Anyone Using Swift 3D?

[GaryR50]

I am thinking about getting Electric Rain's Swift 3D 4 for possible walk-throughs and fly-arounds. Swift uses Flash as its final output, which interests me because it is a format that almost everyone can view online without the need for special codecs, etc, just the Flash player. Also, Flash is optimized for smaller file sizes and quick downloading (though a friend of mine seems to disagree). Has anyone tried Swift 3D for raster animation? I understand that any version before 4 was probably not suitable for our use, but that 4 might be. Opinions?

 

http://www.swift3d.com/

 

Gary

[mbr]

I have the second version of Swift. It's a nice little program for online animations, but it is far from 'real' and cannot compete with a true 3D app.

 

From my experience, and it was a long time ago, you can't really do 'fly by's and walk throughs. It's made more for drag and drop rotating logos and imported Max models (and probably other apps by now) - they make one that integrates with Max's interface. You can literally drag various animations, drop them on your object, and it will spin, fly in, whatever. Pretty generic stuff compared to what you can do with Max, but for online, it's good.

 

File sizes are good compared to a full blown Quicktime, but it would still be several mbs to download a fly by, far too much to really be practical online. What's nice is that it is all vectors, so you can overlay in Flash, control the frames in Flash, scale, etc. If Flash is your program of choice and you will be putting everything online, it's a nice alternative, but for architecture viz, it's not good for anything but diagrammatical stuff.

 

My advice, assuming this is only for the web (otherwise simply stick to Quicktimes) I would use Sorensen Squeeze for the compression. IT's a great program for making Quicktimes part of Flash files and it gets the files smaller than anything.

[GaryR50]

While it's true version 4 still lacks any complex motion paths and is, thus, probably not suited to a full walkthrough, I think it might still useful for doing 360 rotating pans of individual rooms, as well as a rotating flyaround of the exterior. I'm only interested in using this for output for a website, not as a stand-alone movie or anything like that, so it should be suitable.

 

As for 3D, version 4 is better than previous versions, in that raster textures are supported and there is a full blown 3D modeling interface within Swift 3D that allows you to do, basically, anything you can do in Max. Speaking of Max, yes, there is a Max plugin, as well as a Lightwave plugin available. You can import 3DS and DXF objects, also.

 

Though the file size will probably tend to be larger, in version 4 you can definitely do photorealistic output. Check out the examples on the site. One thing I did notice is that any samples that were photorealistic are all still renders, rather than animations, so I suspect it falls short at putting anything with that level of lighting and texturing into motion. but then, most flythroughs in AVI, etc I've seen lately don't exactly approach Yafray rendering, either.

 

Gary

[mbr]

There are some impressive images on there, although I did not see any that were photoreal. It's come a long way.

 

Another consideration, albeit significantly more expensive, is Final Toon that comes with Final Render. You need to have Max, of course, but it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most powerful fill and line renderer out there. It can export to SWF (Flash files) as well as do countless styles of rendering. A great plugin.

 

http://www.finalrender.com/products/products.php?UD=10-7888-35-788&PID=37

 

http://www.metinseven.com/review_finaltoon_10.htm

[GaryR50]

Well, I guess what one considers "photorealistic" is a bit more subjective, these days, with everyone claiming their software produces "photorealistic" output. Admittedly, Swift 3D is not comparable with global illumination (because it doesn't have it), which is the new standard of photorealism, but it certainly stacks up favorably with most raytracers, save, perhaps, for those that do radiosity renders. Anyway, how realistic it has to be all depends upon what one needs the images for, in the first place. For most architects, still, something as banal as Artlantis seems to suffice. I think those who value GI most are in other fields, such as motion picture and TV production. Anyway, it's close enough to meet my needs.

 

I don't have Max, but, thanks for the tip, anyway. By the way, Swift 3D has a polygon modeling interface which is capable of duplicating most, if not all the modeling functions of Max.

 

Gary