Customer Reviews

Amapi 3-D 5

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In terms of its interface and its overall power, Amapi 5 has become my second favorite modeler after TrueSpace 4 (which I have also reviewed in this forum). I gave Amapi 5 a short review in my review on Carrara 3 (see my Carrara 3 review), because my Carrara 3 software came bundled with this secondary modeler Amapi 5. But since I saw a separate listing for Amapi 5, I decided that it would be appropriate to give an in depth review for this modeler.

Amapi 5 has a fairly decent full screen interface which allows you to move around the object you are modeling and to move about the virtual space. The only thing I don't like about the interface is that you don't have the same freedom of movement as you do in TrueSpace. In TrueSpace you can move anywhere easily in the virtual 3D space, but in Amapi if you want to move away from your object there does not seem to be an easy way to move the viewer back and forth. Of course, to move the viewer forward and back away from the object, you use the zoom option. But I like the 3D viewer in TrueSpace because it offers you total freedom to move about the space as you are modeling and operating in it. But with only this limitation, I do like the interface of Amapi. Around the viewport you have a palette of commonly used tools at your fingertips and if you choose, you can choose an alternative arrangement of the tools depending on your working style. The menu is pretty straight forward and much of it is self explanatory.

Amapi has of course an array of primitives for modeling and editing. These primitives are fully editable and can be incorporated into any scene along with other objects.

Amapi supports the full array of editing tools including surface deforming, Boolean operations, scaling, rotation, bevel, extraction, copy, mirror, etc.

Amapi 5 does not support metaballs for organic modeling, but as an alternative it supports a wide array of spline and polyline tools and true NURBS modeling which are great for organic modeling. Here is where Amapi shines! It has tools that are hard to beat in other modelers. You can create surfaces using one, two, or three or more paths. Path extrusion in TrueSpace 4 is limited to one path at a time. In Amapi you can create a variety of surfaces, and these go by a variety of different names, such as the Catmull, Clark, Gordon, etc. I especially love the double sweeping tool where you create a cross section, and then you can create two different profiles and sweep the shapes to create a 3 dimensional surface. I modeled human legs using this tool. There are a variety of hulling tools which make it easy to create hulls of ships and such.

The drawing tools in Amapi makes it possible for you to draw on any two dimensional plane in the workspace and you can often extrude or sweep to create surfaces even if the curves are not touching or share the same point. You can draw in spline mode, polyline mode, sketch mode which is sort of between the two preceding, and also preset shapes such as circles (for lathing profiles), rectangles and squares, various arcs and curves, and helix. The workspace also has a grid (which can be turned on or off) and a virtual workbench where you can model your objects (this can be turned off too). And when you use the tools, the workspace generates an image of the coordinate axis with measuring lines on it so you can measure how high, how far over, how far front and back. Thus the environment in Amapi 5 is very visual. Even in rotation of the object, when the rotation tool appears, there is a circular grid that appears around the object which gives angle gradations and depending on how you move the viewer, it will allow you to rotate the object in the coordinate plane that is viewable from that angle or position in space. And if the default gradations are not fine enough for you, you can always adjust these for more precision. In addition there is also an option for numerical input.

The helix tool can create truly amazing spirals, including spirals with constant radius, but also spirals with increasing or decreasing radius, so you can easily create rope coils and such with this tool.

There is no special lathe tool in Amapi 5, but you can easily lathe using a circular cross section and a path extrusion tool or even the double sweep tool using mirror image profiles on both sides of the circular cross section.

Amapi also has a good selection of subdivision and smoothing tools. I you simply need to subdivide a polygon or to make a finer mesh, the tessellation tool will work fine. Amapi supports quad division and triangular tessellation and it divides a quadrilateral polygon into four triangles, using two straight diagonal lines. There are four types of surface smoothing techniques all of which can give beautiful organic shapes and with MetaNURBS you can control all such smoothed surfaces whether polygonal or true NURBS with the control mesh. The four smoothing techniques all give different types of surfaces with different types of meshes.

