by Lisa Casler

The already excellent features of Cool 3D 2.0 have been expanded on with Ulead's newest version, 2.5. Ulead has added more plug-in's to Plug-in Madness, including dance, surface and path animation's. Use motion blur for that speeding text effect or make your text or objects glow to get attention. You can use token based motion to animate text and/or objects by size, skew, position and rotation.

Cool 3D 2.5 also supports direct 3D hardware accelerators, creates documents larger than the screen resolution and independent motion keyframes for position, size and rotation. With so many animation effects and templates included, you should have no problem finding one that suits your requirements and if none do, you can easily create your own.

You have the option of creating animation in avi or animated gif formats. You can also output still images in gif, jpeg, tga and bmp formats. The system requirement recommends a 166 Pentium and 32 MB RAM, I tried the software on a 166 with 64 MB RAM and a 300 with 64 MB RAM, the 300 Pentium. Both performed nicely, but the 300 Pentium did speeds things up quite a bit.

A picture of the menu bar shows the control you have over your animation.

Cool 3D's Easy Palette system is easy to use, look for the type of animation, background, etc. and double click to use it on your selected text or object.

This is a view of the motion blur effect in the Easy Palette. I used it on the text in the image below.

The motion blur effect applied.

These are some more animation's with various effects applied. All started with the same text, I just changed colors, textures and effects.

	The bend effect
	The dance effect applied. Using this effect on round objects of various colors would make great confetti. The dance effects that are included range from a mild jump to a frantic, bouncing all over dance.
	The frame and animated texture effects applied. As this shows, you can use more than one animation effect in an animation.
	The Move effect applied. This filter moves the letters or objects around.
	The token rotate effect applied. You can use the X, Y, and Z angles to rotate your objects or text
	The token resize effect applied. Nine different animation motions that you can use.
	The token skew effect applied. You can skew in forward, backward and random motion.
	The surface effect applied. Use a sphere, cylinder or a cube path and wrap styles for different effects.
	I created this out of two supplied objects. I used an explosion effect on the heart and had both move towards the camera.
	Here I used an object included with Cool 3D and had the text use a surface sphere path.

Rating: 12345678910

The Plus: Cool 3D 2.5 adds alot of excellant effects and ease of use. Even for the home user it will give Cool 3D 2.5 a lot of use. The professional will certainly want to get this version of Cool 3D as soon as possible.
The Minus: At this writing I found no problems, had zero crashes and found nothing that I see as a minus.

Minimum System Requirements

· Pentium 120 MHz (166 MHz recommended)
· Windows 95/98 or NT4
· 16 MB RAM (32 MB recommended)
· 24 MB HD space (32 MB recommended)
· Direct X 5.0 driver or above
· CD-ROM Media
· Ulead's Cool 3D V2.5