Software
Review of: |
 This
is a neat little program from ArcSoft — with a hook. I’ll tell you about
the hook in a minute but first, let me describe the basics of the program.
Essentially, you type in a name or short phrase and mess with it.
You can find just the right effects with a click on your customizable palette. Just choose the bevel, lighting, texture, background, shadow, or animation you want from an album-like gallery. When the program window opens, click on Text in the tool bar. You can select from a variety of font types, styles, colors, and sizes. A built-in Character Map displays tons of alphanumeric fonts and symbol libraries, helping you find precisely what you need. Now pick a font — big fat fonts seem to look best with the rest of the steps I’m going to describe. I chose Cooper Black. Next pick a background color or pattern. Then pick a bevel for the font letter shapes from several choices given you (this will determine how the light is reflected from the word or phrase. Next you can select the light direction, working from three light sources (visualize three spotlights that you can move around the screen). Moving the lights, one by one, will really change the look of the letter shapes that you have chosen. Now you can choose to cast a shadow off the word or phrase (or simply decide not to use a shadow), change the shadow color from a color chart and the percent blur and/or shadow opacity. This tool selection is full of subtleties so you will want to experiment with this tool for awhile. Next, you can pick a texture for the letters of your word or phrase. You can even import your own images to be used as backgrounds or textures on the text. Admittedly a texture will greatly enhance your image but at the same time, will greatly increase the file size of your image. When you’ve finished with the name or phrase, you have several tools on the tool bar to move, rotate and resize the image. Now the beginning of the hook — animation. You can choose to have your word/phrase rotate back and forth (like a rocking horse), from side to side, up and down or revolve completely in a 180 degree arc in one of three directions. This is cool to watch. Once you’ve selected the animation technique, you can adjust the duration of the rotation up to 60 seconds and the frame rate from 5 fps (frames per second) to 30 fps. A slow frame rate is quite effective. OK, I teased you enough. The hook is you can save your file as. . . an animation. Instead of Save As. . ., chose Export Animation and then choose GIF file, AVI file or an Mpeg file. Once saved, send your favorite person an e-mail message with an animated attachment. Neat huh? Now a warning, the several files that I created while experimenting with 3D Text Factory ended up being quite large. I need to experiment some more to figure out which features to avoid to decrease file size and I suspect adding a background behind the letters and texture over the letters adds to the file size considerably. In other words, be gentle with those whom you decide to send an animated 3D Text attachment to. But if your project is to be printed, shoot the moon. Some perks fo the program:
Manage your work place
You have exporting options
Save to popular image files
System requirements
ArcSoft 3D Text Factory. I looked for a price on this software package on ArcSoft’s Website which revealed a 30 day trial download but no retail price. I suspect that 3D Text Factory is frequently bundled with other ArcSoft products. If you should get it bundled with another ArcSoft product, consider yourself lucky. Arcsoft
Clarke Bird is a graphoholic and therefore liked this program that was given to him by ArcSoft at COMDEX, Las Vegas. |