Editors' Choice Entry-level: Ray Dream Studio Professional: 3D Studio MAX

3-D professionals are more likely to be able to pay thousands of dollars and manage the learning curve to use tools like our professional-level Editors' Choice, Kinetix's 3D Studio MAX. This product offers a near-perfect union of power and integration into the Windows NT operating system. For those with more modest budgets, Fractal Design's Ray Dream Studio 4.1 blends affordability, relative ease of use, and effective hand-holding--without skimping on power--to make it our entry-level Editors' Choice.

For under $500, Ray Dream Studio offers many but not all of the same tools that you'll find in 3D Studio MAX. What's more, it has one of the best ray-tracing rendering engines available today.

Fractal Design has smartly created a handfull of simple wizards (including prebuilt objects) that take 3-D neophytes through some of the more basic 3-D tasks, including the design of 3-D logos and basic scenes. Unlike many of its competitors and all of the high-end tools, Ray Dream eschews the four-pane work area in favor of three walls with 3-D projections. This approach works remarkably well. Ray Dream also features a broad range of output abilities, including Adobe Photoshop's .PSD file format and VRML output.

Ray Dream's nearest competitor, Caligari's trueSpace 2, deserves an honorable mention here. The original version of trueSpace, a recipient of a PC Magazine Technical Excellence award, was the first to stake out the entry-level 3-D arena. Even now the present version offers some abilities, such as Booleans, still unmatched by Ray Dream. But trueSpace 2 lacks inverse kinematics, and without any Wizards, it is harder to use than Ray Dream.

At the high end of the spectrum, 3D Studio MAX goes beyond the expected collection of primitives, model deformation, free-form modeling, and animation tools and offers powerful animation tools such as particle systems (with a gravity option) for snow and rain, a highly useful modifier stack, and extensive controls over inverse kinematics. 3D Studio MAX's unusual interface does not fly in the face of Windows convention but instead offers a unique way to access a tremendous amount of functionality. More than two-thirds of the settings and controls are accessible via the tabbed interface. The real-time shading engine (known as Heidi) is fast and powerful, and the rendering tools are adept. One caveat, though: 3D Studio lacks ray tracing, so reflections have to be fudged through reflection image maps.

Microsoft's Softimage earns an honorable mention for professional-level use. It costs more than twice as much as 3D Studio MAX but offers a far more powerful engine. Softimage also builds in many of the third-party plug-ins that 3D Studio users must buy separately. But beware: The interface in this second Windows version is markedly nonstandard, a surprising deviation from Microsoft's norm.

Animation path An editable line that objects follow during the course of an animation. Anti-aliasing Also known as oversampling, the process reduces, or smoothes, the stair-stepping visual effect often seen in bitmapped graphics. Extrusion Taking a flat, 2-D object and adding a z plane to expand it into 3-D space. Inverse kinematics In an object hierarchy where there are parent and child objects, grabbing one child object at the end of a chain and automatically calculating the proper movements back to the first object, all according to a series of preprogrammed constraints. An example would be an articulated hand, where moving the tip of a finger causes all the other parts to move together in a properly jointed way. Keyframes User-specified frames that are recorded on an animation time line. The animation application automatically fills in the intermediate action between these frames to create fluid animation. Lathing Creating a 3-D surface by rotating a 2-D spline around an axis. Mapping Placing an image on or around an object so that the image is like the object's skin. Modeling The process of creating free-form 3-D objects.

NURBS (Nonuniform Rational B-Spline) A type of spline that can represent more complex shapes than a Bezier spline. Phong shading A computation-intensive rendering technique that produces realistic highlights while smoothing edges between polygons. Polygon-based modeling Representing 3-D objects as a set or mesh of polygons. Primitives Basic geometric shapes, such as balls, cubes, cylinders, and donuts (or toruses). Ray tracing Rendering objects in a scene by following light-ray paths from the observer back to the objects and light sources. Rendering Producing realistic imagery and animations from 3-D models. Spline-based modeling Representing 3-D objects as surfaces made up of mathematically derived curves (splines). Time line A scale measured in either frames or seconds; it provides an editable record of animation events in time and in sequence. Tweening Also known as in-betweening; calculating the intermediate frames between two keyframes to simulate smooth motion. x, y, z planes The three dimensions of space; each is designated by an axis. The x- and y-axes are the 2-D coordinates, at right angles to each other. The z-axis adds the third dimension.

