We have now entered the final stage of the Swift 3D v4 Windows beta!

We sent out what we expect to be the final beta build to our testers this afternoon. In addition to testing a few final workflow and feature enhancements that came out of their requests from earlier beta builds, they’ll be hunting for new bugs and going back through previous ones to ensure everything is now working properly.

This stage is scheduled for one week and if all goes as expected, my next update will include the official launch date:)

Again, if you have any questions regarding development status, please post them on our support forums. Our support and moderation team regularly check the forums and can provide timely replies to your inquiries.

Cheers,
ED

Swift 3D Product Manager

The complete feature list for Swift 3D v4 is now posted in the Swift 3D v4 Feature Preview Area. I also included a button below that links to a detailed feature list for the new Advanced Modeling (AM) Environment. Enjoy!

Check back for the official Swift 3D v4 launch date announcement!

All customers who purchase or upgrade to Swift 3D v4 will also receive the Swift 3D Bonus Collection (models, tutorials, source files and examples) for FREE! View the contents of the bonus collection by clicking on the button below.

Don't forget to check back for the posting of the complete Swift 3D v4 Feature List!

All customers who purchase or upgrade to Swift 3D v4 will be entitled to a free copy of Swift 3D Xpress (value $99).

Swift 3D v4’s Smart Weld facilitates model creation by allowing you to automatically weld a group of selected vertexes within a certain proximity.

Swift 3D's popular Extrusion and Lathe Editors have been improved and now include copy and paste within the Extrusion Editor and from the Extrusion Editor to the Lathe Editor, and Extrusion Editor scaling functionality.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #17!

This has nothing to do with the launch of v4, but it came into my email box today and I thought it was pretty cool. Created by Christian Lowe of Lowe-Tech Productions (www.lowe-tech.com) using 3ds max and rendering with Swift 3D MAX.

http://www.lowe-tech.com/portfolio/paperplanes.html

In an effort to speed up the 3D animation creation process Swift 3D v4 now allows you to save your frequently used materials, models, animations and lights directly to your gallery for future use.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #16!

Create parent child relationships with objects, and cameras and lights in the enhanced Swift 3D v4 group hierarchy tool.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #15!

The Animation Gallery has expanded to include Fly-by, Deformation and Path Animations.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #14!

Well I'm downwright gobsmacked (my new favorite word meaning "utterly astounded") with the enthusiasm for these new features. Even more cool is that the comments sections are rife with questions or requests for features related to the announced features. Which brings me to the dreaded concept of Feature Creep, whereby a software release date is held hostage by the desire to satisfy each and very user to their fullest through the addition of endless features.

Not that Erain would be succeptible to this phenomenon oursleves (yeah, right).

Truth be told, our delays are in large part related to feature creep and our desire to not do things half-a**ed. Yes, we had an Advanced Modeler that was functional many months ago, but it's taken us this long to make it actually usable by adding in the additional features that are truly needed for a great product release.

But back to this feedback loop you all are a part of. As you view these features and begin making those "but it would be REALLY nice if we could do X" comments, please know that we're listening. And just because we've frozen the feature list for V4 doesn't mean you're out of luck forever. This blog, along with our forum, our tech support system and our wishlist@erain.com address are all designed to feed directly into the V5 feature list.

So by all means, be as demanding as you please. And if you're looking for the most direct channel of feature request communication, it's an email to wishlist@erain.com.

Apply multiple textures to a single object and easily scale, position and rotate your textures using improved texturing tools and real-time visual feedback.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #13!

Animation Path Tools Produce Flawless Animations
You're in the drivers seat with Swift 3D's new bezier path animation controls. Easily steer 3D objects, lights and cameras along the precise and perfectly smooth path you've defined in your scene. Animation doesn't get easier than this!

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #12!

Swift 3D v4 now allows users to turn on hardware acceleration for lightning fast viewport action. When working with large models or complex scenes, the accelerated viewport updates become an invaluable "behind the scenes" addition.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #11!

Bevels in a Snap: New Bevel Gallery
Speed up your Bevel applications by simply dragging-and-dropping your preferred bevel type onto an extruded object or text. The Bevel Gallery includes five common bevel types to choose from.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #10!

Swift 3D v4’s Soft Selection tool is a great timesaving function for quickly molding a group of vertexes into any shape, particularly organic shapes.

Don’t forget to check back for Feature #9!

Checking in again to provide an update on the Swift 3D v4 development status. The beta is chugging along full speed ahead. We are currently working hard to address all the beta teams bugs and suggestions from our first beta release. After these are completed we will release a final beta build with the features locked. This schedule is shown below.

- Fix beta bugs and improve features from first beta (current stage)
- Release final beta build with features locked
- Fix bugs from final beta build
- Product Release

We are optimistic that after we have completed the first beta stage and entered the final beta build phase that everything will move along very quickly.

Again, if you have any questions regarding development status, please post them on our support forums. Our support and moderation team regularly check the forums and can provide timely replies to your inquiries.

I will provide another development status update when we reach this final beta period.

