Informatix Piranesi 3 review

All this is possible in Standard rendering mode, but Piranesi has four other modes with powerful creative potential. With Edges rendering you can pull out changes in depth or material as outlines and control the balance between silhouette and internal edges. In Construct mode you can add 3D planes based on the existing image to extend walls or add elements such as hedges or railings. Then Filter rendering provides the capability to apply blur, emboss, jitter and halftone effects along with basic colour adjustments.

The most useful, however, is the Restore mode, which lets you store the current version of your image to the Restore channel, and then use this as the basis of rendering. So you could, for example, clear your canvas, pull back the outline, apply a jitter effect to make the lines look more hand-drawn and then paint on a loose colour-wash clone of your original. The end result is a work of art of which Piranesi himself would be proud. Even better, by saving your brush and fill settings as styles you can quickly apply the same artistic effect to a whole sequence of EPix files drawn from the same 3D model.

No one could claim that Piranesi is an intuitive or easy-to-master application, but it does break new ground and provide new power. If you're interested in producing realistic or artistic 3D scenes, Piranesi should feature high on your shortlist.

Author: Tom Arah