Feature: Xara 3D is really misnamed, it should be named Xara Text 3D
Motivation: But what it does provide is a superb graphics UI and performance

Early in January 2007, Xara caught my eye with an offer for its Xara 3D software for $14 for one week only. The reason is because I have a colleague that bemoans the fact that she got an education in 3D design and half her time is spent generating 3D titling and logos for her clients with software selling for thousands of dollars ... and skills acquired for an order of magnitude greater in cost alone. My somewhat hasty response was thank the Heavens and your local Goddesses that a)you had a job and b)you had an opportunity to experiment around with your Incan 3D program and get to learn some of its broader feature set.

Ohhhh .... hell hath no fury like a woman perceived to be scorned.

When I regained consciousness ..... I promised to be very awary of her problem and "see what I could do" ... while not really wanting to touch that subject with a ten-foot Pole. However, as luck would have it I saw the Xara ad and made the mistake of going up to the site to see what is happening with the excellent Xara Xtreme, its Linux version and have a glance at 3D.

Well before I knew what was happening I had downloaded one of the excellent Xara clips on 3D. And then to my surprise I found myself afterwards downloading the free trial and trying it out as you can see in the screenshot above. Here is what I found.

Xara Speed and Ease of Use

Xara prides itself on the speed of all its tools and features - and like in Xara Xtreme, Xara 3D is astoundingly fast. In Xara Xtreme, bitmap graphics tens of MBs in size twirl and resize with astonishing speed. Xara 3D is no exception, click the Extrusion tool, grab one of the edges of the text or background and draggggggg. Yep, its speedier than a drag racer allowing users to spin and twirl the logo/image exactly the way they want.

And this speed of operation is uniformly spread out among all the Xara 3D tools and operations. Click on the Bevel icon in the toolbar or the Bevel Options ribbon in the Options Bar. Then grab the edge of the text or background. Again, just as fast as the text twirls and moves, it also extrudes in and out quickly - showing exactly how the extrude will look and what are some of the options. It is this latter point - the operations are so fast, that users feel at ease doing trial and error alternative settings and design stylings.

Now click on the Shadow Options and again, users are treated to fast and easy drag and drop operations. Also note that the cursor changes shape depending on what operation Xara 3D is about to perform for you. This is useful feedback, since Xara 3D will change operations depending on what part of the image has been selected and what tool bar option is selected.


First, remember that Xara 3D is not a general 3D designer like say ERain's Swift3D or Autodesk's Maya. Rather it is just a simple 3D Text or logo creator - nothing more. But now let's consider what Xara 3D can do to the text that is being 3D-ized. Note in the screenshot above, the five X icons. Each one represents a different text styling available to Xara 3D users.

If you choose the top X icon which I have selected in the screenshot, the extruded text stands alone. just below The text is a simple layer on a user chosen background. The third X icon represents extruded text on a background. The fourth represents the text as a hole extrude through the background and the final choice is the background as an extruded edge surrounding the extruded text. There are other combinations that could be done but Xara 3D covers the majority of cases here. My colleague who has to do these thing was suitably impressed but wanted chains of letters that could explode like on NFL pre game shows.

Which brings up the final point about Xara 3D. You can animate the 3D Text stylings in some amazing ways as shown in the screenshot above. Xara supplies quite a number of preset animation templates that do even the exploding text gambit. And you can create your own with output to animated GIF or two styles of Flash .swf animation files or animated cursors or video files or animated screensavers.

In sum, Xara 3D does its limited task set extremely well. But it is sort of a one horse pony show. One cannot extrude or lathe shapes or do any other 3D drawing or shaping with Xara 3D. So why Xara 3D ?

Summary

Xara 3D does its task of creating 3D Text logos, kiosk ad messages, and screen savers with great skill and aplomb. My colleague actually accepted my peace offering of the software and actually uses it - and is able to churn things out so fast and with such style that she has started up a small side business. But of even more impact to Xara, Bev is also taking a serious look at using Xara Xtreme for some of its vector+photo editing tasks. Again, the speed and ease of operations available in Xara 3D are available in Xara Xtreme for a much broader task set. So I see Xara 3D as being not just a very well performing niche graphics market player, but a small step into the Xara world. Like its Xara Menumaker and Xara Web Styler programs, Xara 3D delivers on its promise in spades; but also gets users accustomed to what can be achieved with its top of the line Xara Xtreme program.