3D Product Box:: Introduction

 

Product Name: 3D Product Box

Version: Release R2

Price: $29.00

Review Date : 2/01/2007

 

3D Product Box is produced by a Dutch company called Soft Evolution that makes a number of applications; they are keen proponents of .NET and also offer custom development services. It’s nice to find a box design software company that actually has a public face!

 

3D Product Box :: Installation

I found the 3D Product Box installation process rather alarming. The installer isn’t signed and the program requires both the .NET framework and the latest version of Direct X. Bizarrely, the dialog box that appears if you don’t have the .NET framework installed is in Dutch:

Users are becoming increasingly security conscious. I’d argue that if you are not signing your installer, then asking the user to download a 20meg file in a language they don’t understand is commercial suicide. The choice of DirectX as graphics API results in yet another massive download, since the only people likely to have the latest version of DirectX installed are gamers. I’m sure there’s at least some level of crossover between gamers and box designers / developers, but I'm not sure how big it is. To top it all 3D Product Box offers to run on start up by default!

I’m not sure of the logic of this. Perhaps Soft Evolution think that by making their demo products behave like children with attention deficit disorder, it will generate more sales. I’d have thought that all this would achieve is raising 3D Product Box to such a level of visibility that most users would want to uninstall it after a few reboots due to the sheer annoyance of it continually popping up. I run a box design business which in all probability makes me one of the most intensive users of box design software in the world. If I wouldn’t want a box design program running on start up, then who would?

 

3D Product Box :: Interface

On the plus side, 3D Product Box features a nice clean interface without adornments. I particularly liked the cascading menu system the program uses to display all of its 36 box types. In terms of negatives, there’s no mouse control and zoom controls are limited so that you cannot produce a close up image of your box shot. I always find this a bit of an oversight since it’s the most intuitive way to control and position a box.

 

3D Product Box :: Demo Restrictions

Ghastly watermarks that make it very difficult to see your box shot. This is compounded with the defualt lighting in the program which can make textures appear very dark:

 

3D Product Box :: Features and Benefits

Despite some of the negatives we’ve already looked at, there’s a lot to like about the program. An outstanding feature of 3D Product Box is the lighting system. While it’s difficult to see the more subtle effects of this, due to the horrible watermarking in the demo, 3D Product Box provides a flexible and powerful lighting system that lets you easily create some impressive lighting effects. The program offers four separate lights that you can control individually. The only thing the lighting feature is missing is the ability to reset the positions of lights, either collectively or individually. It’s very easy to “loose” a light, either outside of the view port or inside the box, which can be frustrating. But this doesn’t detract too much from a useful and well implemented lighting system.

 

I also really liked the CD’s the program can add to box shots. This brings an interesting new visual element to a box shot. You can add one, two or three discs in front of the box shot, although for some reason you can only display them lying on the “floor” in front or behind the box. I’d personally like to see the CD standing upright in front of the box. I’d also like to be able to add a label to the CD.

 

3D Product Box is one of the few box design programs I’ve seen that allows you to produce Pizza boxes. If you run a pizza delivery service and have a website, then 3D Product Box is ready to help you market your products!

 

3D Product Box:: Quirks

One of the biggest quirks in the program is the decision to label the left panel of the box as the front:

While writing this review, I lost count of the number of times I loaded the front of a box shot onto the side panel. The program does at least label the box with corresponding numbers for the panels, but these aren’t even legible when you select DVD. I also found it strange that the program doesn’t offer any CD case options. Musicians need box shots too and together with the discs the program can already display, this would make a nice addition to the current roster of 36 presets.

The Zoom control is included under the Rotation controls, rather than more logically with the position controls.

The default file filter is set to .png on the panel loading dialog. This will probably be enough to confuse some less experienced users into thinking that the program doesn’t work, since they won’t be able to find their jpeg or bitmap images. 3D Product Box also dumps all the textures you’ve loaded if you switch between box types. On the plus side, it does at least retain the path to the image, but with 36 different box types on offer, the program needs to retain the textures, since a typical user is bound to want to try out other box types.

While 3D Product Box features nice reflections it doesn’t have any shadow casting abilities. There’s also the rather strange decision to call a “Vista Box” an “Extended box”.

Output is restricted to 1,000 x 1,000 pixel maximum, which means the program is less than ideal for producing print quality output, but more significantly, at the highest available resolution, the output is jagged unless your graphics card supports hardware anti aliasing. You'll need to click on the image below and view it at full size in order to see jaggies.

Jagged output seems to be generated whenever you render an image bigger than the view port. The machine I wrote this review on only had an inbuilt graphics chip. On a machine with a graphics card that supports anti aliasing, the image quality is noticably higher.

 

Having said this, there’s no problem when producing small images for the web even on machines without hardware anti aliasing, as you can see below in the image quality section of the review.

I also noticed some graphical glitches in 3D Product Box. These seem to occur when you select Boxes with 3 CD’s and view them from some angles.

 

3D Product Box :: Image Quality

It's difficult to tell much about the image quality from the Demo of 3D Product Box. This is because the watermarks it uses are so obtrusive that they actually obscure the image.

This is a shame, since this is a deciding factor for many purchasers. It's entirely reasonable to prevent unlicensed users of a program from using the output, but there are far better ways of doing this, as other box shot products have shown. Here are a couple of example shots created with the demo version and complete with watermarks:

 

3D Product Box :: Documentation

There's not much to write here as there isn't any documentation.. As you can see the only help you apparently need is help with registration or finding your way back to their website. The website does as least feature a Flash Video Showing how to use the program, but this isn't going to address any specific queries you have about the program

 

Lack of documentation smacks to me of arrogance or lazyness. It's dangerous to assume that your program is so simple to use that it doesn't need documentation. As we've seen in this review there are a fair number of confusing issues with 3D Product Box that are crying out for documentation.

 

There are plenty of software developers than know next to nothing about graphics that would find a manual helpful. As such it can be seen as an important sales tool.

 

3D Product Box :: Conclusion

While 3D Product Box can be a pain to install, based on the evidence on the company’s website, it’s capable of creating some very impressive results. It’s just a shame you can’t see the quality of the output in the demo! I suspect that unless you’ve actually seen the company’s website, then a lot of people simply wouldn’t persevere with the program, that’s assuming they have the patience or courage to install it in the first place!

 

Having said this, the program can produce some stunning results for web use and this is what really counts. Despite a number of quirks and some horrible watermarks, depending on what you are planning to do with your box shots 3D Product Box could be exactly what you are looking for. With a few tweaks and some careful modifications, 3D Product Box could easily rank in the premier league of box design programs.

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