3d Box Maker Pro V2 :: Introduction

 

3d Box Maker Pro V2 is one of a number of products produced by Bink Development. I’m not sure about the current state the company is in, as there website doesn’t appear to have been updated for several years and contains a number of broken links.

 

3d Box Maker Pro V2 :: Installation

The installer isn’t signed and appears to use inno setup. There’s nothing remarkable about the installation process. The download weighs in at a reasonable 4.59 Meg and the program uses OpenGL for 3D real-time rendering.

 

3d Box Maker Pro V2 :: Interface

The 3d Box Maker Pro V2 interface isn’t likely to win any beauty contests. However, it does feature nicely implemented mouse control system that allows you to rotate and Pan / Zoom your box shot with consummate ease. If you’re in any doubt about how to control the view port with the mouse, the program provides a handy link to the help file on the menu bar:

There was a graphical glitch apparent on my review system as you can see in the screen shot. Significantly, this glitch didn’t reproduce in the rendered output from the program. However, this was the first of a number of major bugs that I stumbled across during the course of this review.

 

3d Box Maker Pro V2 :: Demo Restrictions

The demo version of 3D Box Maker Pro V2 doesn’t appear to have any restrictions. I found this a little surprising, as the help file refers to watermarks that don’t appear in the demo…

 

3d Box Maker Pro V2 :: Features and Benefits

3D Box Marker Pro V2 includes a very nice drop shadow effect that looks a lot like the sort of results you can achieve with Adobe Photoshop. The only problem with this is that you can’t display drop shadows and reflections at the same time.

The program can also export software anti-aliased output to pretty much any size you like. I was able to export a 5,000 x 5,000 pixel image without too many problems. This is a feature that a lot of WYSIWYG box shot products are missing. This means you can easily generate print quality output.

 

3D Box Maker Pro V2 is one of the few box design program that offers a face editor. This allows you to design the faces of your box shot in the program without any additional software. Most box shot programs don’t offer this function for the simple reason that a dedicated image editor is generally a far better tool for the job.

 

Primarily, this is because designing a nice looking box shot is a complex process that requires a layer based image editor that supports slicing. This is the only way you can “wrap” a texture around a box without introducing ugly seams at the edge of the box. The image editor would also need to include true type font support with a range of text effects. Paradoxically, any box design program that has the tools to create a professional looking box shot would be better positioned in the market as a full featured image editor.

 

To a certain extent at least, this is what Blink Development has done. The design tools included in 3D Box Maker Pro V2 do show that a great deal of thought as gone into what’s required to make a nice looking box shot.

 

There are a couple of problems to deal with as the face editor includes its own quirky file browser. I suspect this was included to work around the limitation of the Windows file loading dialog not displaying thumbnails by defualt:

I found this both difficult and annoying to use, primarily because the bespoke file browser couldn’t see my external drive where I keep all of my images!

 

Despite this, I was pleasantly surprised by the power and flexibility of the face editor. It can handle and produce very high resolution images, has rudimentary layer support and with some careful planning and a pinch of creativity it is possible to create reasonable looking box shots with the program. Here’s a box design I was able to create in a couple of minutes using just the face editor in the program with some stock photography and some simple square graphics created in Windows Paint:

I particularly like support for transparent .pngs and the nice interpolation of scaled fonts.

 

3D Box Maker Pro V2 :: Documentation

3D Box Maker Pro V2 features an incomplete manual that merely mentions the cover editing functions of the program, without covering them in any detail. Fortunately the cover design elements of 3D Box Maker Pro V2 are logical and well laid out, assuming you have at least some experience with layer based graphics. However, I’m sure that properly documenting these features with examples and tutorials would pay off in terms sales, as the scope of the design elements isn’t immediately obvious.

 

3D Box Maker Pro V2 :: Image Quality

If you can look beyond the lack of perspective the program offers, then the image quality is actually pretty good:

 

3d Box Maker Pro V2 :: Quirks

Apart from the show stopping bugs I encountered, the single biggest quirk in the program is the complete lack of perspective in the 3D Box images the program generates. I find this makes some of the shots the program creates look slightly uncanny. Having said this, there are a couple of angles you can use where the lack of perspective is less evident.

 

I tried the demo of 3d Box Maker Pro V2 on a couple of machines and found problems with the program on both. On a machine with an inbuilt intel graphics chip, then program would not reliably load box panels. It worked fine on another machine with an ATI Graphics card, but then crashed on closure with the following error:

 

3d Box Maker Pro V2 :: Conclusion

One single improvement that would make 3D Box Maker Pro V2 much better would be the introduction of true perspective. This would help to bring the box shots the program generates to life and take the program to a whole new level. There are still a number of graphics card related bugs in the program that mean your mileage may vary when using it. However, if it works reliably on your system then you may find the design tools included very helpful.

 

I got the impression during the review that 3D Box Maker Pro V2 has been left to go stale. There are a number of broken links in the program and its documentation. Old documentation is still available for download and the support forums have disappeared. The company’s site was last updated in 2006. It’s not clear to me if the company are now treating the product as freeware, but the lack of watermarks in the demo would seem to suggest this is the case.

 

I was genuinely impressed by the design tools included in the program. While I won’t be switching to 3D Box Maker Pro V2 from Photoshop anytime soon, the program does make it possible (with the addition of some design talent) to design acceptable box shots without any additional software. With some additional development, these design tools could become really sharp! It’s just a shame that 3D Box Maker Pro V2 is hamstrung by a lack of perspective and neglect by its creators.

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