newtek's inspire 3d

Lightwave 3D has long been a favourite tool of broadcast and film animators, but it's price has put it out of reach for many. NewTek has responded by releasing what is essentially a cut-down version of Lightwave called Inspire 3D, at a much lower price point. The new version is aimed at multimedia producers, web page designers and hobbyists, so most of the features removed are those that would be of use to more demanding animators and broadcast professionals. So what do you get for your money? Quite a lot.

Opening the box reveals a couple of good sized manuals, one a Reference manual, the other a Users manual, a double CD case and... no dongle! Which immediately suggests that 3rd party plugins which check for the dongle are going to be of little use here, and most of the heavyweight ones do. Inside the CD case are the program CD, and a tutorial CD. First things first, into the tutorial disk.

I have to say, I have nothing but praise for this excellent multimedia CD. It contains an good overview of the history of animation, the basics of 3D animation, and Inspire itself. It also covers most of the other aspects of being a 3D animator such as the types of jobs to be found, putting together a demo reel and finding work. It provides a guide to the basics of Modeler and Layout, the two modules of Inspire, enough certainly for a user to feel a lot less intimidated when first running Inspire, and provides some great tutorials in Adobe Acrobat format to cover many of the aspects of actually using the program. Full marks to NewTek and Epic Software for the work that has gone into this disk - 3D first-timers will be off to a flying start. The content is beautifully presented with attractive graphics, used well.

The only problem I had was the 'installation'. The tutorial itself runs straight from the CD, but checks for the presence of Acrobat 3.0 and QuickTime on the host machine and tries to install them if they aren't found. On one machine, it sat for several minutes claiming it was trying to install Acrobat, then eventually did. On another machine it stopped on the QuickTime install and I eventually had to exit the tutorial and manually install QuickTime. All was then well.

Figure 1. The Layout screen. Figure 2. The Modeler screen.

Moving on to Inspire itself, it is very much a cut-down Lightwave 5.5, so I won't dwell too much on features the two have in common, but rather the differences. There are many LW 5.5 reviews out there, including my own on this site. Installation was straight forward.

Like LW, Inspire is split into a modeling module and an animation module. Objects are built and basic surfacing is assigned in Modeler then saved to disk, or exported directly to Layout where they can be textured, placed in a scene, animated and rendered. Inspire uses the same 'rendering engine' as LW, which most would consider a good thing I'm sure.

Inspire's modeler retains most of the power of LW. Only four layers can be used (LW has 10), and there is no option for numeric input when creating or editing objects, except for tools like 'Bevel' which absolutely rely on it. Numeric input is an odd thing to omit, particularly as Inspire is aimed at designers who often have plans in front of them which they need to reproduce to exact specifications. It tends to make modeling in Inspire a fairly freeform experience. The normal grid and co-ordinate readouts are present, so some accuracy is available, but it's a nuisance nonetheless. Some of this lost functionality can be regained using Inspires scripting language, but understandably, many designers will shy away from programming. Also dropped is loading a background image to model over, though the Illustrator import plugins lets you convert Illustrator and encapsulated postscript files to Inspire objects, which makes the conversion of logo's created in 2D illustration packages a snap. Logos and the like are often easier to construct in a program like Illustrator anyway, but importing character or product sketches is out.

Figure 3. The Tutorial CD provides a good overview of 3D both in general, and Inspire specifically. Figure 4. Volumetrics and Particle effects can be simulated.

Other than that, very few tools have been excluded. Metanurbs is fully supported, allowing the (relatively) easy creation of organic models, be they cars, creatures or corn-dogs. Metanurbs are a form of spline modeling which feels a lot like modeling with clay, allowing the manipulation of a low-density editing mesh to create a high-density finished object (Fig3) . It's animation partner 'metamation', which in LW allows you to use your low-density mesh to animate your finished mesh, is not supported in Inspire Layout. Booleans, bevels, magnets, twist, taper etc., cloning (paths and arrays), extrudes (path or rail) and splines are all supported so complex and sophisticated models can still be developed. Professional LW owners who don't like lugging their dongle around (who does?) might want to think about buying a copy of Inspire for home use. Handy for those late-night inspiration strikes.

