Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved. rena Design 2.5 is an inexpensive Windows based 3D modeling and animation application. The street price is about $100. The product is distributed by Andover Advanced Technologies, 532 Great Road, Acton, MA 01720, Phone: 508-635-5300, Fax: 508-635-5326, CompuServe: GO ANDOVER, 74774.1423@compuserve.com, click here for Andover's web page. Many image samples and avi files are available at their www site. he software comes on a CD-ROM with numerous examples, avi files, tutorial lessons, etc. It also includes a tutorial manual with 180 pages that is arranged in eight chapters. Arena Design requires a math coprocesser and a 600 X 800 pixel 256 color screen to work. It also requires at least 8 MB of RAM and 16 MB is recommended. A 486 microprocessor or higher is required. The application consumed 25 MB of hard drive space on my computer. Tutorial one covers all the basics of Windows, menus, dialog boxes, etc. Tutorial two introduces the user to the Arena Design 3D environment. It gives thumbnail scenarios of object modeling, complex object creation, animation creation, etc. Tutorial three is where the work begins. 2D objects are created and edited. A comparison is made between union and difference as it relates to 2D profiles. Union is an additive process and difference is a subtractive process. The snap feature is explored as is the copying and moving of objects. Zooming, panning and scaling of an object is also probed. hapter four discusses the creation and editing of 3D objects. Extrusion of a 2D profile is performed and lathing is also investigated. The creation of basic 3D objects is covered. Arena Design will easily create spheres, sphere segments, boxes, cones, boxes, 3D text, cylinders and n-gons. N-gons are multi-sided objects. After the mouse is clicked for the last time when creating a 3D object a dialog box appears that specifies the size, location, number of segments and other pertinent information regarding the object. This dialog box allows the user to do many different and powerful things if you know how. For example, pyramid is not one of the shapes that Arena Design creates. Yet it is very easy to create a pyramid by starting with a cone then specifying 4 segments in the dialog box. Columns that have any number of sides you may want can easily be created as cylinders then specifying the number of segments. All of this drawing takes place in the familiar 4 different window type view that can be customized to the user's taste. 3D text is also created in lesson four. Text can be beveled front and/or back to any degree desired. Any number of steps may be specified and each letter can be an individual object if you so chose. A pleasing smooth, rounded bevel is easily achieved by specifying many steps and a sharp flat bevel is also easily achieved by specifying one step. Tutorial four also acquaints the user with multiple planes, those mesh reference areas that objects are created upon. One of the projects performed in this tutorial is the creation of a teacup and a saucer. The union and difference commands are applied to circles and ellipses to create profiles that are lathed into the teacup and saucer. A new working plane is added to the side of the cup where a circle is drawn then lathed into a handle. Moving of solid objects is explored and the user discovers that object movement can be confined to any of the three directions available in the 3D world by using the tab key. Multiple objects may be moved by shift clicking. Object rotation is performed and the user discovers that any object may be rotated in any direction using a variety of pivot points. One object may be rotated in relation to another object by shift clicking. Objects may be scaled on one, two or three axis so that any dimensional measurement or proportion can be easily achieved. Even the working plane itself can be modified if the user wishes. hapter five begins with an exploration of the dozen varieties of viewport configurations. Any viewport can display any combination of top, bottom, left, right, front, back, metric view, custom view or camera view. Camera views are created and adjusted. The camera and its field of view can be adjusted any way the user might want. Tutorial five also has the user explore the manipulation of views. The adjust view icon is clicked and a dialog box with several icons appears. You can now manipulate the objects or the working plane by swiveling, rotating, zooming and tilting. The hierarchy concept is next explored with a dummy that is provided. The right arm group is created and it contains the right hand which is subordinate to the lower right arm which is subordinate to the upper right arm. utorial six begins with an exploration of materials. After some materials are selected and applied to objects, rendering is then explored. Arena Design performs shading and raytracing. The materials can be edited as to color, shading properties, lighting properties and mapping types. The user can also create separate libraries. Colors can be defined as interior, edge and highlight. Shading properties include flat, Gouraud and Phong. Shading also includes the interior of and objects and determines whether the interior will be wireframe or solid. Lighting properties include ambient, diffuse, specular, shininess, transparency and reflection. Mapping includes reflection controls, picture map controls and bump map controls. Tutorial six has the user create a box which is then made brown and mapped with a wood grain. The next step in tutorial six requires the user to create a cylinder, make it gold then map the Arena logo onto it. The logo background covers the gold so the background is made transparent therefore the gold shows through but the text remains. Planar, cylinder and spherical mapping is explored. Planar mapping requires the user to place a label on a box then position and size it to the desired standard. Cylindrical mapping, spherical mapping, tiling and bitmap repeating are also covered. These techniques allow the user to do whatever may be wished with labels or surface effects on an object. utorial seven covers lighting and rendering. Ambient light, spotlights and point lights are available. They may be made any color, any intensity, turned on or off, etc. The spotlight may be made of any angle up to 180 degrees. They may be positioned any where in the 3D environment. Shadows may be turned on or off. The rendering portion of this tutorial discusses flat, Gouraud and Phong shading. It also discusses ray tracing. The output image can be either 24 bit color or 256 color. The image size can be from 160 X 100 to 1024 X 768. utorial eight is the final tutorial and it covers animation. A file is loaded that contains a goal post and a soccer ball. The animation settings dialog box is opened and frame 14 of 30 total frames is made a key frame. The soccer ball is then moved to the top face of the goal post. The play button is clicked and from frame zero to frame 14 the ball smoothly soars from the floor to the goal post at frame 14 where it remains for the rest of the frames. The track editor is activated and the first key frame is copied to the last frame. The soccer ball will now bounce from the floor to the goal post and back to the floor again. The soccer ball is now compressed slightly as it strikes the goal post thus adding greater realism. The ball's path is straight so it doesn't look very realistic. The ball's return path is raised, the edit dialog box is activated and the tension, bias, continuity and ease in and ease out parameters are adjusted to increase realism. Additional frames are inserted into the animation and the ball is given a small bounce after it returns from the goal post. The track editor allows repeat movements, reverse movements, etc. The next step in tutorial eight involves the animation of a mannequin. The mannequin's leg is animated to kick the soccer ball. Further work is done creating various animations including animating cameras, light sources and backgrounds. Animation output can be rendered to Cinepak Codec by Radius, Intel Indeo video, Microsoft video, Microsoft RLE and full frames. On my computer the miro DC20 MJPEG option also showed up because of my frame grabber card. Each of these options have additional configuration options that are appropriate to their rendering methods. The output can be shaded or raytraced. Colors can be 24 bit or 256 colors. Output size options range from 160 X 100 to 1024 X 768. It will also output the .bmx file format in addition to avi. his software's usability is severely hampered by a very unfriendly interface. In fact the word processor I use (AmiPro) has far superior 2D drawing interface that this dedicated graphics application. Each time any object is drawn the "create" drop down menu has to be activated. There are no icons for shapes. Furthermore separate menu selections are required for square and rectangle and circle and elipse. You don't hold down the shift key to constrain objects as you can in other applications. To make matters worse you have to go to the drop down menu each time you want to draw another object. On top of all these aggravations you must hit the "G" key for the snap feature. Of course you must hit it each time you draw anything since it doesn't carry over to the next action. Drawing complex objects gets keyboard and mouse intensive real quick. As if this wasn't enough, there is no undo. Frankly this interface is all out of character for this otherwise powerful application. Roger A. Moncrief e-mail All pages copyright© Roger A. Moncrief, Indepth Reviews, 1997