Wave Issue 9611 10/25/96 Article 3-01

***Macromedia: Extreme 3D
by David Lohse

Sitting squarely in the mid-range of PC 3D modeling and animation
products, Extreme 3D 1.0 was released in January of this year. It was an
important entry into the market due to its developer, Macromedia, a long-
standing front-runner in the desktop graphics markets with its heavy-
hitters Freehand and Director (as well as its more recent push into the
Internet market with Shockwave).

Under both Macromedia's reputation in the desktop graphics market, as
well as through bundling with their other products, Macromedia claims a
top spot in PC 3D authoring software. According to WAVE's contact with
Rix Kramlich, the Senior Product Manager for 3D Products at Macromedia,
"Between standalone, FreeHand Graphics Studio & Director Multimedia
Studio bundles we have seeded the market with over 100K+ units." Although
100,000 units is an impressive figure, it should be taken in context:
many of those units are through bundling deals with Macromedia's very
popular graphics and editing packages, and it is likely that some of the
copies of Extreme 3D are waiting to be used.

Extreme 3D 1.0 fits within middle of the mid-range of PC 3D modeling and
animation products, with a price tag around $500, and competing with
products such as Caligari's trueSpace2 and Byte by Byte's SoftF/X. Now,
only 10 months after the release of version 1.0, they have announced the
next generation product Extreme 3D 2.0. Along with several important new
features, as well as tight integration with both Freehand and Director,
Extreme 3D has been elevated into the upper tier of the mid-range market
on the PC, brining it almost up to par with products such as NewTek's
LightWave 3D. Lacking only integration with a video editing system
(Macromedia's long-coming video editing product is still in development),
Extreme 3D 2.0 stands poised to enter the production-quality modeling and
animation arena.

Extreme 3D 2.0 offers a slew of new features. Primary among these are two
new features, which according to Macromedia are unique in the industry:
the Metaform Tool, which extends the metaballs tools found in other
programs to allow the use of arbitrary blobs rather than being confined
to spherical ones; and the Particle Tool, which allows any 3D shape to
act as a particle emitter. Other features include VRML 1.0 and 2.0
support, extensibility through the MIX and MOA architectures, and
hardware acceleration through Direct3D and QuickDraw 3D. Pricing has not
been announced. Extreme 3D 2.0 is scheduled for release in November.

www.macromedia.com/software/extreme3d/quicktour/