D files, including proprietary scene files from programs such as Maya, XSI, 3ds max, and Lightwave (you need to have the parent programs installed on your system, except in the case of Lightwave).

It also does a great job of reading and writing roughly 120 2D and 3D file formats (80 in, 40 out). That's considerably more than the handful 3D Toolkit recognizes. Translating files between incompatible 3D programs can be aggravating in the extreme, so these features alone make Deep Exploration an indispensable tool for your multimedia toolbox.

The program displays layer and transparency information, and is loaded with 3D utilities, including a variety of tools for "healing" objects, changing surface normal direction, and similar capabilities (my favorite is "Remove Degenerate Triangles").

Once you've imported your 3D data, you can add lights and shaded textures to objects and render composed scenes as photorealistic ray traced images with cast shadows as well as produce simple keyframed 3D animation timelines with motion smoothing.

 Page 1 of 1