form•Z 5 review

Auto•des•sys' form•Z is a modelling powerhouse that boasts one of the most extensive feature sets of any program on the Mac.

Version 5 has ushered in many enhancements and is the first version to be Mac OS X-only, as support for the Classic environment has been dropped with this release.

A feature that often surprises people about form•Z is its 2D drafting environment which sits alongside the 3D toolset, since a lot of architectural and engineering projects start out as 2D plans, sections and elevations. Version 5 has introduced new Paste From Drafting and Paste From Modelling commands that allow easy transfer of information between the two environments, obviating the need for the clipboard. The new Select By command in the Edit menu allows the selection of items based on attributes such as geometry, surface texture and topology. There's also a selection sets feature, whereby complex selections can be saved and called up with a single click.

A lot of work has been done on the OpenGL interactive renderer, and it shows. Moving around objects is very smooth, even with large data sets and with a relatively lowly ATI Radeon 9000 64MB graphics card. Shadows, transparency and texture display are now all supported, although these must be turned on from within an options dialog - a bit of a chore, especially for the shadows. It's also advisable to switch wireframe rendering over from Native to OpenGL, as this produces a worthwhile speed boost. Version 5 also has a new Doodle-style renderer, which is highly customisable and produces the look of hand-drawn images.

formZ can now also assign user-definable attributes, such as cost, material and weight, to any object, while a new Information Manager allows attributed manipulation data to be used in spreadsheets or bills of quantities. This will be especially welcomed in form•Z's key markets of architecture and engineering visualisation.

However, form•Z's great strength is its modelling, so we were pleased to note that there are some new modelling tools, including four new parametric primitives: paraboloid, single and double hyperboloid and hyperbolic paraboloid. The latter is the classic 'saddle' shape that can prove difficult to generate from scratch. Now it takes three clicks. A new Frame tool takes lines and adds volume to them. This means complex structures such as prismatic girders can now be generated instantly from 2D lines - a great time-saver. However, you can't generate a frame from a curved line unless it's first converted to a faceted line. Frame generation can then fail if the tube radius is too large and the curvature too tight.

A new Draft Sweep tool can generate novel forms by sweeping a profile along a path and varying the profile diameter according to draft angles and mathematical formulae such as sine, cosine and tangent. Speaking of mathematical formulae, there's now a tool to derive lines and surfaces from them, with 18 pre-set surfaces to choose from, including the Steinbach Screw, Monkey Saddle, Enneper and Henneberg surfaces, just to get you started. Text modelling has also been beefed up with the introduction of Smooth Parametric text alongside the standard polygonal variety.

Finally, objects can be cloned. A cloned object is referenced back to the original object, so that additional instances take up very little memory and so that any changes in the original are updated in the clone. This will make the management of Symbol libraries much easier.