With the release of version 5.0, the folks at Antics decided to add facial expressions and a new and improved user-interface.
The facial expressions do add a lot of power to the program, with an overall amount of control that is somewhere between that found in CrazyTalk and Poser 7. It can look artificial if pushed to extremes and still looks a bit plastic, but it does allow for much more believable performances.
The newly improved interface is made up largely of more colorful buttons on a newly redesigned toolbar. The second part of the interface redesign is a contextual menu which is essentially made up of popup buttons that appear when you click on a certain person or area in your scene. These contextual buttons are designed to simplify things by removing the superfluous clutter. It does help with this, although it separates the look of this program further from many other 3D programs. (Which is, of course, Antics 3D's goal.)
As mentioned in our 3.0 review, while the innovative depth of options make it easy to direct basic performances and actions, you are still going to find your ability to control the minute details of a scene Antics 3D much more limited than they would be with a designated 3D program like Cinema 4D, Lightwave, or Maya. If you desire that sort of functionality or wish to become a professional in the 3D world, you’ll need to save up and purchase a dedicated 3D package such as these.
Performance
Antics 3D 4.0 continued moving forward with good stability and some new improvements in the lighting department. Before this release, lights that were present were very even in their influence, with little ability to sculpt the illumination it provided. Essentially it was only possible to represent a room that was either lit or not lit. Now you can choose between lighting that is more akin to other 3D programs. By selecting the properties of your new light you can switch between a point or spotlight, change aspects like color and shadow, and even control the blur or sharpness of the shadow edge. Controlling the size and spread of your light, relative to your set, is also very easy to do via a set of control curves that appear when you select the spotlight. It’s good to see that, even with this very processor-intensive feature added in, the program still holds its ground and stays efficiently speedy.
As alluded to before, the performance improvements in 5.0 come in the creative power of being able to have your digital actors use keyframeable expressions and in the more steamlined use of the menus and contextual pop-up buttons. New users will like the improvements in the menus, as they do make it easier to get going, but old users will find that there's a bit of learning curve to getting up to speed.
