Mac 3D

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Mac 3D was a three dimensional modeling program that ran on the original Apple Macintosh system. It was made by a company called Challenger Software. There is no reference to the company on the internet, so the company may have gone into liquidation around 1990, due to this, not very much is known about Mac 3D.

1 History
2 Using Mac 3D
3 Practical uses for Mac 3D
4 Mac 3D on newer Macintosh OS's
5 Where to get Mac 3D
6 Notes
7 External links

[edit] History

Mac 3D(Not to be confused with the website, mac 3D) debuted in 1984 for the Macintosh 128. It could support no colour at the time, to the way to trick the eye was by using patterns on the faces of the models to produce a 3D effect. The last known version was released in 1987, version 2.1. It supports colors at this time, but only some dark greens and blue. In theory, you can put more colours in using ResEdit, but this is questionable.

[edit] Using Mac 3D

Mac 3D is not much different to Modeling programs we have around today, has a toolbar at the side, which can create spheres, cubes, cubes with holes in them, slants and triangles. All of them can be grouped, glued, unglued and exploded. It features six lights which are all adjustable. It has a rotate feature, revolve and it has a camera setup.

[edit] Practical uses for Mac 3D

Mac 3D has a lot of features that most modeling programs have, and seeing as it has been abandoned, one assumes it is now free, or maybe it was free to start with. Because it only supports green and blue, it could be a painful task to try and make anything worth presenting, but if you want a black and white model using pattern shading, by all means Mac 3D is useful.

Mac 3D can be used for animation too. By using Movieplayer 2.5 or a GIF sequencer, you can put together lots of files to make an animation. An example is below. Example movie This is what can be produced in Mac 3D in under ten minutes.

[edit] Mac 3D on newer Macintosh OS's

Mac 3D works under classic mode for Mac OS X, so it runs on all Macintoshes except for the new Intel Macintosh. However, you can use emulation to run Mac 3D, but it is not advisable as there are other packages like it that do more and run natively. In an ideal world, it should be run only on a Macintosh with lots of spare memory, as it does take time to move objects. Also be warned, Mac 3D will not work on an OS running Windows for obvious reasons.

[edit] Where to get Mac 3D

This program was not sold in quantity, otherwise there would be more documentation about it. However, if you own, say, a PowerBook 170, you could format an 800k disk and put Mac 3D on it if you download it.