Presenter 3D Lite is designed as a stand-alone 3D product that brings quality modeling, rendering, animation and special sound, physics, and morphing effects to the large, low-cost 3D market. To differentiate it from Presenter 3D without removing design and animation capabilities, Presenter 3D allows you to create models up to a maximum size of 500K and render up to a maximum resolution of 320x240. Because spline-based modelers are effective for organic modeling, provide faster screen refresh and require much less space. As a reference, a 500K Presenter 3D Lite spline-based model is roughly equivalent to a 5 to 8 Meg polygonal file produced by most other 3D products.
"We believe that there is nothing in this price range that comes close to Presenter 3D Lite in features and functionality", says Nick Pavlovic, VIDI CEO. "With the Presenter 3D Lite release, VIDI is making it affordable for beginners, educators, students, and users of other 3D products to create animations and virtual worlds alive with sound and motion for multimedia presentations and web sites. Capabilities like Directional 3D Sound and Multi-Target Morphing on a Digital SoundStage(tm) are not even available on most high-end systems. Presenter 3D Lite makes high-end effects like the lip syncing of Toy Story and the flight of the geese in Fly Away Home both readily doable and affordable on the Macintosh."
The total environment was designed to make 3D easier and more effective without sacrificing functionality. While most low and medium cost 3D products offer polygonal modeling, Presenter 3D Lite offers powerful and Illustrator-like spline design tools. This makes 3D easier to learn and use and is better suited for organic modeling. Yet its Boolean capabilities provide the cut, join, and intersection solid modeling capabilities found only on much more expensive systems. In addition, Presenter 3D Lite offers ease of use and productivity enhancement to both professional and novice users. A frequent complaint among most novice users is "Being lost in 3D space". VIDI not only offers a four-window interface for maximum control over 3D positioning and visualization, but also provides the ability to set depth of views with just the push of the space bar; on-the-fly snaps; rulers and a variety of grid options; Illustrator-like spline and drawing tools with direct key commands; and the ability to select vertices in any window, including the 3D window, and dragging to any other window view. Presenter 3D Lite offers the most intuitive "in-place" with preview controls over extrude, lathe, loft (skin), path extrude, bevel extrude, and sweep. By letting you see and adjust the intended 3D object before it is created, you save time and effort and get exactly what you wanted the first time. Plus it offers powerful, hierarchical grouping and library controls that follow the standard Macintosh file and folder structure and are made easy with automatic name assignment of objects and groups.
One of the most time consuming tasks in 3D visualization is the task of correctly setting the surface parameters. This generally involves a series of trial and error steps of set, render and repeat. With Presenter 3D Lite, it's as easy as clicking on the image that looks best. 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 Real-Time Surface editing and 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."In its rendering lineup, Presenter 3D Lite provides a blazing-fast Phong shader for animation and preview rendering that rivals the speed of the Electric Image shader, a fast, powerful ray tracer for rendering high quality images and full QuickTime VR support. 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. Gary Reisman at NBC 2000 has used Presenter 3D's modeling, rendering, and KineMagics animators like Jitter and Path to produce a flickering map showing affiliate locations on a rotating U.S. map and add a UFO to the Third Rock From the Sun intro.
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 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, Presenter 3D Lite 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, you just blend a few targets. "Presenter 3D's new multi-target morphing is ideal for creating and animating facial expressions, as well as showing 3D characters talking" says Peter Ratner, Professor of Fine Art and Animation at James Madison University. "I used the new morphing capability in my animation class for generating facial expressions and muscle movement on computer-generated models. Changing facial expressions was easy. At each keyframe, I varied morph instances used until I had the desired expression in the real-time preview window. In Presenter 3D, I found that 'A frown is just a smile turned upside down'. You can change a smile to a frown by simply dragging the slider for the smile target to the left. I found this type of capability to be extremely intuitive and it save me a lot of design time."
The geese flying scene in the movie Fly Away Home is another example of how Multi-Target Morphing can be used along with the KineMagics animators to simplify what otherwise could be a difficult process. The KineMagics(tm) plug-in animators provide automatic control and flexibility of movement control between multiple objects and physics effects like gravity, wind, explosion, and collision. Graphic designer Perry Marks used Presenter 3D to simulate the flight of geese similar to that shown in the movie. He says, "With Presenter 3D's spline-based modeling. Multi-Target morphing, and KineMagics motion control animators, this project literally took flight. The fluid movement I wanted was achieved with only two morph targets. This together with the real-time morph previews saved me a lot of time and made it an enjoyable and educational experience."
Sound definitely plays a significant role in the production of special effects sequences by computer. In a recent TV program titled "The Making of Jurassic Park", Gary Rydstom, Sound Designer working for Steven Spielberg, when referring to the combination of computer graphic visuals and sound effects said, "There's a synergy that happens... [the end product is grater than the sum of the parts] and "you can't have one without the other." "Presenter is the first program that gives sound the elements of distance," says Sean Wagstaff. "The ability to place directional and omni-directional 3D microphones and sound effects precisely within its Digital SoundStage environment produces lifelike sound effects that add depth, feel and richness to multimedia, game, film and video production. The result is a three-dimensional surround sound that envelopes the viewer, adding an extraordinary sense of realism to the visual presentation. They can be assigned a sensitivity, range, and a directional cone with sound falloff, and they can also be animated. Sounds that are farther off are faint. As they approach, they become louder. If they are moving fast as they pass the 3D microphones, they are altered by the Doppler shift (which changes the pitch of a sound as it moves toward or away from the listener). The microphones can play into the right, left or mono audio channels to simulate sounds coming from different parts of a scene. This enables you to create visual and audio cues that are synchronized with the actual motion produced. Using a train moving from right to left as an example, you simultaneously hear and see the train faintly to your right. As the train approaches, the sound increases in volume and pitch until it passes before you, and then both sound and train fade to the left."
Sean continues, "Presenter's Directional 3D Sound makes it easy and productive to create animations with realistic sound effects-without the costly on-location recording or painstaking audio post-production. This is a capability currently not seen in any other product. Most sound used in 2D and 3D graphics is actually two-dimensional. Like PacMan chomping across the screen, the noise never gets closer or farther away and there is no sense of velocity or position. Presenter's Directional 3D Sound enhances the computer and video arcade game experience and the home and business interactive multimedia experience. If you close your eyes, the sound seems to come from directly in front of your face. With Presenter, when you close your eyes, you can actually imagine a jet roaring overhead, then disappearing into the distance. While at first this seems like a special effect, once you are used to it, other kinds of sound feel flat and unnatural."
VIDI added a series of special Tech Reports to its web site at http://www.vidi.com that show how Presenter 3D and the Lite version can be used to create explosions, apply Real-Time Surface edits, capture the Doppler sound effect and create QuickTime VR Panorama and Object movies, and use the new Multi-Target Morphing for facial and lip sync animation Additional examples are available at VIDI's new User Site at http://www.webnation.com/vidirep/. This site, created by and maintained by VIDI users, contains images, animations QTVR movies, and tips by VIDI users. One of the most interesting submissions is the Fly Away Home simulation of geese flying. This along with the lip sync reports demonstrate the ease of creating effects similar to those found in effects movies.