Ray Dream has thrown everything but the Idtchen sink into the latest version of its flagship 3D animation program, Ray Dream Studio 5.0. With features such as physics simulation, inverse kinematics, and 3D painting, Ray Dream Studio 5.0 rivals most high-end 3D programs in number and diversity of features. But Ray Dream Studio is not a high-end program. It lacks the speed and the level of control necessary for true high-quality production.
Ray Dream Studio 5.0’s most important new feature is physics simulation, the ability to make a 3D object interact with its environment in a physically realistic way. This takes two forms: general collision detection for use m the 3D workspace; and specialized physical behaviors, such as elasticity and rebound, that can be applied individually to an object. With physics simulation, you can animate motions that would be nearly impossible to create with keyframe animation. Ray Dream Studio 5.0 is the only M-featured animation program for the Mac with this capability.
If you’ve used other 3D programs, you may be disoriented at first by Ray Dream Studio’s unusual workspace. Instead of giving you the standard front/right/top/perspective view, it displays a three-way grid with bounding-box projections of objects in the scene. Although this is not an inherently inferior way of showing object placement, it does have its drawbacks. For one, if you wish to see your scene from any of the standard views, you’ll have to put a camera there yourself.
In addition to Ray Dream Studio’s free-form modeler, which creates spline objects by extruding cross sections along a path, there’s a new mesh-form modeler that lets you edit polygons and vertices individually or as a group. Deformers offer deformation effects without opening the modeler. In Ray Dream Studio 4, deformers could be manipulated only with numeric sliders. Now, they all can be manipulated directly within the workspace.
Ray Dream Studio also supplies one of the most important features to character animators: inverse kinematics (IK). Ray Dream Studio’s IK is quite good, automatically setting keyframes for the intermediate objects in an IK chain. Although it was slow at times (even on a 200MHz system) , it was easier to set up than many other IK systems. Ray Dream Studio’s direct-manipulation tools allow you to adjust joint constraints without the usual trial and error.
Animation is controlled through the Total Control Timeline, and yes, it does give you just about total control, because almost all attributes have their own timeline. But the Tweeners, which control the motion transition between keyframes, don’t give you the same fine control as velocity graphs or function curves in other 3D programs.
Ray Dream Studio 5.0’s texturing abilities are strong. Both procedural surfaces and image mapping are supported and can be combined into Shaders, with a different image or procedure possible for each channel (bumps, specularity, color). Multiple textures can be mixed, with another texture used to dictate the blend between them, then applied as paint objects to object surfaces in a variety of shapes. You also can draw directly on an object with a variety of brushes, but in practice, Ray Dream Studio 5.0’s 3D painting was incredibly slow. Alpha channel support in image maps is still sorely needed for pro-level work.
Rendering in Ray Dream Studio is reasonably fast, and the quality is good if somewhat plastic-looking. In addition, the new natural-media effects impart a hand-drawn look to renderings. Redraw speed in the workspace is another story. Ray Dream Studio 5.0’s own real-time rendering engine gives good interactivity with simpler objects but bogs down with more complex objects. Ray Dream Studio 5.0 feels very sluggish when working with large scenes, even on a 200MHz 604e.
Anzovin, Raf. (October 1997). Ray Dream Studio 5.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 60-61).
MetaCreations Corporation
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
104 / 
2015-08-14 / 
218821c3f97c36dded58003d9cfbb6f29f087b48 / 
/ 
RayDreamStudio_5.0.2_Update.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
