Electric Rain, Inc. has announced the release of Swift 3D version 3.0, a standalone application allowing designers to build and export 3D animations to the Macromedia Flash (SWF) file format, as well as other major vector and raster formats. This latest version provides realistic vector rendering with new RAViX III rendering options, photo-quality raster export and SmartLayer Technology for direct integration with Macromedia Flash MX. SmartLayer technology works in conjunction with the Swift 3D Importer plug-in for Macromedia Flash MX enabling users to render 3D scenes to a proprietary file format. Files can then be imported directly into Flash MX libraries with various aspects of the scene broken out into individual layers. Swift 3D V3 also features the EMO ray tracing rendering engine, which enables the use of bitmap textures within 3D scenes, and supports ultra-realistic rendering output with transparency, reflection and refraction. Swift 3D V3 exports raster images and animations to the JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and TGA file formats, as well as Macromedia Flash (SWF). Additional Swift 3D V3 features include path animation for shape morphing of extrusions and lathed objects, the conversion of text to paths for font customization and morphing, scene hierarchy for creating parent/child relationships and complex animations, and auto-shape tools for easy extrusion modeling. Swift 3D V3 is available on the Windows and Macintosh platforms for a suggested retail price of US$169 for the download and boxed CD version. For more information visit www.erain.com.
