"With the Presenter 3D release, VIDI is elevating the level of 3D modeling and animation", says Nick Pavlovic, VIDI CEO. "Building on our Digital Clay(tm) sculpting and Directional 3D Sound(tm) capabilities, VIDI is introducing powerful Multi-Target Morphing, ground-breaking Explore surface editing, unique motion control plug-ins, and complete QuickTime VR movie generation capabilities. These make high-end effects like the geese flocking scene in Fly Away Home and the lip syncing of Toy Story now readily doable and affordable on the Macintosh. To share the benefits of this new technology, VIDI intends to treat all 3D users as its user base and is making a special upgrade offer that provides its $2,000 product to Strata, Electric Image, Infini-D, and other 3D users for $999, valid through December 31, 1996. In addition to all the new capabilities and a low price, the Presenter 3D upgrade provides many of the promised features that users of other 3D products have been waiting to get from their 3D vendors. These include features like Extrude, Lathe, and Sweep in place with interactive controls and preview, seeing the scene from the point of view of the spotlight or movie projector, and automatic camera edits. These along with Directional 3D Sound have been standard features with VIDI for the past two years."
One of the most time consuming tasks in 3D modeling is the task of correctly setting the surface parameters. This generally involves a series of trial and error steps of trying some settings, rendering, examining the results, changing settings, and starting over again. With Presenter 3D's new real-time shader and Explore, one of the most complicated tasks in 3D modeling is as easy as just clicking on the image that looks the best. VIDI developed this ground-breaking improvement in shader technology to allows artists to make adjustments to shading parameters and see the effect on the final rendered surface in real time. In Explore, you are shown a grid of rendered balls with differing surface parameters. In the center the current value is shown. By clicking on one of the other balls, its values becomes the current version, and moves to the center. In other words, to use Explore, click on the picture that is closest to the version you want until you're happy with how it looks.
Where Explore is even more valuable is in its ability to handle the difficult problems caused by surface parameters that interact with each other visually. For instance, if your object appears too glossy, you might try turning down the specular coefficient. Unfortunately, this will also have the side effect of making your object appear darker. So then you'll have to turn up diffuse a bit, but that often makes your object appear more glossy as well!. To handle this, just set the popup menu in the upper right hand corner to "Diffuse vs. Specular". Explore will then show you all the different results of changing the diffuse and specular components. Pick the one that looks right to you, and you're done! Trying to get that glass object to look just right? Choose "Reflection vs. Transparency", and pick the combination of these two parameters that gives the best result.
Ronald Davis, a fine artist whose paintings are in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Tate Gallery in London, and many others says, "Presenter 3D's new and intuitive graphical surface attribute selection tools enable me to select the virtual color interaction, reflection, diffuse shading, specular highlites, inner glow, transparency, and refraction for every surface in my digital paintings. It gives me a far easier and very accurate way to define a series of rendered options for all surface attributes. It does this without the trial and error metaphor found in other 3D software."
VIDI is determined to aggressively support Apple's QuickTime VR movie technology. We do this by providing full integrated support for creating QTVR panorama and object movies completely within VIDI's Presenter 3D. The software supports the positioning of panoramic cameras, selection of a vertical field of view, and a choice of the three standard QTVR image sizes, or custom sizes. Creating a QTVR node requires only the simple action of pressing start and selecting the rendering options. The software handles raytracing a cylindrical view, rotating and dicing the image, and encoding the QTVR parameters. No additional steps or utilities are required. VIDI is the only 3D animation software company to provide users with the ability to produce panorama and object movies directly from its 3D application. No other package offers this level of integration and ease of use. With QTVR now a part of Netscape's browser for the Internet, we see our role expanding as a provider of web site content development. VIDI is committed to fully exploiting the capabilities of the QTVR 2.0 extensions in the future, including multiple nodes, animation within panoramas, and Directional 3D Sound(tm).
Bob Sauls, lead designer for Jack Frassanito & Associates says "Thanks for helping us pull off our NASA project, a multimedia piece on the space station. All of the models, renderings, animations, and QTVR's are 100% VIDI. There are about 100 renderings, 20 animations, and 10 QTVR movies. I've been using a Power Macintosh to run my renderings, and it's unbelievable how fast the new raytracer is, it smokes. "All of the simulations of the space shuttle docking with the Russian space station shown on CNN, Nightline, and the national evening news were created by Bob entirely with Presenter 3D.
Multi-Target Morphing is a powerful new technology that builds on Presenter 3D's existing 3D Digital Clay(tm) sculpting and Directional 3D Sound(tm) capability. It enables facial animation, muscle flexing, character reshaping, and lip motion synced to sound. This capability allows you to go beyond the ability to do a straight morph between two shapes (targets) of an object. Multi-Target Morphing enables artists and animators to create multiple poses from 3D spline meshes and then animate using various combinations of expressions over time. Where the movie Toy Story required great artistic effort and expensive systems to create facial expressions for its 3D characters, VIDI makes it easy and inexpensive to do. To create facial expressions with other products, the only alternative is to sculpt hundreds or thousands of key poses individually. With Presenter 3D, it's just a case of blending a few targets.
The KineMagics(tm) plug-in animators provide automatic control and flexibility of movement control between multiple objects. Included with Presenter 3D are the Flock plug-in for flexible group movement such as birds or planes flying in formation, a school of fish swimming, or a horse stampede and the Link plug-in for fixed group movement where multiple objects are locked into position. The Track plug-in is used to make sure that the selected object always points at the target object. This is useful for getting cameras, lights, and microphones to "point-at" other animated items. The Path animator with automatic banking control provides improved control over motion along a spline path and works with all the previous plug-ins to automatically control the direction. Link allows items to share animation data. The Follow animator provides multi-object follow other objects. Plus, to provide amateur and professional game and animated effects designers, we developed a Shatter plug-in that lets you blow anything to pieces.
These animators along with Wind, Gravity, Collision, and Jitter and our RealPhysics(tm) attributes such as Elasticity, Inertia, and Attraction can be applied in combination to produce a cumulative effect make it possible to automatically produce professional effects such as the dinosaur stampede in Jurassic Park without having to buy and learn the expensive tools used in such movies. As an application example, if a single horse was duplicated to create a herd, you could apply the Quadruped Motion and Flocking plug-ins to the folder containing the herd. With sound automatically applied to each hoofbeat and a spline path defined, you could produce a horse stampede similar. The entire effect is automatically created without any keyframing or tedious movement of model parts.
Presenter 3D was optimized to support a new plug-in architecture, the new morph data structure, and providing improved ray tracing speed and memory utilization. The introduction of targeted 3D morphing features a new data structure that we call "generation object sets." The data structure is key to creating smooth 3D object morphing; it enables you to create an unlimited number of "soft targets" from just a few "hard-modeled targets." Adding to an already powerful rendering lineup that includes a powerful ray tracer and well-recognized support for RenderMan, VIDI has added a new Phong shader that rivals the speed of the Electric Image shader.
Additional capabilities include a 3DMF import/export capability along with a QuickDraw 3D viewer built into the 3D window. Plus where others only support polygonal objects, VIDI supports import and export of 3D NURB meshes. To Presenter 3D's unique Wrap texture mapping where the map lies directly on the surface instead of being projected eliminating map distortion and "creep", we added Cylindrical, Spherical, and Cubic mapping along with the ability to see where on the object the map is being placed. The Ease In/Out buttons for each parameter now provide smooth curves to enable animators to smoothly vary any parameter.