Merlin 3D
One day a friend on the trueSpace mailing list asked me what I thought Merlin
3D. I said what? He pointed me to a web site with a few pictures and a short
page about a coming 3D program that promised real time rendering nearly as good
as a final render! Boy, would save a lot of time with test rendering I thought.
So I kept an eye on it. Eventually that same friend said he was applying to be a
beta tester. A short time later I had the idea to ask them for a beta so I could
start work on a Spot Review as early as possible while I had some down time. The
beta was indeed something very different. The program had a very simple
interface and passed the "just jump in and fool around" test with
flying colors. The Lightworks rendering engine is very modern and capable while
the program is exceedingly easy to use. However, like most brand new 3D
applications, there are quite a few tools that really should be there and are
not yet as of version 1.0. Because of this it may be a good choice for beginners
or those looking for a program to render objects created in a program with a
less capable renderer. Merlin 3D was the first program I saw which allowed you
to turn any object into a light. Pretty cool. That object can disappear as a
solid object or continue to be a visible object and a light, both. The vaunted
real-time rendering works quite well with bitmapped textures and has some fairly
good tools for orienting those textures on the object. But it works not at all
with algorithmic textures. As of 1.0 there is not real-time display of
algorithmic textures and being a lazy musician type that is the kind I lean
towards. In fairness you will probably get much getter results in any 3D CG
program if you take the time to use carefully chosen bitmapped textures rather
than relying on algorithmic textures with a few exceptions. Darktree Textures is
one of them.
So many things are planned or proposed for versions past 1.0 that I am eager
to see how Merlin 3D evolves and whether it can stay in the running until those
later versions arrive on the scene. A 3D CG program with a simple interface is
rare enough as it is. My attention was quickly taken away from Merlin when I
bumped into Realsoft 3D 4.1.
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