A New, Clever, And Free Way To Display And Animate 3D Shapes Into Your Mac Apps

Apple does a good job of integrating basic functions throughout OS X, including within most Mac apps. For example, in most cases you can drag and drop images and text from one app to another.

What if you want to create some 3D vector designs for Keynote or Pages or some other Mac app? There are two choices. Cough up some extra coin to pay for a 3D vector image app, or get one that’s free and does the same thing.

Shape, Drag, And Drop

One of the more clever utilities I’ve used this year comes from Pierre Chachatelier in France. It’s called ShapeOnYou and it creates 3D vector images in various shapes and forms.

The advantage of vector-based shapes over bitmap images is the ability to rescale the former, which is messy to do in the latter.

In ShapeOnYou, you get a 3D vector-based graphic app which lets you create objects that can be dropped into other Mac apps.

That saves you time and money because ShapeOnYou is free and much easier to learn than Adobe Illustrator. The built-in tool Inspector is similar to that used in iWork.

The app comes with an imposing set of basic and complex shapes to get started, and each shape can be customized to match your needs.

Click on the image above for a larger, pop up view with more detail.

ShapeOnYour has a sizable set of functions, and a modest learning curve.

For example, animations can be exported as a QuickTime movie which can be dropped into most Mac applications.

The 3D rendering options give you controls over edges, shadows, shading, colors, and precise sizing.

Though it features a large collection of shapes already, those shapes can be used as the basis for creating additional shapes.

And, of course, ShapeOnYour exports files to a variety of graphic file formats common to the Mac– PDF, EPS. SFG, TIFF, PNG, JPEG as wells as VRML and X3D. That makes shapes compatible with most Mac document creating apps.

It’s fast, handy, capable, easy to learn, and it’s free. Now, let’s all say a collective Thank You! to Pierre.

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