This program is an excellent buy for $99 if it runs on your system as well as mine. It is a perfect introduction to 3D modeling for stills and animations, and can be used for almost any professional 3D rendering or animation task.

You may ask what does it have to do with fractals? Well, fractals can be used to generate landscapes, like random mountains, or even choppy oceans. RD3D doesn't do that by itself, but there are plug-in extensions that do, which you can buy for it. It also is compatible with a bucketload of standard imaging plug-ins for modifying textures and renderings, many of them free download. The package comes with demos of two of these for generating landscape features, one, I think, from fractals (Four Elements, $150, which renders land, air, water and fire surfaces and textures and bumpmaps), and one from meshes mapped from grayscale images (Supermesh, $100). These features are included in RD3D's big brother, RD Studio5 ($300, so you save $50 on these features alone).

RD3D is an almost complete 3D rendering and animation studio, and you can even make Jurassic Park caliber animations, but if you take on a project that big, you might as well have a more robust object modeler with inverse kinematics and stretchable surfaces for connecting the body parts of 'Momma', or she'll look funny, not angry! Even if you could import a wireframe skeleton for the entire T Rex, you would not be able to pick out sets of triangles on the surface and move them around for key events. Imported wireframes cannot be modified in any details except for position, orientation, scale, and possibly (if your wireframes are imported exactly right, ungrouped, as sets of 3D objects, without any incompatible DXF syntax or surface properties, which I found difficult to get right with my CAD program), shading textures and painted shapes on them.

As a benchmark, and a personal vision, I have created a CAD file for a geodesic dome house, that I wanted to render as a fly-through animation, or as an interactive VR experience. My CAD program could do all that except for one thing: the dome had tinted glass facets, each with different colors, like a fiery diamond. I call it the Giant Crystal. The experience of visiting a virtual reality version of my Giant Crystal would be very inspiring, so Rio's City commission will allow me to build it on a peak in Tijuca next to Corcovado, to honor the natural beauty of the world's largest single crystals, which come from Brazil's mines. (Dream on!) So with the opportunity to review and use RD3D, I immediately set to importing the CAD wireframe dxf files. Besides general difficulties throughout the Babel of dxf standards, RD3D basically only imports very simple ones, so I had to postpone the dome until I can remake every facet in the CAD file individually. Note that object vertex properties are inaccessible: only the hotpoint and center of an object can be positioned, scaled and oriented.

Installation is smooth, but I recommend you skip installing the above-mentioned extensions' demo versions, which never worked properly unless you pay for them. All they give is annoying popup reminders to buy and register them. Beware, also, of incompatibilities of RD3D on Windows 95 or NT with the QuickTime viewer control panel applet. My experience is the Apple Quicktime viewer has caused many a Windows graphics program to malfunction, and it cannot be uninstalled easily, forcing an OS reinstallation, or a surrender to not use the programs it causes to malfunction. There seems to be a pattern that graphical programs that are ported to both PC and Apple platforms, as RD3D is, run into trouble with QuickTime on the PC. In fact I had RD3D running smoothly on W95 until I made the fatal error of installing a QuickTime based multimedia program. Instead of reinstalling W95 I switched to an NTWS 4 computer and everything worked well there too, and will continue to do so as long as I avoid installing QuickTime! I also found it useful to copy the generous samples of 800+ models and 500+ shaders to my hard drive, instead of accessing these from the CDROM.

One of the first problems you need to correct is to have a fast CPU with lots of RAM and hard drive space. The program has its own spooler, the scratch disk, which can be set at any directory on your hard disks. It also has its own error dialogs, and crashes frequently unless you have lots of RAM and have taken steps to minimize the memory overloads, by reducing the default setting of 16 undo levels, avoiding multitasking, not installing the Windows environment icon thumbnail handler, and turning off screensavers. With 64 Megs of RAM, and a PII 300 MHz CPU, it performed excellently. In fact I am very impressed ( I even went and bought several other programs by Metacreations) by this program, after getting over the QuickTime problem, and the memory hurdle which the documentation helped in diagnosing, and I definitely will make the VR Giant Crystal fly through movie, and it can be exported by RD3D to a VRML file. There is another export output to a VRML file with the IVRM RealSpace Spherical Camera. A fisheye lens viewer is included on the CDROM. The program is capable of using hardware acceleration and also can use industry-standard plug-in rendering engines.

RD3D comes with scene and modeling wizards but only the logo creation wizard option is immediately useful. You can make ANY TrueType flying logo animation avi. Nevertheless, you still need to go through the tutorials and the manual and experiment for a few days. With the wizards you can start right away producing high quality renderings and animations, but it really pays to work through the tutorials and the 300+ page manual. This really is a fairly complete 3D rendering and animation package, and there are innumerable widgets and fine tuning points. Working through the manual and tutorials took at least 30 hours, with experimentation along the way. It is more rewarding to also have in your arsenal a nice 2D graphics program to create and import textures for the shaders, custom surface properties. And as you can even rotoscope avi and mov files on surfaces, such as when you map a live movie on a model of a TV screen in your animated 3D worlds, it is useful to have a video editing program to add your own. And a compatible CAD program to create arbitrary 3D objects that are imported into your 3D scenes. Post-production will require using a video-editing program to paste avi clips together and add sounds. Depending on the quantity and complexity of objects you put in the scene, the program will eventually have memory trouble. At this point I did on Windows 95 with 64 with a butterfly, a space shuttle, a grasshopper, a human head, and a double-decker bus. Even more troubles with memory happened when animations were rendered. I attempted to remedy this by reducing the number of undo levels from 16 to 4, and keeping the object browser in text view mode. And turning off screensavers. A noticeable improvement: fewer errors, crashes and warning boxes. From then on I rarely crashed the program.

