Aye, my Istanbul hosts are getting close to releasing their quite rad and ground-breaking real-time 3D software, 3L (aka Thrill). It’s caffeine-o-clock as bugs are ironed out, features are refined and interfaces re-jigged. An OS -X beastie, it harnesses the 3D power within recent graphics cards to provide a modular, real-time 3D environment. Inside this, multiple objects can be positioned and moved around, as can the camera position, or the whole scene itself. Video textures can be composited as backgrounds or on objects, effects can be applied to textures or the final output. And it’s all happening in real-time, super-fast frame rates and with plenty of depth to explore.

Unique to the program is a cleverly coded and killer capacity to record your real-time experiments at full DV resolution – eg 720 x576 pixels for DV-PAL. Play, manipulate, refine, record. Like most contemporary VJ software it also comes with a full range of adjustible sliders, each controllable by mouse input, audio analysis or a large range of oscillators and maths functions. It’s the well thought through detail with a lot of these though, that makes the software quite powerful. And sequencer modules. And a module for controlling those VMS ( video mirror systems that allow the projected image to move around the room ). And lots, lots more, ( wonderful capacities to interpolate between various complex sets of parameters, wet and dry FX levels for R,G and B etc etc etc ), but that’ll come in a later review – this is just a note to say there’s something on the way. 3D graphics fiends who give good constructive feedback are highly encouraged to bug AE into putting them on their 3L Beta-testing list, muchos recommendo.