September 24th 2002 | Jens C Brynildsen

Review: Strata 3Dpro

Strata 3Dpro is a full featured 3D program that can export to the Flash SWF format. This is done using a plugin from Electric Rain, so we had really high hopes for the results when starting this review. Strata is a company that has been around for years, creating programs with a traditional focus on classic 3D models and animation.

Strata 3Dpro is the flagship product, but Strata also offer StrataDV, a video editing tool. Strata DVpro is the first video editor to include compression technology using the Sorenson's Spark codec found in Flash.

First looks
Once stalled, the program looks sort of familiar if you have some experience with other 3D applications, but the 4 bit icons in black and white look a bit dated. This may have to do with issues of portability between the Mac and PC version of the product. With the beautiful icons now available in OSX, Strata should really do something about the looks of their GUI. Most of the Microsoft Operating systems supports 256 color icons, so it gives a slightly old impression. The best looking parts of the UI are actually embedded SWF movies. These are used for a button row and some of the panels. Why not expand on this? A complete Flash UI is no impossibility, just look at Optimaze.

Strata 3Dpro is the kind of program you can dive straight into and start modeling, but you'll soon turn to the manual when you feel like doing something special. If you have never worked with 3D programs, you'd better work your way through the manual as there are no tutorials on the CD. Tutorials on the web exist, but they are mainly made by enthusiasts and the sites are seldom maintained.

3D modeling
Strata 3Dpro is a high quality program with a massive feature list. Strata 3Dpro has support for advanced features like Raytracing and Raydiosity rendering and inverse Kinematics. Modeling features like Splines, Polygons, Lathing, Skinning, Metaballs, Extruding, Booleans, skinning and Sweeping. Effects include animated hair, particle systems, fire, smoke, lens flares, physics and atmospheric effects. The list goes on. This is a fully featured 3D program, but testing all these features is beyond the scope of this article. If you wish to try out all the features, download the demo that is available from the Strata pages. One really neat feature is the possibility to export QuickTime Object and Panorama movies. This will allow users with the QuickTime plugin to rotate and interact with your models.

All editing can be done in the same window, and you often swap what view you work from. If you need multiple views, just add as many as you like. After working a while, the screen can become quite messy, so screen sets like in Flash would have been neat. There are separate modes for editing objects. All objects can be manipulated easily, but expect some getting used to. Entering and leaving edit-modes could have been easier (i.e. double-clicking an object), but Strata has probably avoided this to prevent accidentally entering edit mode.

The modeler performs as you would expect from working other programs. The modeling tools are good and solid. All the professional features you would expect are available like polygonal, bezier and metaball modeling. Extrusions are easily done with preset shapes or you can create your own.

Import/Export
Many Flash users may want to use pre-made models from vendors or freely available ones. Strata 3Dpro supports import from several formats like IGES, VRML, Amapi, DXF and 3DS. From these, 3DS is probably the most widespread format, so we decided to test this. In our tests, none of the 3DS models worked as they should. Open shapes were closed, the axis were ridiculous and impossible to work with.

Even simple models like 3D logos had serious problems and large models failed completely. All of these models were created in the original 3D Studio R4, so they should really have worked. The model vendor Zygote has included some sample models with the application that we chose to use these for the review.

Export features include both AVI and QuickTime video, Cult 3D, DXF, VRML and various internal formats and bitmap formats.

Animation
Strata supports all the classic animation features you would expect from a 3D program. Position, Scaling, Rotation and object properties can be animated over time with ease in/out functions. In addition you'll find advanced features like object collision, anti-matter (Boolean operations simulated over time) and object paths.

The timeline is clean and tidy but requires a lot of nesting. A 21" screen is always an advantage when you do this sort of work.

Rendering
Strata comes with 4 primary renderers: classic Scanline, OpenGL, Raytracer and a Raydiosity renderer. During modeling, you'll probably use the first two, while outputting final result to the last two. To see how these four differ, check the image below.

