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At a Glance |
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| Plasma 1.0 | |
|---|---|
| Rating |  |
| Company | Discreet |
| URL | www.discreet.com |
| Price | $650 |
| Pros | Impressive for the price. Reliable. Creates good-looking, small SWF files quickly. Offers bones and inverse kinematics, as well as physics simulation. |
| Cons | Steep learning curve. New plug-in architecture, so few existing plug-ins. No ultra-high quality SWF rendering mode. No post-render processing. |
You typically start a Plasma project by creating basic 3D objects, such as spheres, boxes, cones, pyramids, or capsules, which appear in one or more viewports. You can also create spray or snow—like particle systems.
You sculpt these objects by applying "modifiers" such as "bend," "twist," "ripple," and "mirror." Each modifier may have a number of configurable parameters that determine attributes, such as the angle of the bend or the amplitude of the ripple. You can also combine and connect objects in various ways.
You animate objects by changing properties such as position, rotation, or scale, along a timeline. You can also animate modifiers, changing the amplitude of a ripple over time, for instance. Plasma also supports "bones" (skeleton-like assemblies used to control characters), and inverse kinematics (which, for instance, makes the character's arm move appropriately when the hand reaches for something).
 [click for larger image] The man on the left is an AVI produced by 3DS Max 5. The man on the right is the corresponding SWF produced by Plasma. (source: Curious Labs Poser) |
Your final steps within Plasma are positioning a camera, creating and adjusting lighting, and rendering your scene to a SWF file. Plasma also renders bitmap files, such as QuickTime (MOV) and Windows Video (AVI), and exports to 3D file formats, including AutoCad (DXF) and Shockwave 3D (W3D). It can import 3DS, DXF and W3D files, among others.
Finally, to create fully interactive 3D content such as a navigation bar, you can bring your content into the Macromedia Flash authoring tool and apply behaviors using ActionScript.
The interface is well-organized and similar to Adobe Photoshop. The timeline and some associated controls are on the bottom, and it's quite straightforward—less complex than the timeline in Adobe Premiere, for example. Options typically show up only when you need to deal with them. For instance, when you apply a particular modifier, the rollout for that modifier shows up in the dockable panel on the right, with the parameters that you can set for that particular modifier. Discreet has achieved a nice balance between making things accessible when you need them and keeping them out of the way when they would be useless clutter.
Plasma worked reliably and efficiently for me, producing small, good-looking SWFs as shown in Figure 3. It "played nice" with other programs, importing 3DS and DXF files, and exporting W3D files to Director 8.5, with no problems. Note that Plasma is basically a scaled-down version of 3DS Max 4, with SWF output added. As such, all Plasma's features have had extensive real-world testing. Plasma gets high marks in all of the basics: reliability, speed, file size, and appearance.
If you already own and use 3DS Max, Plasma is not for you. 3DS Max users can simply render bitmap files, such as AVI files, with 3DS Max and then translate those files into SWFs in one of two ways. First, you can import the AVI directly into the Flash MX authoring environment—a solution which limits you to the Flash 6 player (not good, because many people haven't upgraded to it yet) and doesn't usually give you the smallest possible SWF. Alternately, you can use a relatively inexpensive third-party program like Sorenson Squeeze or Wildform's Flix Pro 3 for AVI-to-SWF translation.
If you live and breathe 3D, 3DS Max is a worthwhile investment. However, for Web-specific needs, Plasma is a highly capable 3D modeling and animation tool designed to deliver Web content at a reasonable price. It fills a niche that nobody had addressed before.
Michael Hurwicz is a coauthor of Using Flash MX from Que books, and is the Flash guy with Late Night Design. Contact him at [email protected].
