Pixar Typestry's approachable interface, animation support, and outstanding RenderMan rendering technology have made it a popular choice among graphic designers and QuickTime movie producers needing to create 3-D text effects.
Typestry 2.0 improves on the original version’s straightforward operating style and adds some significant new features. Typestry 2.0 can import images in Adobe Illustrator 3.0 (and later) format, enabling you to add 3-D effects to logos and the like. New object-building options let you place letters on tube shapes and on “rubber sheets,” which bend and flutter in a variable digital wind. Typestry’s animation capabilities let you animate flags that flutter, distorting their text as they wave. The new particle system simulates everything from fireworks to bubbles to falling snowflakes.
Like its predecessor, Typestry 2.0 opens with an untitled window and a tool palette for creating new text objects and for moving, rotating, and resizing them. Creating a text object involves clicking on the text tool to display the text dialog box, which lets you specify the depth of the text and choose a font from a pop-up menu. Typestry’s biggest limitation — one that I pointed out when I reviewed version 1.0 — is that you can’t access stylistic variants of a font (italic, bold, bold italic) unless you’ve installed the screen fonts for those variants. Most PostScript Type 1 fonts include screen fonts for style variants, but TrueType fonts don’t, so you’re limited to using the plain style of a TrueType font.
You can bevel type characters to produce a rounded, routed-out, or sharpedged appearance, and you can now create and save custom bevel shapes. You can also now customize Typestry’s looks — its library of dozens of surface properties such as chrome, bricks, and stucco. (Pixar One Twenty Eight, a CD-ROM containing 128 additional textures, is available for $299 list price.)
Typestry’s already excellent lighting features — nine front lights and nine back lights — are largely unchanged in version 2.0, except for the inclusion of a new light that adds reflections to shiny objects. It’s easy to experiment with coloring and repositioning lights and with adding gels, to cast shadows that simulate Venetian blinds, spotlights, windowpanes, and more. Residents of London and Los Angeles will be glad to know that Typestry’s electronic atmosphere now includes fog and haze effects.
Typestry 2.0’s animation features, on the other hand, are greatly improved. You still alternate between moving objects and creating keyframes, letting the program tween the required intermediate frames. But the new Score window provides better control over keyframes and makes it easier to ungroup text objects so that characters move individually.
The new, full-color manual — loaded with step-by-step instructions, practical tips, and a detailed index — is a vast improvement over Typestry 1.0’s friendly and informative but poorly organized and unindexed manual.
Typestry 2.0 requires roughly 5.3MB of free memory, but 10MB or more is better; an 8MB Mac can easily run out of memory when rendering an image at highest quality settings. Still, in my tests the program was rock-solid, even when I switched between other applications while rendering in the background. If you want to create 3-D text for a page layout, a multimedia production, or a QuickTime movie, you want Typestry 2.0.
Heid, Jim. (June 1994). Typestry 2.0. Macworld. (pg. 69).
Pixar Typestry 2.1.1
Pixar
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
167 / 
2014-04-14 / 
38dde85b50f49d2c8b9a8d9ccaed98ee6e201151 / 
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pixar_typestry_2.1.1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
