Electric Rain Inc. announced on Tuesday the release of a Mac OS X version of Swift 3D Xpress, a Macromedia Flash MX 2004 plug-in that provides 3D design tools and rendering capabilities for vector- and raster-based animations. Swift 3D Xpress offers the ability to extrude 2D artwork into 3D objects in one step, pre-built lighting schemes, drag-and-drop animations, the RAViX III rendering engine for vector rendering, ray-traced raster rendering and more.
Swift 3D Xpress will ship in mid-October, its release coinciding with Electric Rain’s publication of Swift 3D 4.0 for Mac OS X. Swift 3D 4.0 allows artists to build vector- and raster-based 3D animations and export them to Macromedia Flash and other popular formats. Version 4.0 adds a better modeling environment, the ability to use Bezier curves with control handles to more precisely designate objects’ paths, galleries of pre-built models, animations and other items that can be dragged and dropped into the workspace, performance enhancements and more.
Swift 3D Xpress will be US$129 when it ships, or $39 if purchased with Swift 3D 4.0, which is $189 for the full edition or $99 as an upgrade from version 3.x. System requirements for both applications call for Mac OS X v10.2, a 400MHz processor (1GHz recommended), 128MB RAM (512MB recommended) and 25MB hard drive space.