Amapi also has true NURBS. NURBS (anagram for Non Uniform Rational B-Splines) is a modeling technique using curved lines called spline curves. Bezier spline curves are created by drawing two dots or points on the screen and then having the computer plot a straight line or a curve on the screen between them and then using a control handle on one of the points, you can control how curvy the line appears between the two points. You can build shapes in three dimensions using this technique by modeling on the basis of spline curves and then controlling the whole thing with the control mesh. That is the mesh created from the points and straight lines that the computer created initially to draw the curvy lines between. The method is more computer resource intensive, but it results in very smooth organic shapes.

(TrueSpace 4 NURBS is similar to this, but it actually uses a subdivision technique rather than spline curves. Newer versions of TrueSpace however now implement true NURBS.)

In any case, NURBS modeling is great also for animations. You can modify the shape using the control mesh. Think of a marshmallow or a blob of gelatin inside of a glass box. If you change the shape of the glass box, the marshmallow will change shape with the shape of the box. This is the basic idea of controlling objects with a control mesh. The marshmallow is the NURBS object.

Amapi also includes other standard tools including 3D text, polygon manipulation, including the ability to delete and weld polygons together, you can cut polygons from a surface, copy them, etc.

On the down side, Amapi has a limited selection of lights. Basically you are limited to bulb lights, and infinite (sun) lights. If you need area lights for soft shadows, you would have to create an array of lights and group them together. If you need a spot light, you can create a bulb light and model an opaque object around it where you don't want the light to shine.

The renderer is capable of some realism, but again, you are limited here. Amapi 5 does not support volumetric lighting (simulating lighting in a dusty room or a foggy day), nor does it support radiosity (the ambient light caused by wave scattering and bouncing off of everywhere). Lens flares (such as when a light shines directly into the camera) and caustics (such as light through a magnifying glass) are not supported.

Character animation is also limited. Human and animal characters can be manipulated by such things as control meshes and control path manipulation, but Amapi does not support anything like "bones" in this version (I don't know about later versions).

But to make up for it, Amapi does have good export capability. You can export to popular formats such as *.dxf and *.3ds, and a few others. In which case you can export an organic created in Amapi and export it into another 3D application such as Carrara for example(whose format is also supported in Amapi) where "bones" and other tools are supported.

You have good texturing capability, and there is support for user made textures in *.bmp and *.jpg formats, but I don't think animated textures, backgrounds etc., are supported. I will continue to check into this, but nothing in the manual indicates that this can be done.

Animation, though simple is powerful. There is a basic key frame editor, and you can control all elements in the animation. You can animate lights, cameras, all motion of objects in the scene and deformations. Even though the key frame editor seems to be fairly simple in construction, it seems to "know" how to animate various aspects of motion. I wanted once to simultaneously move a sphere through space and rotate it. I was surprised at how easily that could be done! The software was able to distinguish my animation of rotation from my animation of motion and was able to key frame both. In most key frame editors you have an explicit layout of groups and what motions and animations are possible and whether animation has been enacted for that element. The key frame editor in Amapi 5 is much more simple than this - there is no explicit layout. It just consists of a frame timeline and a slider, but still you can do quite complex animations with it.

The only other criticism I have of Amapi 5 is that it is finicky. There are a few bugs in it which can make the program halt and bail. That is frustrating when you are working on something and then you do something that the program doesn't like and it causes an error and the system then closes the program. Be sure to save your work often and/ or use the backup option in the software. Fortunately, I have never had a problem with the system freezing with Amapi 5 as I have had with Poser 5 (also reviewed here in this forum), but the bugs can be a pain.

But in all, this is a good modeler. But I think it should be used in conjunction with other modelers. By itself it is capable of good and powerful modeling, but you'll be cheated in animation and rendering capabilities. All my modelers have their strengths and weaknesses and I have three so far and Poser 5. I am now working with Blender and Art of Illusion, two other modeler and animation packages, and they too have their strengths and weaknesses. Look around the internet and you'll see my artwork done with all of these modelers.

OUT OF ALL THE 3-D DESIGN PROGRAMES I HAVE USED THIS HAS THE BEST INTERFACE AND ALLOWS THE USER TO CREATE SOME AMAZING GRAPHICS