MacUser magazine, in its August issue, published an article titled "Pop Art" that reviewed Mac 3D products. The results of the review puts Presenter 3D in an advantageous position. While ElectricImage, form*Z, and Infini-D were rated ahead of Presenter 3D, Presenter 3D was rated ahead of Lightwave, Strata 3D Studio and the rest. While attaining the highest scores, both Electric Image and form*Z do not provide a complete 3D modeling, render, animation product and Infini-D was relegated primarily to the hobbyist market. When used together, Electric Image and form*Z are much more expensive, not as integrated, and do not possess the sound, facial, and render capabilities that Presenter 3D does. When compared to the list of complete, professional 3D products, Presenter 3D comes out as the leading product.

The Comparisons

Let's take a look at the Pros and Cons published in the article to see where the major players stand.

Presenter 3D - Stands out on top in interface, working environment, spline-based modeling tools, complex character and facial animation, sounds assigned to objects to generate stereo animation soundtracks, and a unique object-oriented procedural animation. It also has a very fast ray tracer and a Phong rated as fast or faster by many VIDI users. Looking at Presenter 3D's Cons, there appears little to fix except possibly lowering the price. Anybody for that? If Presenter 3D is expensive at $1995, what does that make Electric Image and Form-Z singly and in combination. Several others are also priced above $1,000.

Electric Image Animation System - Recognized for its render speed and animation sophistication, but is expensive, has no modeling capabilities, has a limit of three texture maps per object, and provides mediocre documentation.

form*Z - Recognized for its modeling capabilities, but has a complicated interface with a steep learning curve; no animation capabilities, and needs a separate dedicated renderer which increases the price even more.

StudioPro - Previously the leader in 3-D for the Mac OS with excellent but slow ray-tracing quality, the current version is bug-ridden, falling behind in the state of the art and lacks most of the advanced features promised for this revision.

LightWave - Popular on the Amiga and Windows platforms, unfortunately, the Mac version isn't up to par with the other platforms' versions, it's not consistent with Mac OS interface conventions, the layout timeline isn't time-scalable, so you can't zoom in on crucial keyframes, and ScreamerNet doesn't ship with Mac OS version.

Sculpt 3D - Offers perhaps the best-looking ray tracing on the Mac, and its modeling tools, once mastered, are industrial-strength, but unfortunately, its clunky interface can get in the way and it's not for animators or the faint-of-heart.

Zoom - Primarily an advanced modeling package, with some rendering capabilities with nothing more sophisticated than anti-aliased Phong shading, it seems aimed at CAD users, industrial designers, and architects. It is slow, lacks automatic window redraw, has poor camera-only animation system (no real-time preview while moving, rotating, or resizing an object that shows only wire frame or bounding box), offers no way to interrupt rendering and the lack of a floating layer palette makes layer implementation difficult and has substandard documentation.