Amorphium Pro 3.0

Amorphium started life during the period when Electric Image Inc was owned by the now defunct Play Inc (maker of the Trinity video system). It was aimed at the consumer/semi-pro market and was fun to use, despite a rather clunky interface. Since then, Electric Image has restated its position in the professional arena with its flagship app, EI Universe, and taken Amorphium Pro to a new level of functionality in this third iteration.

This program is primarily a 3D sculpting tool - but it has continually been refined to include a wider range of tools, including full texturing and materials, animation, and even radiosity rendering. While not a replacement for a fully featured 3D animation system like Universe, it's still a useful adjunct to any existing package. It's also perfectly capable of being used on some projects from start to finish - just don't expect to be able to use it all the time on everything. It has some decent film credits to its name (the Austin Powers movies, for instance), proving that it can work with the high-res models required for such tasks.

There are a few new features in this release, but not a huge amount. Probably the biggest single new addition is Tin. This is the Amorphium name for Subdivision Surfaces modelling and is almost identical to the system found in the EI Universe Modeler. The system uses the loop method of SDS that supports n-sided polygons; you're not limited to tris and quads, although it's usually best to keep a tidy mesh and quads are the best way to do this.

What it does do well, however, is render to Flash format. This makes Amorphium a good way to get 3D animations on the Web, albeit in a very stylised way. Nevertheless, the creative possibilities are great.

On OS X, the app proved stable; it didn't crash or hang, but we did experience one serious problem where dialogs stopped appearing, apart from their shadows. The invisible dialogs could not be dismissed but they could be opened multiple times (you can tell by the shadow getting blacker and blacker, and the list of windows getting longer in Amorphium's Dock pop-up menu). This sounds minor, until you get to a Save dialog. At this point, we were unable to save our work and had to kill the app. This is a bug that needs to be squashed as soon as possible.

Amorphium Pro 3.0 is a fairly good 3D package, but it's not to be confused with a fully fledged pro 3D system such as Cinema 4D R8 (the core version of which offers a phenomenal amount of pro-level feature for very little dough). As we said, it can be used alone for some kinds of project, but you really wouldn't want to be stuck with it as your only 3D option. As an extra tool in your 3D tool chest, though, it's a good buy.

The full version of this review can be found in the latest issue of Computer Arts, on sale until March 20 2003. Get your copy now for more reviews of FreeHand, Final Cut Express and Swift 3D MAX. Plus tutorials for Photoshop, After Effects and Flash.