2D Graphics, Image Editing, &
Composition
Adobe, Inc - makers of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, PhotoDeluxe, PageMaker, FrameMaker, Adobe Dimensions, and a number of other essential image creation/editing tools. Now they're moving to internet publishing as well.
Fractal Design, Inc - Fractal Design Painter™, Sketcher™, and Dabbler™are some of the well known natural media design products from this fine crew. Other products include Poser™, a new natural media vector-based program. Fractal recently completed its purchase of RayDream, Inc.
Macromedia - makers of Director, Extreme 3D, Freehand, Fontographer, and X-Res...all very good products in their fields.
MetaCreations - formerly known as HSC, then combined with Specular and Fractal Design, these are the guys who have brought us such great products as Kai's Power Tools, KPT Convolver, Final Effects, Bryce, PowerPhotos, GOO, Infini-D, Ray Dream Designer, Fractal Painter, and Poser.
Kai's Power Tips, the Web edition
Macintosh:
Commercial Modeling/Rendering Applications & Tools:
Amapi - 3D modeling package with a good, if different, user interface. The new 2.11 version is one of the few Mac products to import the prolific 3D Stuido files that are so prolific on the internet.
Alias Sketch! - Mac 3D imaging & animation program from the guys at SGI. Key features include a very high quality rendering engine and NURBS-based modeling tools.
KPT Bryce 2.0 - excellent landscape modeling and rendering without equal. Key features include innovative interface, ease of use, high quality output, and a HUGE fun factor.
KPT Bryce 3D - the latest incarnation of Bryce includes Animation, hypertextures (semi-volumetric), and more.
Bryce 2 Tips - excellent site with Bryce 2 tips. Very well done, with good layout and content.
Bryce 2 Deep Texture Editor Tips - more great info, oriented towards explaining the "True" deep features in Bryce 2's texture/materials editor.
The Terraformer's Guild - excellent source of info on KPT Bryce 1.x and 2.0 tips & techniques.
Byte by Byte Sculpt 3D - new version just released! Supposedly has a much improved user interface. Key features include detailed modeling features (NURBS, object tessellation, independent textures for each face of an object) and high quality ray tracing.
Electric Image Animation System - extremely powerful (and equally expensive) 3D imaging for the Mac. Requires a separate modeling program for quality models. Key features include fastest rendering available on the Mac, high-end animated special effects.
Extreme 3D from Macromedia - replacement for MacroModel. Key features - great modeling tools for the price, good lighting controls.
Form-Z - one of the highest quality modeling programs for the Macintosh platform. Lacks high-end rendering functions, but exports most common file types (except QuickDraw 3D 3DMF files...hopefully this is coming soon...)
Hash Animation Studio - I don't really know much about this, check back later for more info.
Specular Infini-D - Mid-range system with good modeling tools, renderers, and animation. Key features - good price, easy to use, good support for QuickDraw 3D.
Specular 3D Web Workshop - create simple 3D effects for use in web page design, like buttons, extruded text, simple shapes.
LightWork 3D - new company with plans to bring photorealistic rendering to QuickDraw 3D
MeshPaint - a new 3D texture creation application from Positron Publishing.
NewTek - this package started out on the Amiga bundled with the Video Toaster and has evolved into an extremely good 3D design studio (check out Babylon 5 for some good examples of its capabilities). NewTek has now ported LightWave to the Mac. Also, they have a new consumer-level product called Inspire3D which looks promising.
Ray Dream Designer - for $99, this is an awefully good package all around. The modeling tools aren't extremely full-featured, but are adequate for many tasks and you can create some nice objects with them. Key features include super-low price, decent modeling and rendering. For better animation tools Ray Dream Studio is also available.
PatchDance - a shareware spline-based 3-D modelling application which imports and exports DXF and 3DMF files. Fairly expensive for a VERY early beta release shareware app at $75, but it has a good feature set.
Strata Studio Pro - high-end 3D studio for the Mac. Current version 1.75 Blitz has some awesome rendering tools and special effects. Key features include excellent rendering quality, full QuickDraw 3D support, great animated special effects. The upcoming 2.0 version will be MUCH faster and include support for the upcoming QuickDraw 3D 2.0 spec.
Vertigo - this is another 3D modeling/rendering/animation package which is currently being ported to the Macintosh (its currently available on SGI). The PowerPC revolution is getting some power hitters into the Mac 3D market (and none too soon!)
Vidi Presentation System - innovative Digital Clay™modeling system.
Virtus 3-D Website Builder and Walkthrough - these are lower-end products intended for simple 3D needs, but could be just what you need for a particular job.
Utilities
Apple QuickDraw 3D - revolutionary 3D system architecture which aims to take 3D functionality into the mainstream. Although available for the PowerMac right now, this will shortly be available for PC's as well, creating the first truly cross-platform mainstream 3D architecture.
General 3D Info Sites
Alias|Wavefront HomePage - many excellent imaging products, now owned by SGI. This site is very well done, as well. A/W Terraformer Page - this looks like the Bryce for SGI.
SoftImage - this software system is heralded as the very best in 3D development available on any platform today. Too bad they're owned by Microsoft now...they'll likely continue to have the greatest features, but most of them will be fairly useless and the software will be so slow and bloated that people will RUSH to buy it because it's still a Microsoft product. Hopefully they'll be able to maintain a greater degree of independence than other MS company buy-outs.
SoftImage Fan page - this page has some good information and tips as well as a graphics gallery and links to other SoftImage and 3D sites.
NewTek - makers of LightWave and Inspire 3D.
NewTekniques - Great site for news and techniques for using and mastering Lightwave.
Intergraph - one of the finer PC visual-computing hardware manufacturers.
Graphics City - Cool site with Intergraph-related glleries, etc.
VRML Resources
The Wired VRML Info Pages - a great place to start when looking for information on the whole "VRML Craze".
3D Object Libraries
Viewpoint Data Labs - home of the Avalon site, which contains thousands of 3D objects of many types. Unfortunately, almost all of them are in .3DS (3D Studio - a PC 3D application) format, which is effectively USELESS for Macintosh users, as there are no publicly available translators to other formats more widely used on the Mac platform. They do have a few nice files in 3DMF, Infini-D, and other formats which have translators for the Mac, though.
3D Cafe - more 3D objects, also mostly in .3DS format.
Mac & Imaging-Oriented Electronic Publications
Image Soup Magazine - for Mac graphics afficionado's
3D Mail-Order Companies/Suppliers
Technical Animations
Design/Systems
Graphics and Art Galleries
- The Bryce Forum Gallery excellent starting point for checking out Bryce images.
- The Shadowart Galleries - cool conglomeration of galleries.
- Calyxa's Pearl gallery - Truly impressive stuff.
- Check out Duncan Hopkins' Gallery - Pretty cool gallery of various stuff.
- Digitoils - just check it out...it's definitely worth it.
- Dr. Bob's SpaceScapes
- Work by #KPTBryce (on IRC) regulars:
- Jonathan Yuen's WWW page - Awesome gallery!
- Kelly McLarnon's Gallery - ToPaZ from #KPTBryce
- Puppetboi's site
- Bill Blum's web page (aka Ttritt on IRC)
- Jeff Richardson's web site - incredible stuff.
- Jason Stark's art gallery
Last updated: May 11, 1998
© 1996 & 1997 & 1998 Jason E. Cox