4. Making it real: You add colors, textures (often in the form of image and bump maps), and light sources to the object. Additional adjustments of reflective, smoothness, and transparency values contribute to the realistic effect. 5. Operating in 3-D Space: You must position objects, cameras, light, the ground plane, and sometimes backgrounds in simulated 3-D space. Users often accomplish this by using multiple views (top, left, right, side, and bottom). 6. Making it move: To animate your 3-D scene, you can often assign key actions (or keyframes) that the 3-D application could note on a time line. Another method involves drawing a free-form path for your object to follow. In either case, the application will handle creating the frames that occur between the key actions to build a smooth animation. You can set the lights and cameras to follow objects, which, in turn, you can set to deform over time. 7. The final product: Rendering your final scene is analogous to printing using a word processor. The 3-D application lets you define the quality of your output: how highly rendered it is and how many frames per second it has. You can also pick what kind of output you want--still image, animation, or even VRML for the Web.

Space may not be the final frontier for PC graphics, but it certainly bears further exploration in the software arena. From static images to games to virtual worlds on the World Wide Web, 3-D environments increasingly pervade our computing lives. The ability to circumnavigate objects adds a higher degree of realism and elegance to the ideas you convey, whether you're flying through an architectural design for a client or creating alien landscapes for entertainment.

Out of a surprisingly large field of 3-D packages, we reviewed products that not only could perform modeling and keyframe animation (the process that blends separate frames into a fluid sequence) but could also provide some sort of time-line or keyframe overview of a project. We required the software to be capable of running under Microsoft Windows NT; though many of these programs also run under Windows 95, we believe that the present and future power of professional graphics will be manifest on PCs running Windows NT. The days when SGI graphics workstations served as the sole systems handling 3-D animation software are behind us. The forecast is bright for these PC-based applications, particularly among mainstream users.

The Players Eight products met our criteria. They vary in functionality as well as in price, ranging from under $300 to over $7,000. Professional-level packages generally offer far more power and flexibility for creating and animating organic shapes than entry-level ones do. The higher-priced packages--LightWave 3D, Softimage 3D, and 3D Studio MAX--let you edit the function curves that control such elements as the timing, rotation, and position of objects during animation.

These high-end packages are designed for work in production environments. They offer multiprocessor and geometry acceleration to speed up operation when working interactively with shaded objects, the ability to host a rendering farm (distributing rendering tasks to idle clients across a network), and--in the case of Softimage 3D--a database-centric design for managing large, multiperson projects. If your models will eventually end up in games, you'll appreciate these packages' ability to export to console-game and Direct 3-D-compatible formats.

But if you're a graphic designer creating static scenes, you don't necessarily need to shell out big bucks. As an illustrator, you may be far more comfortable with the inexpensive Ray Dream Studio--whose interface lets you draw cross sections on the "walls" of your 3-D space--than with 3D Studio MAX's CAD-like environment.

Or you may prefer the sculptural, free-form deformation tools available in trueSpace 2. And renderer quality, an essential component for the illustration crowd, varies widely irrespective of price. (For more details on rendering engines and quality, see the sidebar "How About Them Apples?")

In the past, the ability to extend a 3-D package with custom routines--such as third-party renderers and animation controllers--was found only in the high-end domain. But as in many Windows packages, the ability to plug in extensions is becoming commonplace. As a result, lower-priced programs such as Ray Dream Studio ship with SDKs just as more expensive products do.

Loose Ends Despite the significant strides that have been made during the past couple of years in 3-D software, certain challenges still remain. Specifically, no true interface standardization yet exists among 3-D products. And a lack of 3-D interchange file formats complicates the problem. 3DS, the mesh format of Kinetix's 3D Studio MAX, acts as a de facto standard on the PC. With the release of a Windows SDK for Apple's QuickDraw 3-D (and its 3-DMF format) and Microsoft's plans for its own 3-D interchange file format, we should see compatibility improve.

Note that these formats support only mesh, lighting, and shader information; none support animation-path interchange data. One candidate is VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), most commonly used as a delivery mechanism for 3-D over the Web. (See the article "The Web Goes 3-D" in this issue for more information on VRML creation and browsing.)

How We Tested To evaluate these packages, we performed common modeling and animation tasks designed to expose each program's strengths and weaknesses. All the packages ably handled the job of creating a rotating, texture-mapped globe with text revolving around it. And though many could model our bouncing ball and boxes scene, animating our Luxo Jr.-style lamp to follow the motion of the ball proved difficult for some of the low-cost packages.

