And It Looks So Easy!
Brad Peebler, NewTek's director of software development, stopped
by recently to show off Inspire 3D, a Webified version of the company's
flagship product, Lightwave 3D. While Lightwave 3D has been used for high-end
rendering and animation in such notables as Men in Black, Star Trek, and
X-Files, the company claims that Inspire 3D should be suitable for product
visualization, Web design, and Web animation.
Inspire 3D is divided into two parts: a modeler and a layout environment.
The modeler lets users prototype 3D object scenes and texture them with
2D images from various file formats . The layout environment uses a metaphor
that lets designers work on a virtual sound stage to create a “photo
shoot” of the product or scene, and imitates a real sound stage in
which lights and cameras can be manipulated to achieve the desired result.
Once composed, a "shot" is rendered in various object formats,
including 3D Studio, DXF, Wavefront, and VRML, and as animations in QuickTime
and AVI. Individual frames can also be rendered as single images at up to
8000x8000 pixels for print. Common formats include BMP, JPG, RGB, SUN, TGA,
and TIF. A GIF plug-in is also available on the NewTek Web site.
Among the many modeling tools supplied are a couple of cool ones--metaNURBS
(Nonuniform Rational B-Spline) and Bones.
