Product Reviews

It's been nearly two years since the release of Amorphium, a program that allows users to interactively sculpt meshes using a variety of brush-based tools. It was mainly aimed at users who were put off by the NURBS- and spline-based approach of other 3D modelling programs. Amorphium sported a very friendly interface, but was hampered by the fact that it was single window only.

Now Electric Image has brought out Amorphium Pro, with a new interface, more animation features and a beefed-up tool set. The redesigned interface now adheres to more 'conventional' standards and sports a quad view of the workspace, if so desired. But Amorphium still takes over the whole screen and replaces the menu bar with a row of text representing each of the different 'areas' of the workspace. Only the first item in this row has any menu attached to it, and the text is in a tiny, hard-to-read font.

The redesigned toolbars have large icons and pop-outs that can be torn off and left as floating palettes, but our copy sometimes crashed when we did this. If you put a torn-off palette in front of a window and click on the window, the window covers the palette, which seems self-defeating. Also, switching out of Amorphium Pro using the application icon in the top-right corner takes you back to the Finder's Application menu, but you can't select anything from it.

Amorphium Pro provides a set of mesh primitives

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that you can use as starting points for your models: sphere, cube, cone, torus and so on. Then it's a case of using the various areas' tools to hone your object. Having selected a primitive, the Tools area is where most users will begin modelling, as this is where you access the sculpting brushes. On the right is a palette of profiles that the brush will imprint or pull out of the surface. They can also paint parallel to the direction of view. You can set brushes to paint only on the side facing, to 'drill through' to the other side of the object or paint symmetrically. When we switched to OpenGL from SoftDraw, changes were made instantly on our G4.

There's also an FX mode, which has 35 different deformation and paint effects. These can produce some great effects, though meshes can get choppy the more they're deformed. There are Decimate and Smoothing tools, which can ease this. There are also metaball tools (Biospheres) and a new Wax object, which lets you extend geometry, rather than just deforming it.

Well rounded

Amorphium Pro really needs a graphics tablet to get the best out of it: the pressure sensitivity of the brushes gives extra finesse. While higher levels of detail than before are possible, Amorphium Pro still tends to turn out slightly rounded-looking objects. However, you can use the new Boolean tools to introduce sharp edges and creases.

You can export to various formats, including Electric Image FACT, DXF, LightWave .obj and Wavefront OBJ, and export with textures if the file format supports it. You can also export animations in Macromedia's Flash format.

Many users hoped Amorphium Pro would be to Electric Image what Alias' Artisan is to Maya but, despite its 'Pro' tag, it's not quite at that level of sophistication. Although it's fun to play with, the interface needs some significant improvements and there's still work to be done to improve its modelling.

NEEDS Mac OS 8.6, G3, 128Mb RAM

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