The quality of the renderers are good and Strata supplies its own network rendering tool RenderPro allowing multiple machines to work on long animations. The textures supplied are good starters, but good looking glass is hard to find in the 3D world. We have seen some excellent examples at StrataCafe, but the images above use the standard glass texture that ships with the product. The texture editor is good, but of little relevance for Flash output as we'll come back to later.

Flash output
The Flash output from Strata 3Dpro is created by Electric Rain, the makers of Swift 3D. The RAVIiX II engine creates small and beautiful outputs, with a good selection of output styles. Finding the Flash output is less obvious than it should be. I would expect it to be in the render options, but Strata have chosen to put a small button on the main navigation bar instead.

Once found, the engine is simple to use, but good results require a lot of experimenting. Our first test model of a bee was rather complex and consisted of about 140.000 polygons. Each render took about 45 seconds. Not much, but when you have to do more than 30 renders to try to get things right, this is quite a lot of time. Turning on the "Edges"-function should have produced good looking outlines, but instead it drew a lot of unwanted lines across the objects. We couldn't find a way to remove the edges across the mesh, so we finally gave it up and switched to another model.

I guess this has to do with how things are modeled, but some work should be done here. For other settings our little bee looked dark, even without Shadows enabled. Changing the color properties for the object had no impact and it seems that the RAVIiX II engine only use the base color for its calculations. For specular highlights, only one light source may be used and in our tests, only the specular component was drawn from this light. We tested a range of other models and had the same problems there.

Bee created by chris@designart.co.uk, www.designart.co.uk

These artifacts probably have to do with the underlying geometry, but there should not be any need for special modeling to achieve the desired results. Other files produce perfect looking results like the table that renders beautifully as both Raydiosity and SWF. These problems are also reflected in the SWF files displayed at the Strata user pages, StrataCafe. Most of the samples there use the Cartoon Single Color-setting and only a couple use outlines.

The Ravixx engine has multiple presets ranging from cartoon to gradient shading. If used properly, you'll get some beautiful results and the file sizes are extremely small if compared to other programs. It seems that it's only Electric Rain that has understood that file size matters on the web and in the Flash world. One major limitation is a bit annoying - you only have one color for the outlines. This setting applies to the whole scene, so for creating classic cartoon style output, you would have to edit this manually later. Other programs have chosen to use special textures for cartoon output that allows the user to select separate outline and fill colors.

Encounter with Strata Support
Flashmagazine received the Strata 3Dpro software a long time ago, so this review should have been published about a year ago. We originally planned on reviewing the Mac version, but we had problems rendering images. Every time we hit the render-button, the program abruptly quit. Strata support was very helpful at first, but then we heard nothing back. Without the possibility to render, we just cancelled the review. Some months ago they contacted us again and this time found what caused our problems.

Flashmagazine HQ is situated in Norway. In Norway and many other European countries we use Commas instead of Dot for floating point numbers. Strata 3Dpro did not check the OS to see what settings were used, and this caused the application to crash on the Mac. Be aware of this unless you are in the US. It is fairly typical for US companies not to check their applications on European machines even though they sell their products to other markets. To us Europeans, this just seems unprofessional. It took Strata a long time to figure out the problem, but in the end they were really helpful.

Overall impression
As with most of the programs available, these programs take a lot of time to learn. For this review, we have obviously not learned the whole program, just had a look at how it performs from a Flash perspective. The file sizes are very good, the output looks well if the model is right and rendering speed is fast even for complex geometry.

Many of our problems with the software may be related to the fact that we don't know the program well enough. If there are workarounds, you'll probably need to contact Strata support to figure them out. There is no use looking in the manual that comes with the program as the word SWF is not mentioned here.

Strata 3Dpro is a 3D modeling application with SWF output as an addon. Buying this program for doing simple 3D animations in Flash is overkill. If you need to do ordinary 3D work as well, this is a good budget choice that will get you quite far.
Click here to buy Strata 3Dpro from Amazon