MacDirectory Magazine

Lightstorm Entertainment

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On the right is the Inspector panel where most of the manual magic happens in both 2D and 3D. This is where text is entered, rather than the canvas and things can get a bit crowded in there if you're working in anything other than a letter-sized aspect ratio. Clicking on one of the sub-panels will expand it, sometimes displaying yet another gear icon, which pops out even more controls. In general, it's a very convenient setup once you learn your way around. Customizing shapes, materials, and surfaces is straightforward. The UI, like much of BeLight's software is designed to avoid visual clutter, yet still be available when you need them. It's also fairly easily (and rather fun) to learn the effects by just diving in and experimenting. After a while, you'll discover that the pool gets surprisingly deep. For example, when you combine layers, you have the option of simply merging them (union), subtract one of the other, display just where they overlap (intersect), or exclude the area where shapes overlap. Or, if you decide to give each letter a separate treatment, you can quickly separate text into separate layers. Art Text 4 has some very cute power-tools, as well. One of version 4's new features, Spray Fill, loads a shape or text object from a huge library of useful graphics, giving you control over size and spacing for the desired effect. (It doesn't actually spray anything, but we couldn't figure another way to name what it does, either.) It doesn't take long to discover that no matter how many example libraries and templates BeLight provides, they barely scratch the surface of what this program can do. Another pleasant surprise to anyone who has worked in any sort of professional 3D software, is how responsive the program is. Every you do is very fast and very smooth.

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