July 05th 2002 | Jens C Brynildsen

First ‘real’ 3D for Flash?

Interview with John Soucie, lead programmer of Electric Rain
It's about three weeks ago since the details of Swift3D were released, and never before has a 3'rd party application for Flash made such a buzz. Swift3D will enable you to do not only cartoon shading of you models, but also true, shaded objects. Compared to the other 2 applications available which are plugins for the $3000+ 3D Studio Max package, the $139 program, is a fully working standalone modeling and animation application.

FM: One thing I'm curious about is how you've been able to keep this a secret for such a long time?
JX: Well, we're a small group...

FM: You said that you are only a 3 person company?
JX: We're three people and growing. The way we kept it quiet is: we saw competitors come out on the Flash CD, and we understood that the Flash market needed it. We did not want to alert them to our precence, so we just made a consciouss decision to gather Beta testers, and we took chances with them cause we did not know their affiliation and asked them. And very much to our pleasure, they were very good about respecting NDA's (Non-Disclosure Agreements). So, we had a very small group of testers, 3 or 4 testers, and we weren't speaking about it, and we decided that the product was finally ready to release...

FM: You told me that you are not too 'into the Flash scene'.
JX: I've always been a 3D programmer, but there's many 3D programs, too many actually. So the market is saturated, we were always raster based. We saw Flash [for the first time] a year ago, in february, and we knew we had to get into that market. At that time we were working on our other 3D products and updates, so we finally decided to attack Flash last september. I'm technical and mathematical, so all I needed to do was to figure out how to convert 3D to 2D and vectors.

FM: And that was difficult?
JX: That was a challenge, yeah. It wasn't a simple problem to solve, and no, I'm not going to talk about it.... [We can do] flat shading, identical to Vecta and Illustrate. It also does full Mesh-Shading, polygon, by polygon which can be useful for small models where you want high quality, but the file sizes grow too much for larger models.

We have another technology called area shading, where we group polygons together and calculate a smooth shading [for this group]. To us, this is our biggest selling point, and no one really knew about that until today.

FM: You'd been doing other 3D progams?
JX: We have only one product on the market, it's called Font FX. It just extrudes text, and allows you to animate [the] text, add textures, backgrounds.

FM: Like Crystal Fonts?
JX: Yeah, and we've been spending a lot time on that. We developed another product called Electric Motion 3D. That's a RayTracer with full photorealism. We were working on that when we saw Flash, and we actually decided to shelve that program so we could do the Flash program. So we were 3 months from releasing that product and we said "no, stop..." and went to Flash.

FM: That's a brave decision.
JX: Sure, but there's plenty of high quality 3D renderers about there, and there were no Flash programs until now , and that was why we chose it. Our goal was 'first to market' , and we're right in the same timeframe as Vecta now and we'll just let the market decide.

FM: How did you get in touch with the beta testers?
JX: I consider us very lucky. We did target Vince Surani of Whacked USA. We contacted him, and had our eyes on Mano1. But we were'nt sure of their affiliation with Vecta so we just contacted Vince, hoping he wouldn't talk about our program, and he suggested we contact Mano right away, cause he knew Mano was not a part of the Vecta Beta-test. So we really wanted Mano and Vince right away, they both joined us and from there, they reffered us to our other testers.

FM: You're not doing texture mapping?
JX: The limitations are really not in terms of 3D. We've been doing a lot of texture-shading in our Font Effects product. The problem is in Flash... I'm not bashing Macromedia, it's just Flash's limitations with bitmaps. Yeah, we could throw a texture on it, but [there] would be too many small bitmaps.

It would be very much like our Mesh-Shading [and] the filesize will grow too quickly. One of our Beta-testers has done a psuedo-texture. He uses our outline output as a mask and puts a bitmap behind the mask, and then he transforms the bitmap to make it look like it's moving. Filesize got a little big, but it was possible...

FM: What about limitations?
JX: As much as we would like to do 100.000 polygon models, our limitation is around 20.000 to 30.000 polygons. The program will always finish whatever you throw at it, but you might not want to wait for it. Vecta was designed to do large models, and with flat shading, they have a good algorithm for doing it.

But from the ground up, we designed ours for gradient shading, not for flat shading. I think that the community 'wants gradient', as much realism as we can get. I wish we could provide it all, but for now this is where the technology is at, so I feel like we have a superior technology. We also have a new algorithm in the works, that'll improve the area shading [even further for even more realism].

FM: You have the first stand-alone program on the market. Will you be doing a plugin for other programs?
JX: We've contemplated it, and to be honest, no definate plans. If we do it, our first would be 3D Studio. We want to investigate that market to see what potential it has, and then we'll look at all the other. Most people will have a difficult time building a good 3D model, it's hard...
So most people will be looking for 3D models, and actually that's why we chose to do the standalone, rather than the plugin. They'll find a model and if it's unanimated, they can animate it in our program [as well as] change colours. Just go get the model you want, and we'll do the rest. It's kind of the bridge between a very expensive program and just being able to do 3D for Flash.

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