Cheers,
ED

Swift 3D Product Manager

Swift 3D v4 numeric rotation controls allows you to have precise control over 3D object rotation and the ability to constrain rotation along an axis. Swift 3D's rotation trackball has also been enhanced with visual axis cues to assist your rotation endeavors.

Don’t forget to check back for Daily Feature #8!

Make sure to stop by and check out tokyoplastic 2 – www.tokyoplastic.com. This anxiously awaited site update is nothing short of the creative genius that has gone into all their outstanding projects. For those of you who are not familiar with this site, tokyoplastic can best be described (in my head) as an amalgamation between Cirque Du Soleil and Japanese Anime. They have won numerous awards for their innovative work including Flash Film Festival and most recently Sundance Online Festival. And what software helped them to accomplish all their animation feats…yep Swift 3D! Ok, we can’t take credit for all their work just the pretty 3D vectors.

Great work Drew and Sam!

If you're a Swift 3D user and haven't visited www.swiftdev.com, you really need to check it out. Not only is it an amazing resource, but the crew that created it and moderate the forums are about the nicest group of people you'll ever meet.

DK

Rapidly design 3D scenes using Swift 3D v4's professionally built drag-and-drop model gallery with 3D, Extrusion and Lathe model collections.

Don’t forget to check back for Daily Feature #7!

Control exactly where your objects outlines get rendered with Swift 3D v4's surface groups.

Don’t forget to check back for Daily Feature #6!

Import a 3ds file with bitmap textures and Swift 3D will now effortlessly attach the textures associated to the object in their respective UV coordinates.

Don’t forget to check back for Daily Feature #5!

Jimbo (a.k.a. J-Fo), our in-house multimedia freakazoid, was once again selected as a finalist in the upcoming Flash Film Festival in NYC for his Swift 3D project Flash Illuminations. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Flash Illuminations is Jim’s personal opus designed to show the potential of combining Flash and Swift 3D in a real-world sort of way. Aside from the sweet design work, there are free source file downloads of all the projects just waiting for you to deconstruct. (Beware, peeking into Jim’s brain can be a tad scary - but not quite as scary as driving in one of his vehicles.)

Click the logo above to view Flash Illuminations

Alas, this is Jim’s 3rd time being nominated as a finalist for the Flash Film Festival 3D category with nary a rubber orange arrow. The poor guy’s getting a bit disheartened and we’re a little worried he’s going to quit the Flash scene and join the circus. So if we can all rally behind Jim and cast a vote he’d be “much obliged” as they say in Jim’s homeland of Nebraska (yet another reason to prop that poor guy up with a vote).

Click the orange arrow above to vote for Flash Illuminations (Scroll down after page loads to vote)

We also want to take this opportunity to congratulate the other 3D nominations that were made by some of our good friends (and Swift 3D) - Billy Bussey (Smirnoff Ice) and Tokyo Plastic (Drum Machine). It looks like another Swift 3D showdown at the Flash Film Festival - In fact, a Swift 3D created project has been a finalist at every Flash Film Festival the past three years. Go figure.

Good luck to everyone!

Set the perfect mood for your animation by simply dragging one of the professionally designed lighting schemes into your scene.

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for Daily Feature #4!

That was the cry I heard about nine months ago from a user who was modeling a house. Basic house - nothing funky. But there was this roofline that was not symetrical and the guy just wanted to reproduce the asymetry in Swift 3D. "Let me see what I can do with the file" was my overconfident reply. 2 hours later, with every trick in the book tried (glued extrusions, segmented lathes, skewed scaling with hidden object, etc.), I had to give up and say "Sir, Swift 3D simply can't move the peak of your roof to where you want it. I'm sorry."

Ouch. Here was a piece of software in its 3rd iteration, and yet there were very simple things you still couldn't do with it simply because you didn't have access to the polygonal mesh that made up each Swift 3D object.

Well, I'm not going to call the Advanced Modeler the total panacea because surely Swift 3D will still have plenty of room to grow after this release, but I will say that by unlocking the door to those polygons, vertices and edges, situations like the one I had with the irregular roofline will be solved with just a few clicks in the Advanced Modeler.

So when when I look at Jim Foley's sweet examples of what's now possible - like the alien head and the Webcam - I think that's great. But it's the simple stuff that you just couldn't do with Swift 3D that makes me appreciate what we have in version 4. So whether your needs are basic or advanced, I truly hope you all find the Advanced Modeler to be worth the wait, because it's mostly to blame for our seriously late release. As it turns out, making simple stuff happen easily takes a lot more time then just making difficult stuff doable.

Hi everyone. I’ll be providing you with regular Swift 3D v4 development updates via the Blue Streak Blog from now until release.

Electric Rain will be distributing a major new Windows beta build to our testing crew tomorrow. We expect the testing for this build to last about a week and at that point, if all goes well, we’ll be putting what is planned to be the final beta into their hands to iron out the remaining bugs. We have some remarkably talented Swift 3D users testing for us, so I’ll try and get a few of their beta examples posted in this blog as they become available.

