Amorphium Pro Edition

by Adam "Iconoplast" Baratz

Amorphium Pro Edition
Electric Image, Inc.
MSRP $229, $50 rebate if you registered Amorphium 1.0

System Requirements:
Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000
Celeron 233 or better
64MB RAM
Display of 800x600 with 16-bit color or better

Rating 7/10

I've been thinking lately. Reflecting on what I'm doing with my life. My mind quickly swung to Ars Technica. It's always been a good site. However, I felt a big empty spot in it. It needs something, I thought. Then it hit me, I knew what would complete it: Flash animation. It's certainly something all of the hip sites have. I mean, I can't go for long without hitting a web site with one of those stylish Flash intros. Seeing one of those animations just makes me want to shower money and love upon whoever created it. Is there a better way to show a user information about how great the site they're about to look at is than by forcing them to listen to poor techno and watch lots of fading scrolling text? I think not.

With a firm goal in mind, I set about my task. Besides quality, productivity was also critical. With a couple pieces of software needin' some reviewin', my American upbringing forced me to be as creatively lazy as possible to come up with the easiest solution to the problem. Ah ha! My eyes were set upon the Amorphium Pro package that I had gotten. Hmm...a new and improved version of the clay-style modeling software, now with more Flash and panache? This looks like it could do the trick! I quickly got it installed, patched (a point revision was just released to make the ever-important Flash renderer snappier), and ready to go!

Starting up Amorphium Pro, I quickly saw how much they revamped the interface in this version. A few menus have been integrated into the game, and the general workflow has been restructured a bit. More importantly, heavy enhancements have been made to the Composer to get tighter control over animations and the scene in general. More on that later.

The other big addition to the program has of course been the addition of a Flash renderer. You're now able to output any project animations or stills into a Flash file for use on a web page. If you want to open them in full-fledged Flash, you'll find each of the frames of the animation available for editing. The renderer gives you nice granularity for deciding how cartoony you want your final product to look. You can render with the bare-bones look of a black line sketch, or get fancy and have it produce lots of colored polygons with gradients to emulate lighting. Surprisingly, the gradients worked out really well. In the finished animation, they flow around the polygons to nicely replicate the scene's lighting. Unfortunately, such rich vectors take a lot of cranking to make. Creating a Flash file out of a complicated scene, or even just a bumpy object, takes a long time to render.

Visual additions included making the interface MetaCreations-esque. Each window comes with its very own drop shadow, and all of the widgets have been redesigned and painted in a charming dark putty color. The new interface certainly looks nice, but past experience has shown that adding cosmetic glitz to programs only breaks efficiency. This continued to be the case as I created the logo. There were other non-UI-related problems to be found. One particularly irritating aspect of the design is forcing the user to save a document to the disk before actually starting to work on it. If you're just screwing around, you can end up with a lot of files named by whatever keys you happened to mash at the time.

The interface updates didn't bode well for the rest of the project. I treaded on through somewhat uncharted territory nonetheless, in search of the long awaited Flash logo (I can tell already that you all are shaking in your boots).

To provide a smashing introduction to a groundbreaking animated short, I had to create a quick logo for my personal studio. One of the new tools added in is the wax tool. It lets you take a primitive and treat it like a ball of wax. You can drip wax onto its edges to grow things off it, melt wax to make it leaner, or smooth it to clean up ugly meshes. For my studio logo, I had the letters i-c-o-n (we can't afford o-p-l-a-s-t yet) grow out of a wax ball. Using the heavily improved keyframing function (I shudder when I think of the lack of things you could do with the previous version; in the new version, I could even do texture animation on the letters, as the final version shows), the i-c-o-n letters soon emerged. Part one was complete.

The wax tool is a useful addition to the arsenal of tools already available in Amorphium. It's not a totally new idea by any means (the Plastiform tool in trueSpace comes to mind), but it is still welcomed. There are, however, some unwanted drawbacks to it. When dripping wax onto a primitive, there is only so much wax you can drip off. At a certain length away from the source object, the wax stops coming. This proved to be a hassle when dripping the letters onto the sphere. The end animation results turned out nicely, though. The materializing letters, while a bit cheesy in this case, are a nice effect.

Next, I added a keyframe to zoom the orb out of view. A handy new addition is a property sheet for each object. You can push numbers around and get live updates on the camera view. It was easy to just set the scale at 0 for this keyframe.

The second part of the animation was the actual Ars logo. My goal in this segment was to replicate the classic Ars logo using morphing blobs. The best tool for this job was of course the BioSpheres. My intent was to choreograph some simple interplay between a couple of spheres, which would eventually become parts of the Ars logo. This task proved far more difficult than it needed to be. The componentized nature of the interface forced me to flip-flop between the BioSpheres tool and the Composer tool to get the two to work together. To move around individual BioSpheres in one BioSphere object, I had to use that tool. To check how they looked on the camera view, I had to switch to the Composer tool. Even flipping back and forth, the camera views for both tools wouldn't match up well, even if both were assigned to be the same thing. It would be far, far easier just to be able to do all of this in the Composer tool. Eventually, and grudgingly, I got them in place. Next was the text.

This part was easy. I dropped in a couple of text meshes. Simple enough. My only complaint was that I couldn't edit the text after I placed the mesh. After the text was in place, I put in another animation to have them gracefully enter the scene.

The final task before the animation could be rendered was to color everything properly. It would not have been a true Ars logo it was powder blue with red and yellow text, and on a white background. If I stopped at this point I'd probably get lynched by an angry mob. Thankfully, it was no problem to fix. A quick trip to the paint tool got the colors I needed on the meshes. While not necessary, my job would have been easier if I had a color picker tool to use on the real logo I had loaded into Amorphium (you can grab any supported image or animation and let it float in your workspace).

After a test render, I tweaked some of the animation parameters, and the final Flash render was ready to run. One big hindrance in the composer is a lack of preview controls on the timeline. To actually view an animation without rendering it, you have to scrub through it. There was no play button that would go through it in real-time. The timeline was host to a number of other problems. Of all the tools in the program, it's probably the most cumbersome to work with. You can't zoom in on any part of the timeline; it's difficult to move around the keyframes once you place them; the list goes on. Because of the lack of play button, the only tweaking I did was in changing the time between keyframes since it was playing too fast. Once the timing was fixed and the animation rendered, this delectable delight [107 K] came out. For comparison of the Flash renderer to a traditionally rendered animation, take a look here [958 K]. A heads up for rendering: Amorphium doesn't render when it's in the background. If your render job is cranking along, and you alt-tab into Outlook to read your mail, the process will pause until you switch back into Amorphium. This is an awful "feature" and should be eliminated ASAP.

Amorphium Pro is a huge, huge improvement over the "complicated technology demo" the previous version was. They took a great tool and turned it into something that most people could be productive with. With the beefier Composer, it can even be used for doing full projects, rather than be condemned to the modeler the previous version was.