Seriously Amiga - CDROM round-up

3D ARENA

[56K GIF]

This corking little montage has been put together and rendered by Andy Everett who is just one of the 3D artists featured on the 3D Arena CD-ROM

Recently we've seen an abundance of 3D or 3D-related CD-ROMs. This is to be expected because it's an activity that is greedy for storage space. However, this is far from Almathera's first outing in the business of producing Amiga CD-ROMs and there's plenty of good reasons to expect something a little more than the standard 3D fare.

3D Arena is more than a collection of 3D objects and bitmap textures. It has its fair share of these, but it also contains a variety of other files as well as some useful utilities.

You get the impression, after scanning a few directories, that this disc has a great deal of support from users and user groups. A lot of the files and example pictures have come from BBSs. A pleasant surprise was to find the 24Bit Club Scotland's excellent Lightwave collection - the whole thing! If you are a user of Imagine you'll be glad to hear that the CD is not exclusively geared to Lightwave. You'll also find plenty of Imagine formatted objects to render. There are also attribute files, tutorials, utilities and example pictures and animations.

Real 3D users will be similarly pleased to find objects, utilities, animations, pictures and tutorials. If you're not a user of this incredibly powerful program, you might like to have a look at the demo version of Real 3D 2.35 that has been included on the disc.

Unlike many other 3D CD-ROMs, 3D Arena has a healthy supply of utilities. There are simply loads of programs - everything from a directory manager to complete 3D rendering packages. Of particular interest are the conversion and display programs that include MPEG encoders/decoders and object convertors.

There is loads more on the 3D Arena disc, including utilities and animations for use with 24-bit cards and even some PC files. It's an absolutely cracking disc that should be in the collection of any serious Amiga 3D artist.

3D Arena stands head and shoulders over almost every other 3D CD-ROM

3D ARENA - FRESH FISH - DEMOMANIA 1 - GIGANTIC GAMES - AMINET SET 1