Product Reviews

Microspot Interiors is a 3D interior design and space planning application based on the same engine as the company's flagship product, 3D World. Its relatively low system requirements - any Power Mac with 16Mb of RAM running at least System 7.1.2, and £59 price tag - conceal a wealth of powerful features.

Microspot Interiors allows users to build rooms by creating walls and specifying their dimensions. Once the walls are built, a floor and ceiling can be added, although for obvious reasons, you won't want to add the ceiling until you're finished with the room. Walls and ceilings can be coloured using the standard colour wheel, and textures can be added, either from the Texture library or from textures which have been imported. Unhappily, only one colour or texture can be applied to the walls, so all the walls in a room must look the same.

Doors and windows are added by choosing the appropriate item from the library and dropping it onto the relevant wall. They can then be re-sized and positioned accurately.

Once the room shell has been built, furniture can be added. The Interiors' Library plug-in has a number of objects, ranging from sofas and beds to shelves and pictures. Objects can also be imported as 3DMF files. Objects can be re-sized, either by dragging a corner to the required size or by specifying dimensions in their Info window.

Positioning can be done by dragging and dropping, using the Nudge palette, or specifying co-ordinates. Usefully, the Gravity feature ensures that objects in a room sit either on the floor or on the object onto which they have been dropped, rather than floating in mid-air. Or at least it should do; we found that occasionally objects sat beneath the level of the floor. Objects can be edited to adjust the way in which they deal with light - reflectivity, transparency and shininess can all be altered.

Lighting can be controlled in a number of ways. The direction, position and intensity of

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the sun can be set, as can the hue of ambient light within a room. Lights are placed in a room in the same way as furniture and can have their settings adjusted in the same way as sunlight.

Rendering options are set in the Renderer palette, and there are three to choose from. The wireframe renderer does what its name suggests, while the interactive renderer renders solid walls and objects on the fly. When the interactive renderer is chosen, the Construct Idler option enables objects to turn into cubes during editing if rendering speed drops below four renders per second.

The third rendering option is the Microspot Renderer, a separate product supplied with Microspot Interiors in the shape of a System Extension. The results of renders using the Microspot Renderer are impressive, with specified lighting and object properties accurately displayed.

Despite Microspot's claim that Interiors' interface is easy to use, we found it unintuitive and, at times, highly frustrating; tools often failed to work in the way we expected, or actions, such as hitting the esc key, didn't have any effect at all.

The NaviCam palette provides a useful drag-and-drop method of navigating around a room. By manoeuvring two pointers along three axes, you can view the room from anywhere inside or outside, although you can't see through walls. You can also zoom in and out to view the room from any distance. However, we found the NaviCam confusing and difficult to use, as it behaved in ways that seemed bizarre at times, such as failing to move the camera in the expected direction. The rotate tool, too, is clunky and at times infuriatingly difficult to use.

Frustration is increased by the manual, supplied in PDF form only. While it's understandable at this price point, having to flip back and forth between manual and application adds to the difficulty in getting to grips with the application.

Microspot Interiors is undoubtedly a powerful and impressive application, but it's difficult to to see where it will find a market. Anyone needing a professional tool will be put off by the lack of flexibility, such as the inability to alter the colour of individual walls. Home users will find the learning curve steep and the interface difficult to get to grips with. One application for which it is well-suited, however, is visualising how a room will look when new furniture is put in, or existing furniture moved around. If this is what you want to do and you're prepared to get to know the application, then Interiors could be just the job.