Product Reviews

Piranesi is a rather clever application that can, in its simplest form, be used to apply hand-drawn and painted styles to 3D models. This is a capability that lends itself to architecture and interior design, where natural-media representations are often preferred over glossy photo-real renders. To achieve this, it makes use of its own EPiX (Extended Pixel) file format. EPiX files are 2D renders of scenes, but they contain extra channel information about objects, depth, orientation and materials. If your 3D program doesn't export EPiX, you can use the bundled Vedute application to do the translation.

EPiX allows Piranesi to selectively paint on 3D surfaces represented in a 2D file, which is quite a feat. To achieve this, Piranesi uses a series of locks. So you can, for instance, restrict paint only to surfaces that have the same orientation in the original model (the treads, but not the risers, on a flight of steps, for example); or you can restrict painting to a specific plane (painting the glass in a window, but not touching the glazing bars). Painting can also be restricted to material types and entire objects.

Piranesi uses the idea of Styles - preset brushes that produce a variety of media effects. You can build styles from scratch or you can use those supplied as the basis of your own. Version 4 now ships with a bonus CD containing a wide array of styles and cutouts, and you can download third-party collections from the web.

This latest version also boasts some new brush options in a new Dynamic Brush palette. These include Mark (brush tip) spread, Brush Angle spread and Colour spread. You can also set fade and opacity.

Piranesi

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4 sees some welcome additions to its interface. Tools now have keyboard shortcuts. You can now also zoom in on a Piranesi scene by any amount (but not zoom out - that's still in fixed increments), and there's even a Navigator pane that at first sight resembles Photoshop's. It doesn't work like it, though, as there's no continuous zoom slider: you still have to invoke the zoom tool, although you can use the Navigator panel to pan with any other tool selected. Scroll wheel mice can also be used to zoom in and out, but in practice the effect was far too jerky.

As well as its powerful painting toolset, Piranesi also contains compositing features, so you can easily place and scale scene elements such as people, trees and furniture. It's in this sphere that version 4 sees some of the biggest changes. The most impressive is its ability to integrate 3D models as cutouts directly into a scene. You can import models in 3DS, DXF and SKP formats and then move, rotate, scale and clip them to make them fit in a scene. Of course, Piranesi maintains the correct perspective of the cutout with respect to the rest of the scene. These cutouts remain fully editable until they are 'burned' into a scene. Once burned, they can be painted using Piranesi styles.

Text now also has 3D capabilities. It can be given a specific depth and an offset from the surface on which it's created. This allows the easy creation of things such as signage.

Another great time-saving feature in version 4 is the new illumination fades. These are like the old effects fades, but have been tweaked to act like light sources - Parallel, Point, Strip and Cone. These can be applied with just a click of a fill bucket. The Lighting fade attributes are highly customisable and can be set on the fly using rubber band indicators in the Piranesi scene. They're not as accurate as fully rendered lights in the original scene, but they're still good enough for most applications.

Although the online Help can be a little opaque at times, the new version includes much more tutorial material, as well as an updated set of QuickTime tutorials on the website and a downloadable demo version. Piranesi 4 is a great upgrade to this original and innovative application.