We also generated a space station (and spaceship with animated flight path) to engage any special tools we might have missed. Finally, to determine the memory limits of the packages, we repeatedly imported a 170,000-polygon mesh.

Our test-bed consisted of an Intergraph TDZ-410, a dual-processor Pentium Pro/200 system configured with 128MB of RAM. This system was equipped with Intergraph's proprietary RealiZm OpenGL accelerator with 64MB of texture-mapping memory. We also used a variety of 3DS meshes from Viewpoint DataLabs' DataShop 4.0, a CD of models. If this sounds like an overly steroidal test setup, keep in mind that working in 3-D can put a most resource-intensive burden on your PC.

Note also that the packages we look at here are general-purpose tools. But programs designed specifically for quick and easy text extrusion and animation can give you professional results with little fuss (see the sidebar "Marquee Value: 3-D Text and Logos"). Ultimately, wherever you choose to venture--into the realm of the flying logo or the arcade-game asylum--you'll definitely find plenty of options on your 3-D horizon.

Kinetix, a division of Autodesk Inc. 3D Studio MAX

It's powerful. It's well designed. It's cheaper than its closest competitor. And it's fun. What more could you ask of a high-end 3-D animation package? Depending on your needs, the answer is either nothing or lots. Kinetix's 3D Studio MAX fronts professional-level modeling and animation tools with an interface that really takes advantage of Windows' conventions, then packs it all into a (relatively) inexpensive $3,495 package.

Beware of falling into the trap of regarding 3D Studio MAX as a David to Softimage 3D's Goliath. The slingshot lessons that this David needs to bring it up to feature parity with Goliath--in the form of third-party plug-ins--cost money. But on the price/performance scale, we see 3D Studio MAX as a highly scalable product with a lower entry cost, making it a great solution for many animators.

This Year's Modeler 3D Studio MAX comes with most of the basics--with the glaring exceptions of NURBS support and a ray-trace renderer--but it really stands out in the way it implements tools. 3D Studio MAX sports both the drop-down menus and icons that Windows users are accustomed to and the programmable shortcut keys that professional animators depend on.

In addition, however, 3D Studio MAX also surfaces about 80 or 90 percent of its functions on a customizable, sliding panel that occupies the right side of the screen. Through it, you access primitives, modifiers, and hierarchy controls. You perform modeling, layout, and animation in the same screen, and instead of switching modules, you simply pick a tab on the panel with different controls on it.

This panel also contains the modifier stack, Kinetix's most useful contribution to 3-D software design. In essence, the program saves a list of all the parameter changes for every modification you perform. You can go back at any time to any transformation and change it.

Kinetix's plug-ins integrate in a similarly elegant way. We downloaded the free free-form deformation modifier from the company's Web site; after installation, we added it as a button on the modifier panel and it behaved the same way as any built-in modifier.

3D Studio MAX contains a wealth of animation tools, including traditional hierarchies and inverse kinematics, function-curve editing, and the ability to change almost anything over time. Keep in mind that mastering the inverse kinematics and other advanced animation controls takes some time; once you've grasped them, however, you have lots of ways to achieve a given effect.

For example, when we were animating our bouncing ball in the lamp-following bouncing-ball test, we chose to simulate the effects of gravity with a Displace space warp (so the ball would squash as it entered the warp's proximity). We could also have created a squashed version of the ball and used morphing. Of course, if 3D Studio MAX let you apply gravity the way Softimage does, we could have accomplished the task in an easier fashion. Unfortunately, you can apply some of 3D Studio MAX's space warps, such as Gravity and Deflect, only to particle systems (for rainfall and explosions, for example).

The product supports both keyframe and path animation, both of which are easy to use. We keyframed the bouncing ball for more precise positioning but assigned our spaceship to a spline path--with banking--for a more free-form flight.

Setting up the inverse kinematics for the lamp to follow the ball was fairly easy, too. To create an inverse kinematics chain or a standard hierarchical chain, you simply select the parent object, click on the link icon, and drag a connection between that and the child object. You set inheritance and locking parameters for rotation, translation, and scaling on an axis-by-axis basis via checkboxes on the hierarchy panel.

