Over the past couple of years, Electric Rain has been building plug-ins that allow 3D users to render files into a variety of vector file formats, including Flash SWF. The plug-in, known as Swift 3D, creates scalable vector artwork for the web. Currently, the Swift 3D plug-in is available for 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, SoftImage XSI and is available as a standalone application.

Another version of the plug-in is the Swift 3D LW Special Edition, which outputs to the USAnimation format and is used to import Lightwave animations into the 2D landscape. This technology builds color palettes from the 3D animations and maintains color, lighting and camera views. Users can create animations containing over 200,000 polygons, including intersecting and self-intersecting objects.

Nicholas Petterssen, Product Designer for Electric Rain, gave me an inside tour of the Swift 3D product. He said: “There are a lot of companies that allow you to build 3D models and animation, of which Lightwave is one. Some other notable products are 3DS Max, SoftImage XSI and Maya. The end product of these applications has typically been raster imagery, which is a frame by frame process of rendering. As an example, in Lightwave, you can build a nice, lengthy animation, but to export it, you’ll need to use an MPEG or an AVI raster based format.”

“Each one of those raster images varies in size and the amount of horsepower to create those frames can be considerable. This offers wonderful results for movies and with film, but on the web, you’ll run into all sorts of bandwidth limitations. If the raster output is a small AVI movie, it can be ok, but if you’re looking for larger 3D animations and effects, raster imagery is not the best way to go.”