The freeform modeler is really nice, but complicated and limited. You really need to think in 3D -- cross sections and twisters and rotations-- so even an astrophysicist could quickly get tied in knots. This is no fault of the program. Thinking in 3d is not as easy as we do it intuitively and unconsciously, and every step must be precise and all interrelationships must be anticipated, or you may end up with a jaggy blob, and parts flying in the wrong direction! The free form is fantastic, and takes a little juggling to move around in the views, but is a very intuitive use of cross sections, sweep paths and envelopes and Bezier-based interpolative envelopes.

Shaders are a really complex issue, and there are lots of them to choose from, including plug-ins. The area preview tool is invaluable for quick checks of the effects, since they depend on lighting that is not identical to the sample sphere in the shader editor and browser. I could easily apply textures and channels, even putting a tiger skin on my experimental freeform blobs. It helps to have lighting correct at this stage cause renders can be slow and not worth repeating later with mistakes in lighting and requiring a makeover. There is the complicated issue of scaling the object and the right texture map to get the proper match of size and pattern. What good is a tiger with too few or too many stripes? For some reason the status bar seems to spend a lot of time 'importing artwork' from shaders and I am not completely sure why, since the program is not stalling. Playing with the shaders and observing the given shaders shows a lot about how to tweak a shader to produce metallic, grainy or glassy surfaces for instance. Bump maps can produce a lot of effects. Reflection, transparency and refraction channels all do not show until rendered with ray tracing, such as applied in the render preview area tool, which is necessary to see the truest representation of the final effect of a shader. All objects can have shaded surface texture paint shapes added, like labels on beer bottles, but I did notice a bug painting on a cube, probably due to poor choice of mapping axes. It painted the opposite side you wanted!

Things get more complicated when you group objects and then switch to different key frames, especially the fact that groups being rescaled wreak havoc with other key frames. You have to go to each key frame and verify all the numerical data, being careful about unlocking the hot points. Plenty of confusion is possible to build in a few short steps! With some careful geometry thinking and planning and experimenting, and clarity of thought about the nature of groups and their members, I was able to manipulate groups using operations like resize, rotate and return to original geometry's. Undo levels can be more confusing than actually planning. So plan. By using parent-child linkages, you can create things like arms, where the hands follow the elbow and move independently too. There are no constraints other than the parent-child linkages. You still need to do some thinking in 3D and also you need to recognize the true nature of the system and motion of that which you are designing. There is no inverse kinematics, but there are a number of tweeners that you can fiddle with to imitate any desired natural motion, but you may need several extra keyframes if you want a specific, geometrically complex motion. You also can import sweep paths, envelopes and trajectories, mathematically precise ones, if you have a 2D graphics application with a mathematics script editor. You cannot impart rotations and key frame events to master objects. Master groups can be formed and they can be added to parent-child linkages. This makes the object hierarchy much easier for natural language. However linkages are not collapsible so you still get a cluttered hierarchy browser, but you can group them as an object that has an expandable icon. You can then save such groups as a master group to many layers of depth. Good luck keeping track of all the positions and motions! But it does work to many sublayers. Almost every step must be checked, debugged and double-checked carefully, since small (or not so small!) errors cause the animation to quickly diverge from your plans! Note however that most of the hierarchy is hidden and you need to know what you are doing. Even the tweeners are conserved. I am starting to believe there is more to gain from doing more with the coordinate system choice in the properties sheet- system, global local or machine. Boy, I never really wanted to get that deep until now. The documentation is spotty on this challenging 3D modeling subject. Einstein's relativistic frames are comparatively a piece of cake.

Lights and cameras at first pass seem intuitive and easy, but I needed to get a deeper understanding by reading the chapter on that. Following this chapter has begun to show the importance of good lights and cameras. What a difference in output! You also can judge just how realistic, or, if unrealistic, imaginary, your output is. When output can be very lifelike, and shadows and lighting are not natural, you know it. You even can open several windows with different camera viewpoints, or set cameras with one step at the places of spotlights to see if the light is covering the target as desired.

Animation keyframes can be applied to almost every object and property. Tweener behaviors include bouncing, oscillating, linear and Bezier curves. And they really work well. Rendering of stills or animations can be slow unless you use lossy file compression. There is even an option to use SMP services. The output is breathtaking!

Overall I rate this program one of the best I ever used, and a bargain. No joking, with a lot of time and a basic CAD program to create the T Rex positions, it can do as good as Spielberg. One thing I really learned using it so far, though, is that the mind-numbing plethora of features and options and widgets can stultify your creativity so that all you can imagine are aliens and dinosaurs and flowers and appliances. The program was designed to imitate 3D reality, and it does a good job at it.