In general, form·Z allows design in 3D or in 2D, using numeric or interactive graphic input through either line or smooth shaded drawings (OpenGL)among drafting, modeling, rendering, and animation platforms.

Key modeling features include Boolean solids to generate complex composite objects; the ability to create curved surfaces from a variety of splines, including NURBS and Bezier/Coons patches and mechanical or organic forms using metaformz, nurbz, patches, subdivisions, displacements, or skinning; specialty tools such as Terrain models, Platonic solids, geodesic spheres, double line wall objects, stair cases, helixes, screws, and bolts. In addition form·Z modeling supports methods for transforming and morphing 3D shapes and allows the production of both animated visualizations of scenes and the capture of 3D shapes as they morph into other forms, introducing modeling methods that explore 3D forms beyond traditional means.

Technical output oriented modeling allows users to refine the design with double precision CAD accuracy to full structural detail for 3D visualization for the production of 2D construction drawings, 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and CNC milling and offers information management of bills of materials and spreadsheet support for construction documents.

RenderZone Plus provides photorealistic rendering with global illumination based on final gather (raytrace), ambient occlusion, and radiosity, for advanced simulation of lighting effects and rendering techniques, which result in renderings with the most realism, as the illumination of a scene takes into account the accurate distribution of light in the environment. Consequently excellent results are achieved in a short time, with little effort to set up and easy to control.

Key rendering features include multiple light types (distant (sun), cone, point, projector, area, custom, line, environment, and atmospheric) whereas the environment and atmospheric lights, which may be considered advanced light types, are especially optimized for global illumination. Both procedural and pre-captured textures are offered and can be mapped onto the surfaces of objects using six different mapping methods: flat, cubic, cylindrical, spherical, parametric, or UV coordinates. Decals can be attached on top of other surface styles to produce a variety of rendering effects, such as labels on objects, graffiti on walls, partially reflective surfaces, masked transparencies, and more. State of the art shaders are used to render surfaces and other effects. A surface style is defined by up to four layers of shaders, which produce color, reflections, transparency, and bump effects. They can be applied independently or can be correlated. Libraries with many predefined materials are included and can be easily extended and customized.

Also available is a sketch rendering mode that produces non photorealistic images, which appear as if they were drawn by manual rendering techniques, such as oil painting, water color, or pencil hatches.

In addition to its widespread use in the architecture and 3D design worlds, form•Z and RenderZone Plus are also extensively used in Hollywood - in all production stages, in and behind the scenes (set design pre-production and construction, miniature model design, pre-vis animation, CG special effects and post-production, etc.). The following thread [2] mentions the practical use of form•Z in almost all blockbuster movies of the last decade, including successful TV productions.

Additional movie references:

Pirates of the Caribbean [3]

Victor Martinez (Solaris, Minority Report, Cat in the Hat, Transformers, etc.) [4]

Richard Reynolds (Lecturer @ AFI, Planet of the Apes, Mission to Mars, Pearl Harbor, etc.) [5]

Oliver Scholl (Time Machine, Independence Day, Mission to Mars, Stealth, Jumper, etc.) [6]

Electric Image, Inc. was initially a visual effects production company. They developed their own in-house 3D animation and rendering package for the Macintoshbeginning in the late 1980s, calling it ElectricImage Animation System. (To avoid confusion with the current product with its similar name, we will refer to this initial incarnation of the product simply as ElectricImage.)

When the company later decided to offer their software for sale to others, it quickly gained a customer base that lauded the developers for the software's exceptionally fast rendering engine and high image quality. Because it was capable of film-quality output on commodity hardware, ElectricImage was popular in the movie and television industries throughout the decade. It was used by the "Rebel Unit" at Industrial Light and Magic quite extensively and was in use by a variety of game companies.Bad Mojo, Bad Day on the Midway However, only these high end effects companies could afford it: Electric Image initially sold for US $7500.

EIAS has been used in numerous film and television productions such as Piranha 3D, Alien Trespass, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Daddy Day Care, K-19: The Widowmaker, Gangs of New York, Austin Powers: Goldmember, Men In Black II, The Bourne Identity, Behind Enemy Lines, Time Machine, Ticker, JAG - Pilot Episode, Spawn, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Galaxy Quest, Mission to Mars, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Titan A.E., U-571, Dinosaur, Terminator 2: Judgement Day - DVD Intro, Jungle Book 2, American President, Sleepers, Star Wars Special Edition, Empire Strikes Back Special Edition, Return of Jedi Special Edition, Bicentennial Man, Vertical Limit, Elf, Blade Trinity, and Lost In Space. TV Shows: The whole Truth, Lost, Flash Forward, Fringe, Surface, Weeds, Pushing Daisies, The X-Files, Alias, Smallville, Star Trek:Next Generation, Babylon 5, Young Indiana Jones, Star Trek Voayager, Mists of Avalon, Star Trek Enterprise...'.

Electric Image, Inc. was always a small company that produced software on the Mac platform and so never had a large a market share. Play, Inc. purchased Electric Image corporation in November 1998. The first version of EIAS released under the Play moniker was version 2.9. Play later released the 3.0 version. This was the first version to run on Windows, and to mark this move, Play renamed the package Electric Image Universe. Play was never a greatly successful company, and so Electric Image Universe stagnated during the time they owned it.

In 2000, Dwight Parscale (former CEO of Newtek) and original Electric Image founders Markus Houy and Jay Roth bought back the original company from Play Inc. On September 19, 2000, the company bought back the shares of Electric Image from Play and set about to recapture the product's former customer base. The new company released version 4.0 and 5.0 under the Electric Image moniker. Then due to a licensing problem with Spatial Technologies, they dropped the Modeler program from the version 5.5 release, and renamed the package back to Electric Image Animation System.

Versions 6.0 and 6.5 were subsequently released with vast improvements to the rendering engine and OpenGL performance. Version 6.5r2 added FBX file importing capability. 6.6 added Universal Binary support and finally drops support for Mac OS 9. Version 7.0 brought Multi-Layer Rendering, Image-Based Lighting, Raytrace Sky Maps and Rigid Body Dynamics. The current version, 8.0, added Photon Mapping, Fast soft shadows, area light, Quadratic light drop-off, EXR and 16bit image input support, Displacement Sea Level, new Weight maps tools, lots of workflow enhancement and Renderama improvements.

EI Technology Group Announces Sale of EIAS Intellectual Property

San Antonio, TX – January 12, 2010 – San Antonio based EI Technology Group (EITG) has sold the intellectual property rights of Electric Image Animation System (EIAS) to new owners Tomas Egger and the Igors . The sale includes the software applications: Animator, Camera, Renderama and all related modules. This transfer will allow accelerated development and new technologies of the software to evolve, without limiting them to EITG’s budget as it continues development of Modeler. Brad Parscale, President of EITG stated, “ This move is best for the future of EIAS. It puts the products in the hands of the artists and developers who use it most. EIAS will swiftly progress with new features as a result of this transaction.”

Modeler saves its files in Electric Image's "FACT" file format for importing into Animator (see above). It supports ACIS modeling, "ÜberNurbs" (EIAS' subdivision surfaces modeling technology), LAWS (based on parametric formulas) as well as Boolean operations and other modern modeling tools.

Modeler last shipped in Electric Image Universe 5.0. As a result, users of EIAS 5.5 and newer use a third-party modeler instead. As of this writing, Electric Image recommends Nevercenter Silo for this purpose.Form•Z from auto•des•sys is also popularly used as a companion for EIAS.

Cobalt, at $2,995, is the high-end member of a four-member family of products. The other three Ashlar-Vellum offerings are “Graphite”, “Argon”, and “Xenon”.

• Graphite essentially inherited the feature-set of Ashlar’s flagship product, Vellum. It offers 2D and 3D wireframe drafting and equation-driven parametrics.

• Argon is the most affordable, offering 3D solid modeling (but not history-based), ray tracing, and animation.

