Additionally, there is plenty of helpful information, resources and a community forum on the Electric Rain site to help users get up to speed quickly. A vibrant user community is typically a good indicator of health of the program and the developers. When a couple of issues were apparent shortly after the Swift 3Ds release, users posted and developers fixed. That’s pretty cool.
If you are new to working with 3D in general, a review of the manual is essential. While the table of contents in the manual is excellent, it would have been nice if that was also translated into .pdf bookmarks, obviating the requirement to always return back to the table instead of navigating the document with the bookmarks.
One of the things I did notice as a “missing” capability was keyboard shortcuts for timeline functions. As film/video/3d creators, we’re used to having keyboard shortcuts to accelerate through common and repetitive tasks like “next key frame”, end of movie, or clicking in an area and type in numeric frame advance values. In some of my tests, I created mechanical animations requiring constant rotations. The S3D rotation controls don’t allow for entering degrees in more than +/- 180 or applying behaviors for constant rotation. So, I was left with copying and pasting keyframes for the effect with constant, individual frame back and forth requirements to get the key frames adjusted for visually seamless looping. Irritating. There are keyboard shortcuts for modeling and other functions, so this omission tended to stand out.
Also disappointing to note was that you can’t click-drag in the timeline and select multiple key frames. I had to keep reminding myself that this is not a full blown animation/motion graphics editor or 3D solution to manage my expectations.
Tweening/easing customization is very limited, but easy to use.
The object morphing tools function in similar fashion to other 3D packages that allow morphing. The object animation path tools are super easy to use.
The one mental jump I had to make was in working with the various options S3D has. The properties controls display a hierarchical tree of what is in your scene. In most 3D applications you first select your tools and then highlight the object you want to work with. However, in S3D, you first must select the object you wish to edit from the scene and the the tools/options then appear on the palette along with the tree/hierarchy of what is editable. I didn’t like this at first because it was different than I was used to, but it is efficient. Old dog, new tricks.
I did appreciate the motion presets as a shortcut to the most common “marketing” types of needs. Motion can also be completely customized.
The range of options are appropriate and satisfactory for what S3D is and the objects that you have selected. If you’ve come from a sophisticated 3D or editing tool set that allows you to assign “tags” to objects and then modify the tag properties, you may feel hampered by not having that here. However, keeping in mind this is for more simple animations and shorter durations, the tools sets are fine.
After selecting your object in the scene, all of the areas that you may want to edit are then shown in the Property Tool palette in numerical, slider and button format. Oddly, any time you work with a material, whether it is a background or and object material, you’re forced to double click the material picture box to open a separate dialog box.
A capability missing for bitmap renders, in my opinion, is the ability to use movies as object textures. Especially for the filmmaker market or advertising markets, this would be a boon if included in a future release.
One of the coolest option sets is something that you can realize outside of the program. Upon export into Flash format, users have the option to engage reflections, highlights, shadows and transparency - just like in multi-pass rendering. But here is the nice thing: part of S3Ds tool set is an importer into the actual Flash program that allows users the ability to turn on and off any of those items directly in Flash since they export in layers. Very nice.
