Strata Design 3D CX 6: the designers’ key to unlock 3D

Special Effects

Strata has a whole range of special effects options that range from particle effects, to hair and fur, to lighting and flare effects. Obviously you can also create your own version of these effects by selecting “new” from the resources panel and choosing an effect type. It would reach too far to describe each of these effects in detail here. I have added an image where I have applied one to the transistor radio that I have used through this review (and which is a library model included with the software).

Lighting Essentials

Apart from placing light objects in your scene you can set environmental options from the Environment window. In fact Strata Design already does some of the work for you with every new scene that you create. By default one distant light source is automatically placed on the environment sphere. This is done because otherwise you would see nothing in your rendered view! However once you become familiar with the tools in Strata Design you will often not use these generalized lighting tools but pick the more controllable light sources from the tool palette like the spotlight and the point light. One option there however is important if you use Strata’s Raydiosity rendering to calculate your images and that is the Light dome. There you can set an image that will light your scene using the image brightness values. Strata Design supports HDR images for rendering so these can help greatly enhance the realism in the scene.

There are however some more tabs to fine tune your scene here in the environment window. They are located in the other tabs. These allow you to control options for setting background colors or images, reflected environments for the whole scene (remember that you can set reflected environments for each material in the materials themselves).

Atmosphere

Sometimes you want to show the visible effects of light in your renders. If you have a rock stage for instance with spotlight bundles of light. Normally these foggy effects are not displayed. By dragging an effect from the resource panel onto the targeted light source however these effects jump out at you. It’s very simple to do and greatly enhances the believability of the scene in cases where these effects are warranted. There are, once again, lots of ways to enhance your scene by atmospheric and lighting effects and Strata Design 3D can hold its own with some of the other 3D packages out there.

Animation

No package today is complete without some form of animation capabilities and it should come to no surprise that Strata Design 3D packs a good punch of animated options for you to choose from.

At the most basic you can animate a shape or object by clicking the clock symbol in the project window and once you have done that the shape can be animated over time. Some of the more general properties that can be animated are position, rotation and scale. Of course it’s also possible to animate on a sub object level and by making use of a bones or constraint system. The animation controls are limited though when compared with applications like Cinema 4D or Maya but I think that the emphasis and audience of Strata does not target animation specifically.

There is however an area in which these animated properties really come into play. And that’s when you combine Strata Design CX with Strata Live 3D. You can then start to script interactive web or PDF based presentations with actual 3D models. More on that in a future review of these specific modules for Strata Design 3D CX 6.

Rendering

Strata is a very capable renderer. In fact that is a bit of an incomplete statement. Strata has several rendering methods to choose from which makes it a very flexible renderer. Right from day one back in the late nineteen eighties Strata has had a great ray tracing engine. Up to today that has not changed. The rendering landscape however has changed drastically with the arrival of image based lighting and rendering, photon based rendering, indirect illumination unbiased rendering and all these new aspects that can make images come to life with stunning realism. Strata has grown with the industry and with every new update of the package and supports many of the state of the art rendering techniques as well as the more stylistic rendering options like toon shading or simple open GL shading display modes (which can be great for technical animations that sometimes benefit from being very stylized).

Strata has five main areas of rendering procedure:

• Open GL
• Toon
• Scan line
• Ray tracing
• Raydiosity

The more realistic ones are the latter two in this list where Strata’s proprietary Raydiosity is the highest end rendering here in Design 3D CX 6. It’s also a very slow one that you need to carefully balance and tweak because else the rendering times can become prohibitively long, even compared to state of the art renderers on other packages like Mental Ray, VRay, Brazil and Maxwell Renderer. That said however, Strata has a great palette of rendering choices available that give you as the user the choice to go from modest shading to full throttle realism, all in the Design 3D CX 6 package.

This story written by Albert Kiefer

Albert Kiefer is a professional designer and technical expert located in the Netherlands. He has well over 20 years of experience in the fields of computer illustration, animation and image manipulation. He also develops interactive concepts and graphical interfaces for large international corporations that are active in consumer electronics.