There have been a lot of questions surrounding the Mac release and whether it will coincide with the Windows release. As was the case with previous versions of Swift 3D, the Mac development schedule typically runs 4-6 weeks behind the Windows. The primarily reason for time gap is that all original code is written as a Visual C++ Windows app, which then needs to be ported to the Mac. A time consuming process. So rather than making the Windows users wait while we port to the Mac, Electric Rain chooses to release each OS as they are completed. Our apologies to any Mac users out there who had been anticipating a simultaneous release.

If you have any questions in the meantime regarding development status, please post them on our support forums. Our support and moderation team regularly check the forums and can provide timely replies to your inquiries.

I’ll provide another development update early next week to let you know how things are progressing. Until then stay tuned to this Blog’s V4 Daily Feature previews.

Cheers,
ED

Swift 3D Product Manager

Looking to make an objects surface a little smoother or rounder? The Swift 3D v4 advanced modeling environment will facilitate in helping you create organic shapes by providing you with tools to choose specific areas of an object to smooth or round.

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for Daily Feature #3!

Starting today, we’ll be using this forum to give you a glimpse into some of the exciting new features and benefits that Swift 3D Version 4 will offer.

Advanced modeling decisively topped the wish list of our existing Swift 3D customers, earning this new feature the Pole Position in our Daily Feature List. Version 4’s new Advanced Modeler introduces you to sophisticated modeling functionality that removes the restraints from your 3D modeling efforts!

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for Daily Feature #2!

They said I got to have the honor of posting Erain's first entry to the blog - something about being semi-literate in the English language or something - and so I did (please validate my existance by reading that one first). So now let's get some juicy V4 feature gossip going, shall we.

(FYI, I will likely get scolded about this post in the morning, but that's what they get for letting me work remotely from Vermont.)

So today I was working on a tutorial for V4... and I was in this new area of the Swift 3D interface called the "Advanced Modeler"... and it was pretty much completely insane what the engineers have done! It's like our little Swift 3D, but all grown up. I openly admit that I'm not a 3D artist, (aint no Mark Rush futurecycles getting modeled on my machine), but that doesn't stop me from recognizing some serious horsepower.

I've been off of the Swift 3D project for quite some time now - working on some other "stuff" - but now that I'm back helping gear up for the launch, I really have to respect where this application is about to go. I'll save the specifics for later, but for anyone who has an inkling to move beyond Swift 3D's current lego-style modeling, your inkling is soon to be satiated.

OK, that's a big ole' cat head poking out of the bag, and no one can make me stuff it back in. As soon as we work out some of those hairballs (read: bugs) we can fill in more of the details that I was privy to today - that is if I don't have my blog admin privileges revoked.

Sorry, I just had to get a little more comfortable with that funky little word. I mean how can an idea - a genre - a movement even - that is so disruptive, powerful and poetic get branded with such an ugly word. Blog. Well, some people probably say the same thing about the words Electric, Rain and Swift 3D, so I guess I better get over myself and get down to business.

Yes, Erain is blogging, and lovin' it I might add (as much as one can love soemthing that's only minutes old.) No, I love this new communication forumn not for its history, but simply because it's about communication via the written word, which is something I personally take delight in. Furthermore, I think it's high time Electric Rain started having a little more open discussion with its customers above and beyond the support forum and those promotional emails you keep getting.

I'll be the first to admit that we've been slightly (OK, maybe more than slightly) incommunicado with the folks that mean the most to us. It was the needed slap in the face that came with this thread on the Erain forum that made it all too clear to us that we need to get a little more up-front with our most loyal customers. There are those that use Swift 3D - and to them we owe a damn good product at a reasonable price. And then there are those that both use Swift 3D and like it enough to pay regular visits to our site, just to see what's going on and what they can look forward to. That's you, reading this blog, and to you I apologize for having waited so long to bring you up to speed with our upcoming product release, and our company's progress in general for that matter.

And so the blog (hey, it's rolling off the keyboard already). If you care to return, I dare to promise you information. In fact I gurantee it. Swift 3D V4 has been a long time in the making (I'll spare you the myriad reasons/excuses for the excrutiating delay) and we've finally reached a point where we can let the cat out of the bag... or at least those parts of the cat that have some tooth and nail.

We will be consistently rolling out a list of the new features of Swift 3D V4 via this blog, so check back when your curiosity hits a periodic redline. Hell, throw the RSS feed into your aggregator and let the good news come to you automatically. I don't care how you do it, but know that we've renewed our commitment to the hardcore Swifters and I'll take full responsibility for ensuring that our troubles in hitting a release deadline don't ever place you all in the lurch again, wanton for information with a seemingly distant Erain all guarded and tightlipped.

No, it's time to start talk... excuse me, bloggin'. And I, along with the rest of our team, will do our best to stay current, stay informative, and stay entertaining in this new blogerrific venue. That was part of our pact with you way back when as Swift 3D V1 hit the streets and Electric Rain began its relationship with the best damn user base in the world, and it's part of our pact now. Along with a killer Swift 3D V4 release of course, which is why you won't see any of our engineers posting fluffy entrys (hey, I'd like to think there was a tiny bit of substance here) to the Erain Blog.

So, in true User Guide fashion, "Let's git' it on!"