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Edit Review: Kinemac 1.0

Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Franklin McMahon

New 3D animation program lives up to its promise of realtime playback with no rendering.

A lot of professional video applications promise realtime results, and Kinemac 1.0 for Mac OS X is one of the few that delivers. From a company that's also named Kinemac, it's a 3D program that allows quick and easy compositions with the uncanny ability to play everything back in realtime with no rendering. It harnesses the power of your (necessarily beefy) OpenGL card to produce stunning results in minutes. The program is laid out cleanly and features a pretty soft learning curve, so anyone from seasoned pros to 3D beginners can jump in and start creating.

Billed as a realtime animation and presentation package, Kinemac might actually seem like a 3D PowerPoint at first glance. And in some respects, you certainly could whip up some fancy documents to dazzle the boardroom (the program even does charts and can import a tabbed text file of database info). But as you dig deeper, you'll realize the software is actually capable of some rather sophisticated animation.

Kinemac starts with a common four-panel view: your animation view and then views such as side, front, and back. You can switch it so you just see your camera view as the main window. To begin animating, add various standard elements such as spheres, boxes, text, and other primitives. You can also load in .obj and .3ds files as well as .svg vector files. The cool thing about using .svg files is that the program can automatically extrude your vector graphic, which is handy for logo work. In addition to 3D text, you can import .rtf text files, and the program can automatically generate 2D static or scrolling text.

Once you load some objects into Kinemac, the fun begins. Choose parameters such as reflection level; surface attributes (metal, glass, etc.); texture; and color. Even better, you can map a movie file onto any object. The program does a remarkable job of playing your clip on just about any object, from a box to a complex object to a logo.

Setting things in motion is next, and the program has the standard timeline with keyframes. It also sports a complete Bézier curve panel, which allows you to drill down and adjust any frame of any object in your project. Tweak the rotations, fades, acceleration, speed, and size. Much of the standard parameter adjustments reside in the inspector panel, where you have a large number of controls — including anti-alias, setting background images and movies, stage size, animation scripting, object alignment, lights, camera lenses, camera tracking, and object targeting. The inspector also features a full file browser, so bringing in graphics and video is as easy as drag and drop. Animations can be nested and grouped, which allows for very complex maneuvers.

Did I mention all this happens in realtime? That term is thrown around a lot. You might think of similar animation programs such as Apple Motion, which is realtime — up to a point. Once you get complex with a project in Motion, you then have to start rendering. Kinemac keeps things light and spry, using tricks such as image maps for reflections as opposed to techniques such as raytracing. That way the program keeps everything playing in realtime even as your scene increases in complexity. Once you get your scene how you like it, you simply export a QuickTime file, and even that happens very fast.

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© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.