Sculpt 3D is the Macintosh port of the first Amiga raytracing 3D app of the same name.
Despite excellent modeling and rendering tools, Sculpt 3Ds price and arcane interface have limited its appeal to a loyal following of industrial designers and architects. With the latest version, the program is ready for the mainstream: not only has Byte by Byte integrated standard Mac-interface elements and dropped the price, but it’s added an animation package that used to be sold separately. The result is an excellent, if idiosyncratic, 3-D design program that presents a more familiar face to Macintosh users and is less intimidating to novices.
Sculpt 3D still marches to the beat of its own drummer, though, starting with the way it builds objects. In most 3-D programs, a vertex is simply a handle on an object's surface, such as a corner on a cube or a point on a faceted sphere. In Sculpt 3D, vertices are basic construction elements that can be placed anywhere in space. Join two vertices with a line and you create an edge; connect three into a triangle and you get a face. The program gives you complete control over the contours of an object, letting you select elements individually. Sculpt 3D doesn't force you to work at this nuts-and-bolts level, but it does let you build complicated model surfaces one vertex at a time. In practice, this CAD-like object structure provides exceptional modeling flexibility. Sculpt 3D lets you build curved objects using various spline types and extrude, lathe, and loft 2-D outlines into 3-D objects. You can also apply Boolean functions to 3-D objects by trimming the surfaces of the intersecting shapes, or produce standard shapes such as cubes, spheres, and cylinders. These shapes share Sculpt 3D's ohjcct structure, making them fully editable starting points for more complex constructions.
Instead of the earlier versions' menu commands, Sculpt 3D 4.1 puts its object-building tools on an unobtrusive palette reminiscent of the original Mac Draw interface. But although interface enhancements have made Sculpt 3D more accessible, the program retains its idiosyncrasies. For example, object-editing operations are accessible only from the Actions submenu of the Scene menu. Sculpt 3D can produce exquisite ray tracings and has excellent controls for lighting and for calibrating surface attributes, such as reflectivity, transparency, and roughness. You can edit the programs built-in procedural textures by selecting attributes from pop-up menus, while graphical controls lot advanced users finetune individual surface effects according to the angle of view. The dialogs may look simple, but don’t he fooled; Sculpt 3D's texture-editing controls are as sophisticated as any of its competitors.
The same can't be said for Sculpt 3Ds animation component, which is suitable for architectural-style fly-throughs but not much else. You can move the camera (or its target point) along a path through the scene, but you can’t move individual objects or animate their surfaces.
This version of Sculpt 3D lacks a printed manual, but it does include a tutorial and a thorough online manual. Given the program's price reduction, having to print your own hard copy is only a minor inconvenience.
The Last Word
If you’re willing to be somewhat accommodating in your modeling style, Sculpt 3D will reward you with exceptional tools suitable for complex modeling tasks. But with its new, lower price and simpler interface, Sculpt 3D is no longer for techies only.
Domingo Martinez, Carlos. (September 1996). Sculpt 3D 4.1. Macworld. (pg. 81).
Byte by Byte
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sculpt_3d_4.1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
