Electric Rain, Inc. announced the release of two new plug-ins for LightWave 3D and Discreet 3ds max users. The Swift 3D LW plug-in allows LightWave 3D users to render 3D scenes directly to a variety of vector-based file formats, including Flash (SWF), AI, EPS and the new XML-based SVG. Similarly, the Swift 3D MAX plug-in allows 3ds max users the ability to render 3D scenes directly from the 3ds max interface to the same set of vector-based file formats. Both plug-ins provide high accuracy 3D scene rendering, while staying true to colors, lighting schemes, camera views and animations. The company boasts that their proprietary vector rendering technology, RAViX II, renders up to 10 times faster than other 3D-to-vector rendering products on the market. Each plug-in supports an extensive array of rendering options such as 3 levels of outlines, 5 levels of cartoon shading, 2 levels of gradient shading, specular highlights, plus shadows and a full previewer window where users can see the results of each rendered frame. They can each handle models with more than 200,000 polygons, including complex intersecting and self-intersecting objects. The resulting files are fully optimized; users do not need to use other applications, such as Flash, to perform the optimization. Swift 3D LW is now available on the Windows and Macintosh platforms and is compatible with LightWave 3D versions 6.5 and above. Swift 3D MAX is now available on the Windows platform and is compatible with 3ds max versions 3, 3.1 and 4. For more information visit the Electric Rain Website at www.erain.com.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