Setting up inverse kinematics chains is easier than editing them, however. 3D Studio MAX provides a collapsible outlinelike view from which you can manage almost every aspect of your scene, from materials to hierarchies to function curves. But unlike Softimage's Schematic view, in which you can drag and drop chains from one parent to another, 3D Studio MAX's Hierarchy view forces you to break and re-create chains (unless you simply want to reverse the order of an entire subchain).

Render Redux If 3D Studio MAX has a weakness, it's the renderer. We found, however, that working interactively in shaded views was sufficiently zippy, thanks to Kinetix's proprietary Heidi display engine.

We also liked the materials editor, which provides a broad, easily accessible array of textures and procedural shaders, as well as lighting, mapping, and alpha channel controls. The program offers an adequate range of options for output to both PC graphics and video devices.

But 3D Studio MAX's basic scanline renderer provides substandard quality for a product aimed at the professional market. The product doesn't even offer a basic ray tracer, but we expect to see good plug-in renderers in the near future.

3D Studio MAX makes a great choice for small shops that want to add capabilities as their budgets allow, and supplements the modeling capabilities of programs such as Softimage, which don't have the flexibility of 3D Studio MAX's modifier stack. -- Lori Grunin

3D Studio MAX List price: $3,495. Requires: 90-MHz Pentium-based PC or better, 32MB RAM, 100MB hard disk space, Microsoft Windows 95 or NT 3.51 or later. Kinetix (a division of Autodesk Inc.), San Francisco; 800-879-4233, 415-547-2000; fax, 415-547-2222. www.ktx.com LightWave 3D

For years, professional animators have used LightWave 3D to generate high-quality flying logos and alien creatures. We salute their ingenuity and persistence. Though this $1,495 package offers many of the tools we consider essential for commercial or artistic work, it lacks basic features (such as grouping tools) that would make 3-D work a lot easier.

LightWave 3D 5.0 consists of two applications: Modeler and Layout. As you'd expect, you create your models in the former and arrange and animate your scenes in the latter. You export models back and forth between the two--and you must remember to Save All Objects in Layout, a separate dialog and function from Save Scene, or you'll lose many changes (as we did initially).

This bifurcation of tasks wouldn't be so bad if there were more interface consistency between the two. For instance, Modeler offers four simultaneous viewports; Layout allows you only one at a time. Modeler has Undo, Layout doesn't. You can set an object's pivot point visually and numerically within Layout but only numerically within Modeler. One interface feature they do share is the large, immovable dialog boxes that pop up right smack in the middle of the screen.

You can create the same objects in Modeler that you can with 3D Studio MAX or Softimage, but it just takes some extra creativity. Take, for instance, creating our cartoon hand. Our preferred method is to drag out the points or patches from a NURBS-patched sphere. While LightWave doesn't directly support NURBS-patch creation, its MetaNURBS tool can convert any four-vertex polygon into a NURBS patch and back on the fly (no other product does this).

We discovered that many LightWave users generate NURBS-patch spheres by starting with a cube, metaforming it at least twice (we had to do this multiple times to gain a sufficiently granular arrangement of polygons), and then toggling on MetaNURBS.

Creating a motion path for our bouncing ball entailed similar contortions. You can't draw paths in Layout, though you can edit their function curves once they are keyframed. But we couldn't just draw a random path without referring to the location of the boxes. We eventually ended up pulling all four box models into a background layer in Modeler, drawing the path in the foreground, and exporting it back to Layout.

Unfortunately, neither Modeler nor Layout let you easily edit your curve tangents, which made fine-tuning our path difficult. Modeler has spline controls, but in Layout you can specify only the tension, continuity, and bias parameters.

The most frustrating aspect of Modeler, however, has to be its lack of any grouping or named selection set tools. To create our lamp, we had to place every segment on a separate layer and export each one as a separate object so that we would be able to animate them later.

Too Confining LightWave's inverse kinematics tools are far less flexible than either Softimage's or 3D Studio MAX's. LightWave lets you constrain only rotation angles, not location or translation. Nor does LightWave provide any easy scenewide way to manage your links and parent-child relationships; all this takes place on an object-by-object basis. On the other hand, it comes with the ability to create muscle bulges built-in; in 3D Studio MAX, this capability comes only with the $995 Character Studio plug-in.

We did like LightWave's renderer, which has a nice selection of controls, textures, and output quality choices. It lets you generate several variants and preview them before you choose the one you want to apply.

