SPECIAL FEATURE • JANUARY 18, 2001
Creative Mac's Best of Show Awards for Macworld SF 2001
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New offerings from third-party developers were impressive as well.

Amorphium Pro from Electric Image receives our Best of Show award for being the most significant Flash development tool we've seen since ... well ... Flash itself. Amorphium Pro is what the first Amorphium should have been, only better. It's a 3D modeling, animation and rendering package that's both intuitive and powerful. And it's the first important piece of 3D software geared toward graphic designers who work with Flash.

We also give a Best of Show award to Electric Image for Universe, the company's soon to be released high-end 3D suite and successor to EIAS. Everybody's married to their own favorite 3D package, and I'm not choosing up sides here. I'm just saying you have to see how this thing renders. Gorgeous! You will be tempted to stray....

On the 2D/3D front, our Best of Show award goes to ZBrush from Pixologic, which made its Mac debut just in time for the big show. I've been playing around with the prerelease version for some time now and have been enthralled with the program's novel approach to art through a combination of 2D and 3D tools. The full release, available right about now, packs even more into this affordable and intuitive program. I'm sure I can't adequately describe ZBrush in this space. It paints like a painting program. It uses 3D primitives and deformation tools. It has textures and reflection maps. It renders in real time. Its brush strokes contain depth information for layering stokes on top of one another.... Just download the demo and play with it for a while, and you'll understand what I'm getting at.

Of course, we must also give an award to Alias | Wavefront for their Mac OS X port of Maya, the high-end 3D package that is not only significant in itself, but significant in what it means for the platform as a whole, potentially helping to lead facilities from the dark side to the light and showing SGI and NT developers that high-end 3D software has a place in OS X. It's been common knowledge that Maya will be ported to OS X for some time now. But this last Macworld was the first time it was shown actually running on the new OS. We look forward to the full release.

Finally, I'm giving an award to Nothing Real for Shake. Although Shake is an awfully long way off, this high-end compositing suite made its Mac debut last week in pre-alpha form after only a couple weeks of coding. This is not vaporware. This is hardcore Unix code ported to the hard Unix core of OS X. We couldn't see much of the action in the build exhibited at Macworld, but I've seen this program on a certain other platform that shall remain nameless, and it is impressive.

So these are our lucky eight winners from this year's Macworld expo. We hope you enjoyed the presentation. Please be sure to visit the sites of all of our winners, and remember to drive safely.

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Dave Nagel is the producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of the Creative Mac, Adobe InDesign, Adobe LiveMotion and Synthetik Studio Artist WWUGs; and executive producer of Creative Mac, Digital Media Designer, Digital Pro Sound, Digital Webcast, Plug-in Central, Presentation Master, ProAudio.net and Video Systems sites. All are part of the Digital Media Net family of online industry hubs.

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