Artifice, Inc. DesignWorkshop 1.5
Artifice, Inc. 
Artifice Press Release
Eugene, Oregon--August 6, 1996--Artifice, Inc., a leading international provider of new tools and media for environment designers, is pleased to announce a major new version of DesignWorkshop®, the award-winning virtual building toolkit™ 3D modeling software. DesignWorkshop 1.5 makes extensive use of QuickDraw™ 3D from Apple Computer, Inc. to provide improved functionality, improved performance, and improved compatibility with other design applications.
"We are very pleased to be able to combine Apple's exciting QuickDraw 3D technology with the user-friendly live-3D design environment of DesignWorkshop," says Kevin Matthews, president of Artifice. "The impressive high performance of the Power Macintosh" with integrated QuickDraw 3D makes an ideal platform for the growth of our innovative CAD products."
"The foundation of our system is the simple, powerful, and expressive 3D user interface that DesignWorkshop is known for. Using QuickDraw 3D we have added impressive real time rendering of lights and textures to our application without any increase in complexity or cost for our users. " This major upgrade to DesignWorkshop, now in final testing and scheduled to ship within 30 days, provides integrated QuickDraw 3D rendering and acceleration, with automatic texture-mapping and multiple light sources, plus full support for reading and writing both the DesignWorkshop standard and 3DMF file formats.
Artifice President Kevin Matthews says, "The addition of QuickDraw 3D rendering and file exchange to DesignWorkshop provides our users with really dramatic new capabilities for architectural visualization. We have prioritized these exciting capabilities for accelerated delivery in DesignWorkshop 1.5. And there is more to come as QuickDraw 3D and DesignWorkshop move forward together over the coming months."
The addition of high-quality texture-mapping and real time rendering of artificial light sources broadens the scope of DesignWorkshop significantly, making it a more complete design tool. The speed and visual realism provided by these new capabilities extends the range of efficient application of DesignWorkshop modeling well beyond conceptual modeling, deep into design development and detailing for buildings, interiors, and landscapes.
For typical professional users, DesignWorkshop 1.5 actually delivers two major applications in one simple package, combining the outstanding architectural modeler with high-quality rendering capabilities. With DesignWorkshop 1.5, professional presentation images can be produced in record time right inside the design-oriented modeling environment, and the need for a separate rendering application and all the associated complications is eliminated.
Direct saving of models into the 3DMF format makes it a snap to publish high quality live 3D models on the World-Wide Web, using Netscape Navigator™ 2.0 and the Whurlplug plug-in. Lighting, texture-mapping, and a WYSIWYG home view of the model are automatically saved in the 3DMF model file, and 3DMF models from any other application can be easily merged into the DesignWorkshop rendering environment. The conventional CAD translators have also been upgraded in DesignWorkshop 1.5, with the addition of direct translation to and from PowerCADD™, plus major enhancements to the Radiance scene exporter and DXF support.
High-level rendering is very fast just in software, but coupled with the
very affordable QuickDraw 3D Accelerator Board from Apple Computer,
DesignWorkshop 1.5 provides smooth walkthrough rendering speeds even with
large realistic architectural models and with advanced rendering
features, like texture-mapped transparency and multiple colored lights.
A fully-functional demonstration version of DesignWorkshop 1.5 is
available now for free downloading from the Artifice web site, at
Keywords: architecture, architectural design, QuickDraw 3D, Power Macintosh, 3D computer graphics, 3D design, 3D CAD, World-Wide Web
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Apple, Macintosh, and Power Macintosh are registered trademarks, and QuickDraw is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Netscape and Netscape Navigator are trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation. PowerCADD is a trademark of Engineered Software, Inc. DesignWorkshop is a registered trademark, and the DesignWorkshop logo and "the virtual building toolkit" are trademarks of Artifice, Inc.