Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved.
ractal
Design Detailer installed easily from its CD-ROM. This is a big
application that consumed nearly 50 MB of hard drive space. It is
available for the PC and the Mac. It requires Windows 95 or NT 4.0.
Unfortunately the Windows 95 uninstall feature doesn't work properly.
I usually try to verify that this feature is functional. Detailer is
a 3D paint program. The manual recommends 20 MB or more RAM. It also
includes Ray Dream Designer 4.1. I have not reviewed Ray Dream
Designer here because it is reviewed elsewhere on these pages. Check
the review of Ray Dream Studio.
Ignore the animation stuff at the end of the review. The Ray Dream
manual that comes with Detailer is identical to the one that comes
with Ray Dream Studio 4.1. The Ray Dream that comes with Detailer
does not include any animation capabilities. The Ray Dream Designer
that comes with Detailer does support Detailer's unique file
extension. Ray Dream Studio can be upgraded to support Detailer. The
cost is $9.95 for the upgrade.
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colorful, attractive Detailer manual is a little over 300 pages in
length. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Detailer. The resemblance
to Painter is apparent to those familiar with Painter. Some of the
tools on the toolbar apply to 3D only and others apply to 2D only.
The object selection tool at the top of the toolbar and the light
bulb icon are strictly 3D tools. 
The
lasso, rectangular and circular selection tools are for 2D only. The
tools are grayed out when they are unavailable. The virtual trackball
(second icon down) allows rotation of any 2D or 3D image. 3D images
can be rotated on any X, Y or Z axis. 2D images can be rotated in the
X and Y directions. Each time a tool is selected, the controls
palette (oblong tool box at the bottom) changes to provide
information about the tool. For example, when the virtual trackball
tool is selected and a 3D object is rotated, the controls palette
provides sliders that show in degrees the rotation of the object in
all 3 axis. Alternatively, an object may be precisely positioned by
moving the sliders to any degree desired. The magnifier, grabber,
dropper, brush and paint bucket tools work like they do in other
applications. When the text tool is selected, the control palette
allows the selection of font, font size and tracking. Both truetype
and postscript fonts are supported. Selection tools are rectangular,
oval or lasso. The shift key can be held down to achieve squares and
circles. The controls palette allows a lasso selection to be new,
additive or subtractive. Any part of an image that is selected can be
floated. The floater adjuster tool allows movement of floaters. The
control palette allows grouping of multiple floaters, moving floaters
to the front or behind, opacity control and many different
compositing methods.
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brushes palette and materials palette have drawers. These are handy
because they allow the user to have more screen area available when
they are closed. There are 19 different brushes and each has a subset
of preset characteristics. For example, the water color brush can
have broad water brush, diffuse water brush, large simple water
brush, large water brush, pure water brush, simple water brush,
spatter water brush, water brush stroke and wet eraser brush strokes.
The 5 most recently used brushes are available through the icons at
the top of the palette. Any of the 19 brushes may also have their
icons dragged into any of the 5 locations unless an icon is locked in
position. Icons can be locked by holding the mouse button down while
the cursor is over an icon until a green dot appears just below the
icon. They can be unlocked the same way. Detailer's icons don't have
any bubble help so it is somewhat irritating to try to figure out
what all these different brushes are. Fortunately they can be
selected from a pop up list by name. Unfortunately the list or icon
must be selected to discover what it is. Quite a few controls are
available for the brushes. Brushes can have just about any of their
parameters such as size and shape altered by accessing the drop down
menus on the brushes palette. There are 3 additional brush libraries
that can be loaded from the CD-ROM. Brushes can also be created and saved.
hile
the brushes palette is devoted strictly to brushes, the materials
palette is devoted to color, textures, objects, patterns and lights.
The textures and patterns have drawers. The objects and lights are
for 3D objects only. There are 26 built in textures and 8 more
libraries of textures for paper, stone, paint, wood, metal, etc.
There are 20 built in patterns with 11 more libraries on the CD-ROM
for scotch weave, stone, weave pattern, wood, metal, etc. Libraries
can be edited. Items can be deleted, added or moved between
libraries. Detailer supports plugins. My Alien skin, KPT 3 and 32 bit
Convolver plugins showed up on the effects menu. A few other filters
showed up that I have downloaded from the internet. Unfortunately
none of the terrific Adobe gallery effects filters showed up nor did
the KPT 2 filters. The remaining several pages of chapter 1 are
devoted to setting up the user preferences, making models Ray Dream
compatible, setting pen pressure sensitivity, undo levels, etc.
Detailer supports 32 levels of undo.
hapter
2 covers Detailer's basics and includes 3 tutorials. Primitive
models (box, sphere, cylinder, cone and cup) may be created within
Detailer. Ray Dream Designer models can be imported provided they
have been saved in Detailer's .vdu format. Models may have up to 240
separate objects with each object having its own color and surface
characteristics. Five types of two dimensional maps can be applied to
each object. Texture maps add color. Bump maps provide surface
relief. Highlight mask controls the highlights in different areas.
Reflection mask control reflections. Glow map is used for such things
as LED displays, lamps, etc. A model is placed in the model window.
It can then be moved left or right and up or down with the hand like
grabber, zoomed in or out with the zoom tool and rotated in 3D space
with the virtual trackball. The virtual trackball provides precise
location in degrees for all 3 axis. Alternatively the model can be
precisely located by sliding the axis sliders on the control palette.
The window drop down menu allows the user to set the 3D view size.
Model backgrounds may be set to any color. Imported images (.tif,
.pct, .psd, .bmp, .tga, .jpg, .pcx, .gif and .pyr) may also be used
for backgrounds. The window drop down menu also provides for hiding
and displaying the background. The object palette provides control of
the 5 maps. Any image in the .tif, .pct, .psd, .bmp, .tga, .jpg,
.pcx, .gif or .rif file formats can be used for any type of map.
Patterns and textures may also be used. The eye at the left end of
each map line can be clicked to open and close. When it is open the
map is applied and when closed the map isn't applied. The pencil
means the map is either active for editing or not active if it has
the red slash through it. An image may be rendered to any size at any
time. After the image is rendered it may be saved in any of the
aforementioned file formats. I found the rendering process to be
somewhat slow on my 133 MHz Pentium with 64 MB of RAM. A 1500 X 1500
pixel image took about 25 minutes to render into an 8.5 MB Photoshop
3 file. Rendered images may be composited in Detailer provided they
have been saved in a file format that retains the mask (.tif, .psd or
.rif). The image must be selected, copied then pasted into another
image. There is no drag and drop support.
All pages copyright © Roger A. Moncrief, Indepth Reviews, 1997
Thanks to Judy Gefter, !LuM! and Charles Blaquiere for their advice and counsel, some I heeded and some I didn't.