FORM-Z
Platforms, Prices, and Company
PC-(Windows 98/200/XP, Windows NT 4.0) / MAC/ MAC OS X
Form-Z itself alone costs around $1,495, with RenderZone is about $1,995, with RenderZone and RadioZity, $2,390.
Company: (automated desing systems) Autodessys, inc.: Form Z http://www.formz.com/
Applications
Form-Z is a general-purpose 3D modeling, rendering, and animation program that puts sophisticated solid, surface, and form-manipulating capabilities into the hands of the personal computer user.
Extensive set of 2D/3D form manipulating and sculpting capabilities, many of which are unique.
It is an effective design tool for architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, animators and illustrators, industrial and interior designers, and all design fields that deal with the articulation of 3D spaces and forms.
Examples/Samples
Functions:
Derivative objects that can be generated from
other objects include 2D shapes,
parallel extrusions or extrusions to a
point, walls, lathed objects, helixes,
screws and bolts, spiral stairs, one
and two-source sweeps along arbitrary
paths, multi-source/multi-path
skinning, 2D and 3D sections of solids,
projections of objects including
unfolded objects, and parallel objects.
Spherical objects, that include the complete set
of Platonic solids, soccer balls,
and lathed and geodesic spheres, can be
generated both interactively and through
numeric input, and can also be
scaled and stretched.
Terrain models can be generated as true 3D solids,
trimmed to the shape of a site,
from 2D contour lines. The four available
types, mesh, triangulated mesh,
stepped, and triangulated contour models,
can be freely combined to model
rivers, roads, flat areas, and a variety of
other topographies.
Smoothly curved splines and meshed surfaces can be
generated and edited
interactively using one of a complete set of
mathematical methods that include
NURBS, B-splines, and Bezier
curves.
Metaformz™ allow you to organically blend a
variety of 3D forms, and as
implemented in form•Z raises the metaballs
technology to unprecedented levels.
Mesh models both flat and smoothly curved can be
created, then edited and
reshaped interactively by changing their
parameters and their geometry, or by applying
one of the many available
deformation operations to pull or push an area, or to bend
and twist. Image
based displacements can be used to imprint a shape on both flat
and already
meshed surfaces.
Advanced rounding can be applied to vertices,
edges, or both vertices and edges
including concave vertices and sequences
of edges called stitches. Draft angles
can also be applied to surfaces of
solids.
2D and 3D text (TrueType™ and PostScript™) can be
generated as plain text or as
text objects. A variety of text placement
methods are available, including the
placement of text on or between freely
unfolding and editable control lines.
Boolean operations, which include union,
intersection, and difference, as well as the
composite split operation, can
be applied to either 2D shapes or 3D solids. They can
be used to compose
primitive shapes into arbitrarily complex forms.
Trim, Split, and Stitch operations are
Boolean-like operations that can be applied to
surface meshed objects as
well as to solids, to cut away a piece, to separate an
object into two or
more parts, or to connect objects together.
Both 3D symbols for modeling and 2D symbols for
drafting can be defined and
stored into symbol libraries. The program
actually ships with a few libraries of its own.
Symbols can be placed as
instances as many times as desirable through a variety of
placement
options. Also, symbol editing operations allow you to apply global or
local
changes to instances.
The Query tool provides the ability to determine
information about objects, and to
calculate areas, volumes, and distances.
Many more.
Links/Web Resources:
Support: http://www.formz.com/Support.html
Virtual Casting: http://www.castech.fi/