Okino Computer Graphics is pleased to have its PolyTrans product reviewed by Christian Aubert in Game Developer magazine. You may also wish to read the 3D Design Magazine reviews of PolyTrans and NuGraf by clicking here.
Copyright 1999 Miller Freeman Inc. and Game Developer Magazine
For those not familiar with the user base of the program, PolyTrans is the first data translation program to break down the translation barriers between the 3D multi-media (including animation), 3D game development, high-end CAD/CAM and VisSim markets (click here for list of supported file formats converting these markets). The following review was written with 3D game development, as well as a portion of the 3D multi-media market (3DS MAX, SoftImage, Lightwave, etc) in mind.
As quoted from the article, Mr. Aubert writes:
"PolyTrans addresses a lot of 3D file translation problems that affect
game developers. Anyone who has ever had to deal with file translation
issues will benefit from this package."
"The package was very stable, and I never experienced any crashes. Clearly,
Okino has spent countless hours tuning and refining this software package."
"Anyone with a minimum of exposure to 3D software will feel right at home
with this package... The interface is straightforward and fairly simple,
considering the wealth of choices facing the user."
"Support for triangulating NURBS and spline surface patches and tight surface
definitions will definitely save lots of time... The package does not stop at
geometry conversion either. Vertex welding, polygon normal flipping, and
vertex normal computation operators are all available."
"All this would be enough to justify the price of admission, but PolyTrans does
something that's relatively rare among data translation tools; namely,
animation transfers. You can literally take a Lightwave scene and render it in
3D Studio MAX or SoftImage with no tweaking."
"I did a test in which I took one of our in-game characters from Lightwave,
converted it to 3D Studio MAX, and then back over to Lightwave. PolyTrans
left all the geometry, animation, surface, lighting and camera information
intact. One of the features that contributes to this flexibility is PolyTrans'
support for conversion of 2D bitmap formats, allowing textures to be converted
to a 3D package's native format."
"Considering that [PolyTrans] costs one quarter to one twentieth the price of
the 3D packages it helps interface with, the question of whether to buy
PolyTrans is moot. The only reason I wouldn't recommend buying this piece
of software is because you can get its bigger brother NuGraf for a mere
$100 more." (Note from Okino: NuGraf contains all the functionality of PolyTrans
in addition to extensive rendering functionality, a more extensive user
interface and material/texture editing; the 2 NuGraf printed manuals, however, are
geared more towards rendering whereas the one manual of PolyTrans is geared
more towards data translation).
The staff at Okino would like to thank Mr. Aubert for spending a considerable
amount of time trying, testing and reviewing PolyTrans. We would like to
commment one his one small point about PolyTrans "requiring a high level of
technical knowledge": our design philosophy for PolyTrans and NuGraf has
been that anyone should be able to use our products with little or no technical knowledge
required; even though we have provided a wealth of features and options for
the most technically inclinded users, none of these dialog box options should
ever have to be touched for everyday file translation operations. We find
that beginner users of PolyTrans and NuGraf grow into expert users over time,
and they appreciate the flexibility that these numerous dialog box options
offer to them when needed in times of crisis (ie: tight production deadlines).
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