Attached Link: http://www.viewpoint.com/pub/products/enliven.html

You may remember that about the time MetaCreations sold off Poser and all their other tool software, they switched to delivering interactive 3D content over the web, were renamed to MetaStream, and finally to Viewpoint. The Viewpoint interactive 3D web technology is quite impressive, but has until now been nearly inaccessible to all but large corporate advertisers, due to the fact that to publish any Viewpoint content, you used to have to buy a multi-thousand dollar broadcast key. Also, although many 3D packages export to Viewpoint format (including Carrara), there have not previously been very accessible authoring tools for creating the interactive components. All this has just changed. Viewpoint has just released a tool called Enliven, along with a new version of the Viewpoint Media Player. Enliven is a complete authoring tool for creating Viewpoint content, including animation and interaction. Best of all, Enliven can digitally sign Viewpoint content created in it, and this signed content can be published with no broadcast key or additional fees required. The new player now builds in a version of JavaScript (known as VETScript) which has complete access to all of the objects in the Viewpoint scene, and Enliven supports the creation of VETScript objects. Viewpoint has its own Flash player, which can play SWF files in the foreground or background of a scene, or as a texture on a 3D object. It also supports a form of streaming video, which can again be played in the foreground, background, or as a texture. It's "hyperview" mode allows the content to leave the confines of the browser window it is running on, so you can do something like have a 3D car drive out of the browser window and off the screen. So, if you are at all interested in building interactive 3D web content, 3D ads, interactive avatars, etc., give it a look. Best of all, the base trial version of Enliven is FREE. The only things lacking in it from the $250 "Pro" version are the convertor to turn MPG, AVI, etc., video files into the custom format that Viewpoint uses, and more 3D file format import options. The 3D file formats that the free version can import are OBJ, ASE, NFF, and Viewpoint's own MTX format (which many 3D packages can export to). The Pro version plugs into Right Hemisphere's Deep Exploration to handle all the other 3D file types, so with the Pro version, you do actually get a fully licensed copy of Deep Exploration. Free is definitely a very good price :)

Awwwww, too bad the authoring component is PC only. :P It looks to be one of the most robust solutions out there, however. I'll be interested to see what Adobe does with their .u3d capabilities for .pdf -- Now that's a ubiquitous delivery technology...

This should have happened years ago, and hopefully Viewpoint has not missed their opportunity to become a standard tool with "low budget" developers. Alias/Wavefront managed to do it, so perhaps Viewpoint will as well.

I would never use Viewpoint. The corporation was a bunch of idiots. They didn't know what they had. With Bryce, Poser, etc, they had a HUGE share of the hobbiest market, and now that the market has shifted to pretty much cater to the hobbiest market since it has grown exponentially, they missed out on a lot of money because of there idiocy. Just my two cents though:)

Yeah, I would agree with "a bunch of idiots" to summarize Viewpoint's past actions. However, if their tools are now affordable by the masses and they offer equal or better functionality than the competition, I would give them a look again.

The problem I see with Enliven is that the recipients need to download and install the player. In the corporate networks most users are restricted from upgrading and installing software. Software installation, even viewers, need approval from the department head and IT department head to insure software conflicts don't arise or misuse of bandwidth. To conserve corporate bandwidth many companies have stripped out the most common multimedia codecs (video) allowing basically audio only. In working on corporate projects I have found a work around by using Adobe Acrobat which all networks (so far) include as a standard tool.

InfoCentral, Are you are using U3D? Another option is WireFusion, which uses java, so no plugins are required. Unfortunately it's currently slow with a complex model. When OpenGl support comes to java, things should speed up quite a bit even with an inexpensive video card.

No U3D; using Acrobat 6 and haven't seen anything to upgrade for yet. Before 6 I had 3 so I usually wait several versions before I feel it is worth the cost of the upgrade.

I tried WireFusion and did the watch tutorial. It is not very user friendly and I think that the only componets built for it are those the author needed to complete his own business projects. I once asked about its use on thier forums and they had no real good answers as to what to use it for or how to use it for other applications. Just the watch tutorial...geesh.

Message edited on: 06/19/2005 16:09