NewTek has equipped LightWave with some obvious strengths. Unlike Kinetix (maker of 3D Studio MAX), for example, NewTek offers separate boxed versions of LightWave for several different platforms, and a large variety of plug-ins are available as well. LightWave also requires less horsepower to run than either 3D Studio MAX or Softimage. And LightWave has the advantage of being the least expensive of the packages with professional capabilities. So if you're really strapped for cash, you'll still be able to get the job done with LightWave; it will simply take a little more brainpower. -- Lori Grunin

LightWave 3D 5.0 List price: $1,495. Requires: 486-based PC or better, 16MB RAM, 50MB hard disk space, Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 or later. NewTek Inc., Topeka, KS; 800-862-7837, 913-228-8000; fax, 913-228-8099. www.new tek.com Caligari Corp. trueSpace 2

The fact that trueSpace 2 still stands up to and even surpasses more recent applications is testament to Caligari Corp.'s foresight when it shipped the product in June 1995.

At that time, Caligari introduced to the Windows/Intel world features such as solid views and a few Boolean operations--features that we now take for granted in animation packages. Sadly, though, the program hasn't had a major update in quite sometime, and its lack of inverse kinematics and fine-animation control relegates it to the low end of the market. Still, it's a powerful tool for graphic artists, Webmasters, game designers, and multimedia authors, who will find many top-shelf features in this reasonably priced ($795) product.

In one major respect this product shows its age: It was designed for Windows 3.1 with Win32s, though it runs easily under both Windows 95 and Windows NT (with no long-filename support). As a program designed before the advent of 200-MHz Pentium Pros, however, it does not require immense processing power to run at workable speeds. Artists using at least 486-based machines with 16MB of RAM will find trueSpace's wireframe views astonishingly responsive. Even its more complex operations are relatively quick.

Effectively working with trueSpace's solid views--which use Intel's 3DR library and show the effects of lighting in real time--requires a more powerful machine, however, and few graphics accelerator makers have chosen to support the Intel API. (An exception is the popular Matrox Millennium, which has shipped with Windows 3.11 3DR drivers since October 1995.) The library is also constantly updated, which will have users running to the Intel Web site for bug fixes and upgrades.

Users running trueSpace for the first time will no doubt find its initial display of nearly 40 icons confusing. The program disregards a number of Microsoft interface conventions, but we began to appreciate its design after a run through the superb tutorial manual. Excellent right-button mouse support, one-touch keyboard commands, a help bar, floating tool panels, and the lack of long, branching, pull-down menus make modeling startlingly fast and intuitive, even when performing complex operations like beveling 2-D paths into 3-D objects.

The controls are efficient but require the user to be fairly familiar with the program before doing almost anything. Also, trueSpace has no preset for instantly arranging the screen into the traditional

"3 orthographic + 1 perspective" layout familiar to users of 3D Studio MAX. But the ability to create small, floating-view windows lets artists easily customize the program's look to their own tastes--or even to the needs of a particular model, which can be set as the default view.

Users control animation either by assigning objects to easily editable paths or by keyframing. Though you can keyframe almost every operation, trueSpace's limited keyframe monitor makes editing complex animations rather laborious. And because the program lacks wizards that can speed up common animation tasks (like those found in products such as Ray Dream Studio), users can't really conjure up a clear-cut strategy.

Caligari Corp. includes a CD with more than 200 textures and 600 model files in its own .OOB format. Users, though, can feel secure using almost any geometry library or file downloaded from the Internet. The program imports enough geometry formats to double easily as a file-conversion utility. The application supports the standard .DXF and ASCII 3D Studio MAX file formats and adds filters for binary 3DS files, as well as for Imagine, LightWave, and Wavefront geometry. Of course, files import with varying degrees of fidelity; binary 3DS files, for example, lose their hierarchy information. Notably absent (another sign of trueSpace's age) is support for VRML. Caligari produces a low-cost VRML authoring tool called Pioneer, however, which when used with trueSpace makes for a formidable VRML modeling and publishing package.

Rendering takes place inside the program, with no provision for external renderers. But you can render any viewport at any time with many options common to higher-priced products. Right-clicking on a render button brings up a small, render-options floating bar that accesses the ray-tracing engine, fog controls, multiple levels of anti-aliasing, and animated backgrounds. You can render to .AVI, .FLC, and numbered bitmapped files through another dialog that also controls motion blur, depth of field, and the ability to render multiple fields for output to video.

