October 10th 2002 | John Dalziel

VectorStyle v1

My first foray into graphics on the PC came in 1993 with the wonderful natural media tools of Fractal Design's Painter. A few years later the same company spun off a product called Detailer which let you use the same tools to paint directly onto a 3D object. Detailer was effectively a plug-in for their 3D modeller, Ray Dream Studio, and this became my introduction to 3D graphics.

What is it? a 3D vector renderer plug-in for Carrara Studio 2
Manufacturer: Eovia
Platforms: Win (NT4 sp3, 98, 2000, ME, XP), Mac OS (8, 9, X)
Requirements: Carrara Studio 2

Both Fractal and Ray Dream Studio have assumed new identities over the last few years. Fractal merged with Kai Krause and Meta Tools to become MetaCreations in 1997, and they went on to merge Ray Dream Studio with Infini-D to become Carrara - so far, so good. Then MetaCreations lost the plot a little and threw away everything to chase 3D on the web with Viewpoint - are you following all of this? One of the toys they threw out the pram was Carrara. So it was then that Eovia, a company formed by ex-MetaCreations employee Antoine Clappier, picked it up.

The reason I dig through the dirty laundry is that I feel they have come full circle. When I look at Carrara I get the same feeling about Eovia that I got from Fractal. This is a handful of talented people working predominantly on a single product, and making it beautiful. There is a maniacal attention to detail evident throughout the package.

Anyone familiar with the Kai-infused interfaces of Bryce and Poser will feel at home with Carrara. As with all custom GUIs though, you are either going to love it or hate it. For example, when I ran it from a laptop and changed from the laptop screen to an external monitor I found it didn't cope well with the changes in resolution. It may look beautiful but I found this annoying.

Strictly speaking this should be a review of VectorStyle v1, a new proprietary plug-in vector renderer for Carrara 2, but if you're a Flash developer you should think of it in terms of a single purchase. For a 3D package, its price-point is far lower than any of the big boys. Even Discreet's homegrown web solution is twice the price. I'll get to VectorStyle in a minute, but as you're going to need Carrara 2 to use it I'm going to run through this first.

Inside the box
You can't fault Eovia for their presentation. The packaging is luxurious and the accompanying manual runs to just short of 600 pages. There are two CDs: one install CD and another of libraries and assets. Also in the box is a registration card and a full colour quick reference card of keyboard shortcuts and navigation tips.

Installation
Installation was painless on both old (Win NT) and new platforms (Win XP). The footprint for a full install is about 163Mb. This is actually pretty small for a 3D program these days - a full install of 3DS Max for example can be over twice this.

First run
When you run Carrara 2 for the first time you are greeted with a couple of pop-ups, both of which are optional. The first is a registration box and the second, a quick product tour. This turned out to be eight short Flash movies about the basics, and six more for upgraders about the new features in version 2. These tutorials make learning the interface a lot less daunting. Interestingly for Flashers, the movies are essentially commented interface tutorials of the product in use and have been captured to .SWF from live sessions using Viewlet Builder

Eovia uses a workflow process that they call SmartFlow. In the case of Carrara 2 this boils down to 5 ordered steps: Assemble, Model, Texture, Animate and Render. This notion of rooms for each step of the process keeps the GUI from getting too busy and has become common to the big 3D packages.

Assemble
The first step in our SmartFlow process is to assemble the basic elements of our model. This consists of the usual primitives, spline modelling, meta ball modelling and a rather fun collection of toys including particles emitters, fog and fire. The package feels as though it wants to be played with and getting quick fun results is very easy.

Model
The model step is what I would call modifiers and deformations. It's here you take your primitive and bash it into shape. For polygonal primitives there is support for sub-divisional surfaces as you give it the usual nips and tucks. You can also play with fire, bend fog, build spline patch objects and play-doh your meta balls. Carrara 2 also comes with full support for bones, IK chains and physics. I found the physics very impressive and boning your model to be actually pretty easy. The back of the box blurb claims to handle 250,000+ polygon models with ease. I never got anywhere near this figure but the software renderer seemed happy to keep up with whatever I was doing.

Texture
The website also claims Carrara Studio comes with one of the most advanced texture editors ever created. . I suspect Ed Cattmul might want to take issue with that, but it is pretty damn tweakable. Most importantly, you can build up multiple layers of textures until you get just the effect you are looking for.

Animate
Animation is performed using the usual keyframe and tween method familiar to all Flash users. What may come as an interesting surprise to those unfamiliar with 3D packages is that pretty much any property can be tweened including modifiers and deformations. This opens up all sorts of interesting animation possibilities. Once you've set up your animation you can preview and tweak it using the storyboard view. This is really nice for getting a quick feel for the timings and rhythms of your piece.

Render
Carrara 2's renderer is blindingly fast and in the right hands can produce animation of truly cinematic quality. Anyone who's seen Brian Taylor's excellent Rustboy will be familiar with what the product is capable of. This new release brings the welcome addition of caustics, which will really do wonders for your final renders.

Okay, now onto rendering with VectorStyle.
As I explained earlier, VectorStyle is a proprietary vector renderer for Carrara 2. As well as .SWF it outputs to .EPS, .AI and .SVG. Installation was straight forward enough and there's a pretty good PDF manual to get you through all the controls.

VectorStyle uses Electric Rain's RAViX II rendering engine, which claims to render 10 times faster than competing products. Bizarrely, rendering to a .SWF file is not done through the render section at all, but is actually an additional format available under Save As in the file menu.

There are plenty of output options to tweak and toggle to strike that important balance between detail and filesize. There are three levels of outlines, five levels of cartoon shading and two of gradient shading, shadows and specular highlights. It can't really be awarded the best 3D web renderer yet due to the omission of any Shockwave output, but what it does, it does very well. I found the quality of the gradient matching in particular very impressive, the colours were correctly matched and the blends were good.

Summary
Carrara 2 boasts many of the features found only in the high-end packages, but at a fraction of the cost. The proprietary interface may not be to everyone's taste, but personally I warmed to it. Even without the plug-in it may be worth the investment given that Flash MX will now happily deliver video.

VectorStyle v1 makes an excellent addition to the product. It opens it up to the web community and I think this is a sensible move considering the pricepoint.

Visit Eovia