Layout is Inspire's animation module. Restrictions which are immediately obvious are only two displacement, shader, pixel-filter and image-filter plugins. LW supports four, and with the abundance of plugins in all those classes, NewTek may like to think about increasing the number of both programs' plugins slots - maybe Inspire to four, and Lightwave to eight or unlimited. However you can still go a long way in Inspire before it becomes a serious handicap, at which point it's probably time to look at upgrading to Lightwave anyway. Inspire will only render animations at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480, deliberately just short of full broadcast resolution no doubt, and a maximum of 8000 x 8000 pixels for stills. Pixel aspect ratio is locked at 1. Other high-end features including network rendering, field rendering, inverse kinematics, morph gizmo (a weighted morphing system), particle systems, and volumetric rendering (Steamer in LW) are not included, though some can be 'faked' - see Fig 4. Animation support is still extensive : bones, displacement mapping, animated textures, spline-based keyframing of objects, lights and camera, and object morphing are all there. Glows, depth of field and extensive lens flares allow a sophisticated touch to be given Inspire images, while motion blur can be used either in animation, or to give a feeling of movement to print work.

Oddly multi-threaded rendering is included, for those with multi-CPU machines.

Inspire also has a few new tricks up it's sleeve. A Photoshop Filters plugins allows Photoshop filters to be applied to images as a post-process filter, which seems of dubious value given Photoshop's batch processing abilities. Hopefully a future version of the plugins will be applicable on a surface basis. Stereoscopic rendering is included, for all your LCD shutter glasses owners, and a plugins to generate Red-Blue stereo images too, for those with the cheaper variety of stereo eyewear.

OpenGL and Direct3D are both available in Layout and Modeler (See Figs 1 and 2), and are invaluable for placing textures and setting up lighting in Layout, and editing in Modeler. I found Direct3D to be about 3x slower than OpenGL on the two systems I tested on, but on some graphics cards Direct3D may prove more useful. Direct3D is only available on Windows96 systems. I tested Inspire on both Windows95 and Windows NT4 and it performed flawlessly on both. I had several crashes associated with switching between OpenGL and Wireframe modes in Layout though this may be a problem with my graphics card, I have observed the same problem in Lightwave at times, and it happened in both 95 and NT. My NT install of Inspire crashes if I try to run Inspire from the start menu, though it runs fine from the actual program directory. Some of the sample scenes have incorrect object and image paths, but Inspire prompts with a file requester if it can't find an object or image, so this is easily fixed. Annoying though. Problems like that should be picked up before shipping.

Figure 5. A logo created in Illustrator then imported to Modeler and rendered in Inspire.

Inspire's manuals are good. The Reference manual provides essentially a list of each function of the program and what it does as well as some technical addenda, while the User manual explains the features in a more practical fashion with plenty of examples and mini tutorials. When starting out you'll spend most of your time in the Users manual and as you become more experienced you're more likely to reach for the Reference manual. Inspire does not have online help. There are several third-party books on Lightwave which will also prove useful to Inspire users.

[Editor's note: Inspire is also available on the Macintosh platform but the manuals are very much written for the PC and a Mac user must keep the different keystroke setups firmly in mind to avoid getting lost]

At Inspires' recommended retail of $495, I would have to conclude that NewTek has a winner on it's hands here. For one quarter of the price, you get at least 90% of the functionality of Lightwave. NewTek offers an upgrade to Lightwave for the difference in price between the two packages, so there's little to loose when you exhaust Inspire's abilities and need a more powerful package. Web and multimedia designers and producers will appreciate the ease of use, an intuitive interface, a powerful modeler and the fast, attractive rendering. Hobbyists will appreciate the depth of features still available and will go a long way working with any aspect of 3D before they run into Inspire's limits. Anyone trying to break into the professional realm of 3D but without the budget for Lightwave can get a good start and could create a great reel with Inspire, and would be well prepared for a position using Lightwave in a studio. For anyone new to 3D the tutorial disk gives an excellent introduction to 3D that would let even someone who's never used a 3D package before get off to a flying start. 8/10.

product information

supplier	Newtek
web site	www.newtek.com
price	US $495
system requirements	Windows 486DX w/FPU, Pentium or better Windows 95 or NT 3.5 or later 32 MB system RAM (64+ MB recommended) Color Display (24-bit recommended) CD-ROM drive PowerMac PowerPC CPU System 7.6.1 or later 32 MB of application RAM (64+ MB recommended) Color Display (24-bit recommended) CD-ROM drive

Bill Boyce is a freelance animator living in New Zealand. Bill enjoys windsurfing, touch rugby and movies, is 5'9", and looks lousy in a swimsuit. You can contact Bill by email at bilboyce@ihug.co.nz and he has a homepage at homepages.ihug.co.nz/~bilboyce.


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