The product's uncommon interface and lack of wizards force users to learn the program well before creating 3-D scenes or animations. But once mastered, trueSpace can still compete with more expensive packages for fast modeling and spectacular output. -- Daniel B. Levine

trueSpace 2 List price: $795. Requires: 386-based PC or better, 8MB RAM, 8MB hard disk space, Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later. Caligari Corp., Mountain View, CA; 800-351-7620, 415-390-9600; fax, 415-390-9755. www.caligari.com Fractal Design Corp. Ray Dream Studio

Ray Dream Studio 4.1 earns a mark of distinction: Though remarkably powerful, this $499 product from Fractal Design Corp. is nonetheless a comparatively easy-to-use, cross-platform 3-D animation package.

The only application here to offer wizards for creating scenes and 3-D logos, Ray Dream takes on the complex task of creating highly rendered 3-D imagery and animation and makes it accessible.

Three-dimensional rendering, modeling, and animation are complicated issues. Each application examined here addresses these issues in its own way, and Ray Dream is no exception. Fractal's answer to the riddle of how to work with 3-D objects in the PC's 1-D plane is to offer a three-walled workspace representing x, y, and z planes. As you move an object in space, a projection of that object appears on all three walls. To move an object up in the z plane, you simply grab the projection of the object on the wall. This approach sets Ray Dream apart from products that rely solely on multiple views to help you position objects, although Ray Dream also lets you open multiple views--top, bottom, and sides. The only problem with this metaphor is that you can sometimes move an object outside the range of these walls.

This spline-based, ray-tracing application features the usual collection of primitives and even adds an octagonal object. You can pretty much draw any object you need using the spline-based drawing tools, which come complete with draggable anchor points to distort and shape lines. Ray Dream also provides a flat drawing plane to make this task even easier. Once you've drawn your shape, the application automatically extrudes it. You can then use the perspective view to control the depth of extrusion, lathe an object, or apply boilerplate torus and spiral extrusions, to name just a few options. Unlike Caligari Corp.'s polygon-based trueSpace 2, Ray Dream doesn't let you create lattice deformations by grabbing vertices on a 3-D object and dragging in or out. Instead, you deform objects by previewing them through the deformation settings on the tabbed properties box.

Every object--including lights and cameras--exists as a nameable object in the object hierarchy window. You can view this as an iconic object, or by name with the time line alongside it. Each object (and every aspect of each object) can have its own time-line entry and actions.

Ray Dream is a keyframe-style animation tool. You can't create animations by drawing a path, but you can view the animation path of any object--especially useful for applying tweening operations to the motion path of our bouncing ball. You play back all animations in real time or output quick, savable animation previews that include the backgrounds not viewable in the working scene.

Despite its sub-$500 price, Ray Dream remains a powerful product with a sizable number of high-end controls. You set inverse kinematics by simply selecting a property of a given object. Wrapping textures around objects and projecting them onto surfaces works nicely, and because you can work interactively in various levels of rendering quality, you can often see the results of your handiwork right away.

Other tools for fine-tuning your image include the shader window, from which you can drag and drop any prebuilt shade (marble, wood, or glass) or texture map, and an objects browser window, which comes with many prebuilt objects that you can add to your scene and modify. You can also drag and drop your own objects into this browser for later use. The shades are editable, and you can drag and drop customized shades to the shader window.

Ray Dream's extensive output options run the gamut from simple .BMPs to rendered .AVIs. There are even Geometry buffers for channel operations in Adobe PhotoShop and VRML output.

Fractal's attempts to make this application more accessible via wizards and an intuitive drag-and-drop interface fall short in a few key areas. The manual is not well indexed, and it often fails to explain how some complex functions will affect your animation. And if your confusion leads you a few steps too far in your project, don't expect Ray Dream's one-level undo function to help you find your way out.

Despite these minor frustrations, Ray Dream emerges as an affordable, well-crafted product--and one of the few in this roundup to evidence a clear understanding of the Windows environment by offering drag-and-drop, customizable tool bars, multiple-scene windows, and right-button mouse support. With such a good start, the future looks bright for Ray Dream Studio--and the intrepid 3-D artists who choose to use it. -- Lance N. Ulanoff

Ray Dream Studio 4.1 List price: $499. Requires: 486-based PC or better, 12MB RAM, 40MB hard disk space, Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later. Fractal Design Corp., Scotts Valley, CA; 800-846-0111, 408-430-4000. www.fractal.com