Comparison with competitors

The fundamental differences between 3D Outside the Box and its competitors is:

• Targeted at amateurs - I have designed 3DOB with average people in mind; it is not intended for professional 3D artists, but people whole either have an occasional need for 3D or who want to create their own 3D movie/world.

• Shareware - 3DOB is a shareware application written by a one person company. This has advantages and disadvantages.

• Price - 3DOB, being shareware, has a very competitive price.

For those of you familiar with other 3D applications, the functionality in 3DOB is a summary of a few popular applications. Since many are targeted at professionals, 3DOB doesn't incorporate their full functionality, just enough for average people:

• Topography and landscape design - Such as exists in Corel's Bryce and E-on Software's Vue d'Esprit.

• House and building construction - Like Broderbund's 3D Home Design.

• Human and animal characters - As in Curious Lab's Poser product. (BUGBUG - Feature not yet implimented)

• General purpose modeller - Most 3D programs include a general purpose modeller.

• Animation - Most 3D programs include animation.

• Wave editor - While they're a dime-a-dozen, 3DOB's wave editor includes functionality useful to animation, such as phoneme recognition for lip sync purposes.

• 3D paint - Like in Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint.

Below is a list of other 3D programs on the market. I have categorized them by price range; this may not be entirely accurate because prices do change and some companies' products cross my arbitrary lines. Most of them have trial downloads that you should look at. Be wary of the art galleries because while the impressive images are produced using the applications, they never seem to tell you how many days of work went into producing the image, or how many hours it took for the image to draw.

And as long as I'm listing web sites, here are some other useful 3D links: