GroBoto for Mac

User Reviews

• Tremendous Fun!

  Welles GoodrichDecember 13, 2006

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I'm new to GroBoto but reasonably skilled in a variety of 3D apps. As a result, GroBoto, although a serious program, plays like a toy. It is completely intuitive with a learning curve best discovered by playing around. In the most basic function, you take any one of a variety of preset primitives (you can seriously modify them as well) to which are applied patterns vaguely akin to fractals. So you start with a seeded shape or 'bot' and then grow the imgae...GroBot...Oh! Within GroBoto is a very good rendering engine and texture collection but personally I export the models as groups or even individual elements to use in Vue or Poser where greater access to texture creation exists. On a slower machine you have to watch it when building a scene as the primitive bots can build up amazingly fast so keep an eye on the object count. Another thing to pay attention to is that there are two distinct techniques, auto and draw. The auto feature is simply press a button and go, "oh wow!" But with the draw feature you can populate your scenes with primitives almost like the Image Hose in Painter. As you would guess, I'm very enthusiastic about the application. Think of this, if you need alien sculptures for a world you are rendering, there's nothing better or more fun. As a Universal Binary, it's optimized for Intel Macs, too.

  ---