The new Corel MotionStudio 3D offers great power for adding 3D text and graphics animations to your video productions - with animated extruded text, flying and exploding 3D objects, and naturalistic fire and smoke. Even better, it is designed for enthusiast video editors, with an accessible interface to help you quickly create sophisticated animations from pre-built components, and it's priced at only $100.
MotionStudio 3D comes with an extensive library of more than 140 pre-defined objects, including spinning globes, turning gears, and flying spaceships. Then you can select from hundreds of materials, object styles, and animated effects to customize the objects in the scene. Plus, all this power also works with 3D animated text, plus particle effects including bubbles and snow.
After you assemble your scene, you can add global effects, including lightning, fireworks, and clouds, and add realism with lens flares, shadows, reflections, motion blur, and even depth of field. Then set the final scene view with backgrounds, global lighting, and camera settings.
Of course, you also can dig in further to customize the object attributes and fine-tune the keyframed animation. But all the heavy lifting of setting up the objects, attributes, motion, and scene can be done as simply as drag and drop from the library.
Underneath, MotionStudio 3D is built on a core of a quite powerful traditional 3D modeling and animation tool. You can import and export 3D geometric models in common modeling formats (DirectX and 3D Studio), build complex models from scratch with detailed materials, and combine objects into hierarchical structures (such as tires on a car). You then can keyframe animate the object shapes and motion, and build entire 3D scenes, complete with lighting and camera control.
Corel MotionStudio 3D is an impressive re-packaging of traditional 3D modeling into a nicely accessible tool for video editing enthusiasts. You can create quite effective text and graphics animations without being a 3D expert by using the supplied models, styles, and effects. And the underlying 3D modeling architecture provides lots of headroom to further customize your productions with your own objects, textures, and motions.
See review in Videomaker magazine: Corel MotionStudio 3D Editing Software
See my article for more on the features and interface --
Walkthrough: Corel MotionStudio 3D
Find the
Corel MotionStudio 3D on Amazon.com