Software

Swell 3D prides itself in being one of the only three-dimensional websites in the world. There are a few other websites about 3-D art, but this one was actually built in 3-D anaglyph from the ground up, and that, I think, makes it unique. (UPDATE: almost unique. Two weeks after I posted this, the 3-D Barcinski & Jeanjean site was launched.)

So you can imagine my excitement as I read about "Z3D," a browser plug-in for Firefox by Claudio Benvenuti, who says it will turn any website 3D right before your eyes! Of course I installed it and tried it out.

What it does is replace the background of every page with an anaglyphic tattersall grid, and replaces all text styles with gray anaglyph type. It really does look as though the text is hovering above the background. And when you mouse over a hyperlink, the text hovers even higher. So it works, I guess.

Since Z3D doesn't do anything with images, it will give the best results on pages full of text links. I tried it on Drudge Report and The Huffington Post.

Well, that's what it does. The text is in 3D, but the style is trashed. Columns are broken. Text is sometimes rendered in the wrong place, or seemingly missing from the page entirely. I appreciate the effort, but Z3D reminds me of those online programs that will translate any Web page into Pig Latin or Leet. It's clever, and it's interesting to see the results, but I can't imagine anyone finding it useful, or even enjoyable for long.

This is a detail of William-Adolphe Bouguereau's 1873 painting, L'Amour et Psyche, enfants. You can see it along with many other three-dimensional anaglyph conversions from two-dimensional works, in the gallery pages of 3D Gugle.

3D Gugle is software for making 3-D images. It costs anywhere from 46 to 3,500 euros, depending on which version and which license you get, but you can download a 20-day trial copy for free. Normally, I would try a piece of software before writing about it, but I have no plans to use 3D Gugle, because it only runs on Windows, and this is a Mac shop.

Since I am not using the program, I have no opinion whether it is easy to use, or whether it is worth the money, or whether it is the best way to generate 3D pictures. I will only tell you that the anaglyphs in the example galleries are very well done, and very much worth clicking over there and looking at.

"LOTRO," or The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, is a multiplayer online game set in the fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. It requires Windows XP or Vista, and costs money, though you can try it free for 14 days.

The game itself is not in anaglyph, but one player calling himself "IceTeaMan" made five anaglyph screen shots from the game, and posted them to the LOTRO forum, which is where I found them. Click on any of these thumbnail pictures to see the full-resolution images. My thanks to IceTeaMan for making and sharing these anaglyphs, and kudos to the LOTRO developers for creating such a picturesque game.

I wrote before about , a free 3-D modeling and rendering program for Mac and Windows. I really haven't done a whole lot of playing around with it, but today I figured out how to make it do a simulated marker rendering.

This is neat. It's exactly the same scene with the same extruded Swell 3D logo that I drew before (except this time I deleted the girl), but rendered with the "Dry-Erase Marker" style. It actually almost looks like it was hand-drawn with markers. How cool is that?

It wasn't terribly difficult, either. Just go to the "Window" menu in Sketchup, and choose "Style." You'll see all kinds of sketchy rendering styles you can try out.