Customer Reviews

Strata 3D Pro

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great tool and you can't beat the price with a stick. It is very powerful and somewhat easy to pick up for anyone with CAD experience. I use it in conjunction with Vectorworks and can import models into Strata. The only deficiency is that it does not have any complex drawing tools for modeling complex shapes and so requires more cleverness in creating complex or architectural geometries. Overall, I highly recommend it.

If one buys the current release, 5.1, they will find that there is virutally no trouble with hardware Mac (Intel or other) or PC. Through the use of Smart Crash reporters - that send crash logs directly to support, Strata's programmers have nearly eliminated issues.

The tech support community is unmatched, with helpful and quick-responding forums - and since OS X has stabilized it is solid and depandable...not to mention outstanding rendering capabilities. I've built a small company on it, now in my 4th year.

The new Photoshop plug-ins are very cool.

If you want a 3D package that works, stay away from this one. I purchased te Strata CX Pro (version 4.0) and had nothing but problems. When I loaded it, and tried to open it, all it did was freeze up, and then the entire screen turned white. I posted on the StratasCafe forum, and received an immediate answer from a Strata Rep (good service for bad product) and received a link to a posting on the forum that explained in detail some major problems with Strata, which the company blames on the Graphics Accelerator card manufactureres. Apparenty if you have anything other than an onboard graphics system (built in to your main board) then you will have major problems with this program. Since there are so many different possibilities with these cards, nobody can quite explain what it is on each card that helps fix the problem. One person suggested to turn tha hrdware acceleration completely off, which allowed me to open the program, but everything moved really choppy and it was horrible (I have a 512mb graphics card). After battling with this program for awhile I gave it away (I couldn't justify re-selling a piece of junk like this) Hey folks, even Blender runds better than this ... you would be better off downloaded it from free at Blender.Org than shelling out more that the price of the plastic and cardboard for this sorry software.

And get this ... Strata puts all the blame on the graphics card manufacturers!!! I currently have laoded, and work in Newtek Lightwave 9.0, Carrara 3d Pro 5.0, Adobe Photoshop cs2, After Effects and Premier, Vue Infinite 5.0, Amapi 3d Pro 7.0, and several other programs, and I have never seen anything like this ... all the other programs on the market work just fine with all the major graphics accelerator cards.

So, in a nutshell, if you want to avoid wasting several weeks or months trying to get this up and running, don't buy it. If you have a generic storebought proprietary machine, this may be the product for you ... but don't buy it, wait until somebody like me gets frustrated with the incompetence of the programming and gives you a free copy!