Traditionally, creating 3D titles and logo with animation has been the province of high-end applications such as Light-works, Cinema 4DXL and even Maya. Then along came ProAnimator and the rules all changed says David Hague.
Zax Dow, the founder and designer for Zaxwerks has been known to suggest it is possible that every television station in the world has a copy of his software ? and used daily to make 3D animations, logos and station ID images and so on. I don?t doubt him. But if it is not true, then I reckon the release of version 4 of ProAnimator will change all that.
Primitives and text
ProAnimator is a tool that is used to create 3D objects and text and then animate them. Coming in two forms, a stand alone application or as a plug-in for Adobe After Effects, ProAnimator takes a totally different approach to established 3D techniques.
| Let?s say you want to create some animated 3D text that has a chrome material applied to it. Simple. Type the text as shown in Figure 1, choose any font / size / bold etc changes you want and click OK. |  |
| The text now appears in 3D in the Scene Preview Window. You now add a material to the text or a style. To check out the results, you can then render that single frame. |  |
But if it simply stopped there, then there is little to separate ProAnimator from other similar basic 3D packages. On the tools palette is the true power of ProAnimator.
Toolbox
By using these tools, ProAnimator has a unique new way of creating animation. Rather than laboriously setting keyframes for every object, ProAnimator uses behavioural animation techniques to animate many objects with a single set of controls. This results in animations of great complexity being very fast and easy to create. Further, it enables multiple versions to be made with a few simple keystrokes. Animations can be saved as templates, which can then be applied to any group of letters or logo elements for exceptionally fast graphics production.
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Verdict
By combining all the facilities of the animation tools with the Properties tools for materials, styles and objects, ProAnimator gives a limitless palette of possibilities and some extremely wild effects can be created quickly and easily. Due to the flexibility of the program, different styles and animations can be quickly tried to see if they fit the desired look and feel.