• Xenon is a less capable cousin of Cobalt, offering all of the 2D and 3D solid modeling functions of Cobalt as well as ray-trace rendering and animation. However, Xenon lacks Cobalt’s geometric and equation-driven parametrics, “Associative Assembly Tools” and the mechanical parts library, nor does it support dimensioning using geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T).^[7]

Ashlar-Vellum’s patented, 23-year-old “Drafting Assistant” is the central component of Ashlar’s “Vellum interface”.^[5]

The Drafting Assistant tracks the position of the designer’s cursor and looks for nearby geometry. It then automatically displays information alongside the cursor regarding nearby geometric features to which the designer can snap. The designer can create new geometry at those snap points, or create construction lines to serve as guides. The Drafting Assistant is sensitive to the following geometric attributes:^[6]

• Centers
• Endpoints
• Intersections
• Midpoints
• Perpendicularities
• Quadrants
• Tangents
• Vertexes

Drafting Assistant remembers the last snaps with a weighted algorithm to intuit the designer’s intentions; thus, it is easy to snap to intersections in empty 3‑D space.

In the animation at right, the designer first snaps to the X-, Y-, and Z-axis coordinates at the midpoint of the top edge and then snaps to the same spot on the leading edge, which has different X- and Z-axis coordinates. He moves his cursor to a point in 3D space where there are no geometric attributes to snap to. Although there may be 3D surfaces underneath the cursor, Drafting Assistant intuits the designer’s intent and offers an intersection point comprising the Y- and Z-axis coordinates of the first edge and the X-axis coordinate of the nearest edge. At this location, the designer adds a circle freehand and then specifies a diameter of 200 millimeters by typing it into the box at bottom right. Last, the designer uses the “Remove profile from solid” tool to cut through the block. Here again, Drafting Assistant enables prompt definition of the depth of the cut by snapping to the back quadrant of the intersecting hole.

The Drafting Assistant also provides a “Message line” at the top. This displays instructions appropriate for the selected tool, prompts the designer with what he should do next with any given tool, and reminds the designer of optional modes for those tools.

Cobalt’s parametrics and history tracking work permits the designer to later edit the diameter and/or location of either circle—both of which have dependencies (holes in the block)—and the model updates accordingly.

Cobalt features several modes for making animation, notably “Static” (where the sun and shadows move in a stationary scene), “Walk-through,” and “Fly-by”. Cobalt is also capable of six different levels of photorealistic rendering, from “Raytrace Preview Render [Shadows Off]” through “Auto Full Render [Shadows On, Antialias]”. Choosing less realistic modes for trial animations allows very quick rendering—even those with several hundred frames—because Cobalt fully exploits multi-core microprocessors during rendering.

The click-to-play animation (upper right) shows two industrial pushbutton switches surrounded by a virtual “photo studio” in a Cobalt model. The mirrored hemisphere enables the reader to see the back wall, floor, and ceiling lights, which all contribute to the nature of the light reflecting off the switches. Face-on images of these switches were used in the development of a touchscreen-basedhuman–machine interface (HMI) for use in industrial manufacturing settings.

To create fly-by animations, Cobalt prompts the designer to specify an path (a line or curve) for the “camera eye” to follow as well as a point at which the camera should point, and then renders the animation. A designer can specify such attributes as the angle for the camera’s field of view and can turn on settings such as perspective, which gives rendered images a vanishing point.

Whether the designer is rendering a single image or a multi-frame animation, Cobalt offers broad control of lighting, including the ability to illuminate images with sunlight wherein the date, time of day, latitude, and longitude are all user-adjustable to obtain accurate shadows.

Cobalt is a parametric-based computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D modeling program that runs on both Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. The program combines the direct-modeling way to create and edit objects (exemplified by programs such as SpaceClaim) and the highly structured, history-driven parametric way exemplified by programs like Pro/ENGINEER.

Cobalt integrates wireframe, freeform surfacing, feature-based solid modeling, photo-realistic rendering (see Ray tracing), and animation. Cobalt, a product ofAshlar-Vellum, is history-driven with associativity and 2D equation-driven parametrics and constraints. It offers surfacing tools, mold design tools, detailing, and engineering features. Cobalt includes a library of 149,000 mechanical parts.^[1]

Cobalt’s interface, which the company named the “Vellum interface” after its eponymous flagship product, was designed in 1988 by Dr. Martin Newell ^{[Note 1]} and Dan Fitzpatrick. The central feature of the Vellum interface is its “Drafting Assistant”, which facilitates the creation and alignment of new geometry.