Pricey But Powerful, Byte-by-byte's 3-d Modeler Features a Speedy New Rendering Engine.
Ben Long
Reviews 3D Modelers/
POSITIONED AT THE HIGH end of the Macintosh 3-D market, Sculpt 3D is pricey ($1,495), but it's also powerful enough to let you create virtually any kind of 3-D object -- if you know what you're doing, that is. The new release, Sculpt 3D 4.0, features a much improved interface and support for several different kinds of curves, but it remains a difficult product to use. Still, the power and feature set of Sculpt 3D rival those of some of the best 3-D modelers for the Macintosh, such as AutoDesSys' Form*Z and VIDI's Presenter Professional, thanks in no small part to a speedy new rendering engine.
Pondering Perspectives
Modeling in Sculpt 3D takes place in three linked windows called the Tri View. Each window displays a view of your model along a different axis (x, y, or z), and a fourth window displays your scene rendered as it looks to your camera, called the Observer. By moving the Observer, you can render images of your scene from various perspectives. A simple palette gives you access to Sculpt 3D's tool set, and a new prompt line gives you context-sensitive instructions while you work.
Sculpt 3D offers a good selection of modeling tools (including primitive shapes such as circles, squares, cubes, and spheres). It also provides commands for creating lathes, extrusions, and lofts. Although these features are standard in most 3-D programs, Sculpt 3D actually sports more power than most other modelers in that it provides complete control over each vertex of an object.
Sculpt 3D is a polygonal-surface modeler rather than a spline-based modeler, such as Alias Sketch, or a solid modeler, such as Form*Z. Consequently, all of its surfaces are composed of small polygons. You can grab any vertex of any polygon and move it in any direction you like, which is precisely what makes Sculpt 3D at once a powerful and daunting program. Whole ranges of polygons can be selected and moved, duplicated, rotated, scaled, and a lot more. Sculpt 3D's impressive controls even let you assign a separate texture to each polygon in a model.
Although this level of control is powerful, it does not lend itself to manipulating curved surfaces easily. You select one of the four different kinds of curves that Sculpt 3D now supports -- NURBS, Bezier, B-spline, and arc -- and use it to extrude or lathe shapes into three dimensions. The curve tools function like the curve and pen tools in an illustration package. After you've shaped the curve and instructed Sculpt 3D to use it to create a 3-D shape, the program constructs a polygonal surface. You can still edit the curve at this point, however, with Sculpt 3D's nice mix of polygonal-modeling and spline controls.
Industrial Art
Sculpt 3D began life with a strong industrial-design focus, and the new version of the program builds on that strength. With excellent, simple controls for positioning and snapping objects to particular points in space, Sculpt 3D gives you a good deal of precision and makes it easy to align edges and surfaces.
Aside from its standard modeling tools, most of the program's modeling power resides in the Actions menu, with its simple commands for creating objects and performing modeling functions. You can create primitive shapes -- from hemispheres to cones -- numerically or with the mouse and access commands for lofting, twisting, extruding, extruding on a path, lathing, and welding surfaces together by using dialog boxes.
Sculpt 3D also has Boolean tools that enable you to carve one object with another or carve the shape of one object into another. Like most of the other functions in this program, these commands are lightning fast. In fact, Sculpt 3D operates as fast as any modeler you're likely to find on the Macintosh, particularly if you're running it on a Power Mac.
Scratching the Surface
For applying textures to your models, Sculpt 3D provides a mix of procedural (code-based) and surface (bitmapped) textures, which gives you plenty of power for creating realistic surfaces as well as a good interface for positioning those surfaces on an object. The product provides several procedural textures, including wood, marble, camouflage, and stripes. For those who want to create new textures themselves, Sculpt 3D has a somewhat confusing interface for texturing controls. For some imponderable reason, Byte-by-Byte has chosen to use nonstandard terms for just about everything related to textures. Transparency maps, for example, are referred to in Sculpt 3D as Transmission maps, and Specular maps have been defined as Glint maps.
When you're finally ready to render, you will find that Sculpt 3D has one of the best -- not to mention speediest -- ray tracers available. Because the program gives you exacting control over the smoothness of any set of polygons in your scene, it's a simple matter to optimize your models to get the most rendering speed without sacrificing quality.
It's a real shame that Sculpt 3D's power is hampered by such a nonstandard interface. Three-dimensional modeling is a complicated process no matter how good your software may be, and problems in Sculpt 3D's interface design end up making things even more confusing. The program has nonintuitive tools: For instance, using the pen tool (which works and acts like a Bezier curve), you define control points after you create the curve. In the more-standard graphics programs, you click and set your control points before you draw a Bezier curve. Having to create much of the image by using modal dialog boxes is awkward as well. Unfortunately, although Sculpt 3D's documentation is thorough, it will prove helpful only to those who are already 3-D experts; however, the new tutorial, a self-printing file on one of the disks, does ease the learning process somewhat.
The Bottom Line
Sculpt 3D may give you a lot of power, but it lags behind its main competitor, Form*Z, in ease of use. Although Form*Z also has a steep learning curve, it's more polished and has more modeling tools than Sculpt 3D. Form*Z doesn't have the rendering capabilities of Sculpt 3-D, but by the time you read this, a new version of Form*Z (which has a rendering engine and a higher price) may be a worthy challenger. But right now, if you need a modeler that can create absolutely anything and can render high-quality ray tracings fast, consider Sculpt 3D.
Sculpt 3D 4.0
Rating: (3.5 out of 5 mice) Average/Very Good
Price: $1,495 (list).
Pros: Vertex-level control over all points. Fast. Powerful ray tracer.
Sculpt 3D's three-window view lets you see along each axis of your scene. The fourth window displays a preview of your image from the perspective you've set.
Powerful texture controls are one of Sculpt 3D's strengths, although the program's texturing interface is far from simple to use.
