Product ReviewsMultimedia software
Modelshop from Digital Element is an add-on for Photoshop that can best be described as clip art on steroids. Basically, it allows you to composite 3D models into any Photoshop document, complete with lighting and shadows. This gets around one of the main limitations of clip art: correctly matching perspective and shadows. Modelshop also handles masking and compositing for you. Modelshop is a Photoshop plug-in so has to go into the plug-ins folder, although we had a little trouble getting Photoshop to recognise it. When we put the entire Modelshop folder into the plug-ins folder, we couldn't access the plug-in. Installing the bare Modelshop plug-in worked fine, but we then couldn't access the PDF Help manual - that had to be manually transferred to the plug-ins folder as well. The Modelshop interface is loaded from the Filter menu, and comprises a large dialog box with a Preview pane on the left that contains a view of your Photoshop document. Next to this is a pane for the Scene Tree, an overview of the models you've loaded into Modelshop. Along the bottom is an area where you can set and add new lights to your scene, and along the top of the dialog is a long row of buttons that allow one-click access to View and Object Manipulation tools, as well as buttons for scene and object loading and management. Modelshop comes complete with 50 models in .3ds format (from 3D Studio Max, an application not available on the Mac). Modelshop should, however, have a means of browsing them - either an HTML solution or at least a Jpeg of what you're getting, as all file names are in the DOS-standard 8.3 format, which makes it almost impossible to understand what they mean. Still, the models you do get are generally high quality and fully texture-mapped. Modelshop can also use files in .dxf (standard 3D
One factor comes to the rescue here: there are many, many sites on the web offering 3D models, so you should be able to get a model that suits from somewhere. There's also a More Models button on the interface, which takes you to Digital Element's own web repository for 3D models, although this wasn't up and running at the time of writing. Once you have imported a model, you control its positioning in the Preview window. We would have preferred to see an all-in-one tumble/orbit tool here, though. There are also controls for scaling the objects. The Scene Tree allows you to turn object visibility on and off, and if the object is multi-part (layered), these sub-parts can be turned on and off as well. Furthermore, if your .3ds file contains animation data, a frame counter appears that lets you choose the object's position and so on at a particular frame count. The lighting pane lets you add as many lights as you need to match object lighting to scene lighting, and the interface for positioning light sources is extremely intuitive. Lights can be set to cast shadows or not, and Modelshop also supports shadow planes. These are invisible in the final render, but 'catch' any shadows that fall on them, allowing them to be composited into the final scene. This is extremely important for making objects sit properly in a composition. At the moment, only flat planes are supported, but it would be nice to define any object as a shadow catcher so that more convincing effects against complex backgrounds could be achieved. A Preview button allows you to see the fully rendered results of your efforts without having to dismiss the dialog - a nice touch. Once you're happy, click OK, and the object is rendered and composited into your scene. There's one drawback: the model is rendered directly onto your original image: it would be far better to have the object and shadows rendered to their own transparent layer to allow for more flexibility. In all, a few rough edges need to be ironed out, but Modelshop is an interesting first release. By Tim Danaher
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