Hi it’s Michael here.
Thanks for being patient. It’s finally done. So, without further ado…
“Here’s The Most Comprehensive Review Of Box Shot 3D on the ‘Net”
No fluff, no filler – Just what you want and NEED to know before purchasing.
Note: This is a review, Click Here to Visit The BoxShot3d Website.
First of all, What Exactly is Box Shot 3D?.
At its simplest Box Shot 3D is a virtual cover renderer that uses ray tracing algorithms. What does this mean? You can create images of virtual or electronic products that look very realistic. Having an attractive image for a product is often the deciding factor for purchasing it.
There is a Windows version and a Mac version of Box Shot 3D.
The most common use for something like Box Shot 3D is making a cover image for an ebook. However it comes with a wide array of built in shapes including hard cover and soft cover books, book stacks, binders, folders, software boxes, CD & DVD boxes, cards, brochures, bottles and cans as well as paper bags.
If these shapes are not sufficient you can load 3DS files. This provides incredible flexibility and means that if a shape you want to use is not yet native to Box Shot 3D you can find a suitable 3DS shape and use it.
These shapes can have different images applied to different parts of them. For example, if you have selected a hard cover book, you can choose an image for the front cover, the side (or spine), the back and even the leaves (or pages).
What BoxShot 3D is NOT
Box Shot 3D is not an image editing application for example, like PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro. The images you use for the front, side etc need to be created already. They are then applied to the shape you have selected. This means that if you want to add text to a cover, for example, you need to put the text in the image you are going to use for the cover.
Sample Images You Can Produce
I haven’t used all of the shapes in BoxShot3D as I don’t sell all bottles and drink cans, for example. So I’ve just grabbed a few sample images from the Box Shot 3d website to give you a feel for what you can produce. These are based on the standard straight out-of-the-box program.
Using Box Shot 3D
Before I knew about Box Shot 3D I was creating my product images by hand. This meant putting together the front, side, top etc to make a book or box, then distorting them to get a perspective effect and then trying to get a realistic looking reflection and shadow. After doing a few, I did get a bit faster but they never really looked convincing. Hey, I’m not a graphic artist (in fact, I think my 6 year old daughter can draw better than me).
After spending hours to get a handful of product images, I decided to spend the money and get a program to do it. After looking at quite a few I settled on Box Shot 3D.
When you first start up Box Shot 3D you see a screen similar to the following.
A preview image is shown at the left and the panel on the right controls the shape and the transformations you apply to it. The tabs on the right are
Shapes – where you choose the shape you wish to use
Images – enables you to apply images to the front, sides etc of the shape
Camera – gives you control over the camera angle and distance from the shape
Lighting – sets the lighting levels and the amount of shadow
Scene – gives you control over the amount of reflection of the image and its sharpness. You can also set a colour or an image for the background of the scene.
Render – allows you to set the size and quality of the final product image
The default shape is the software box. You can select any of the standard shapes or load your own 3DS shape. You can also rotate the shape around the X, Y or Z axes. You can also set an offset for each of these so that the shape appears to float above the floor, for example.
Some of the shapes allow a degree of tweaking. For example you can have a book stack with a book standing on top of the stack. The number of books in the stack is adjustable and the standing book can be rotated independently of the stack. That is worth getting BoxShto3D just for that feature in my opinion.
The images you use for the shape’s front, sides etc can be jpeg, tiff, psd, bmp, or png images and BoxShot3D supports transparency.
You can also apply bump and specular effects to the image to give it texture and added realism. You use images the same size as the main image for these effects. The Bump image is a heightmap – it is a grayscale image where dark parts mean “lower” and bright parts mean “higher”. The Specular image is another grayscale image that defines level of specular reflection for the side. Black parts mean there is no specular at all and white parts mean “maximal level of specular reflection”.
What does this mean in practical terms? It means you can give the appearance of height to your product image. For example, if you are producing a book, you can use a leather bump image to give your book the appearance of having leather cover. If your product is a membership card, you can use the bump image to give the letters the appearance of being raised above the card. The end result is an incredibly realistic final image.
Chances are you probably won’t use the Camera tab much at all as pretty much everything you can do here you can do with the mouse by clicking and moving it over the actual preview image. In the Windows version the middle scroll button zooms in and out.
When you first use Box Shot 3D you will probably spend a bit of time playing around with different lighting options to get the best results. BOx Shot 3D supports 3 different types of lighting. Ambient light is the general light level of the scene and is non-directional. Direct lighting is similar to spotlight shining on the product. You can control its angle and intensity. It is what gives you the drop shadows. Finally there is skydome lighting which is intended to simulate the light that would come from the sky. It softens the shadows and can help make a scene look more realistic.
The last thing you need to do before rendering the final image is to set the degree of floor reflection. A lot of product images in recent years have a reflection similar to what you would get if you sat the product on a mirror or polished floor. Box Shot 3D gives you full control over the amount of reflection and the degree of sharpness.
Sometimes you might want a bit of contrast in the image. For example, if you have a cover that is predominantly white, it is not going to stand out much against a white background. Boxshot 3d lets you use a solid colour or an image as the background. This allows you to tune the final appearance of your product image so you have sufficient contrast and so it fits in with the background colour of your web page. And you can aslo set a transparent background so there are virtually no constraints here.
Now all you need to do is render the scene. After selecting the image size, you can choose to render it in Draft quality up to High End. Of course the greater the desired quality the longer the rendering will take. If you are in a hurry you can let Box Shot 3D run in the foreground. If you have other windows open over it, Box Shot 3D uses less processor power and so takes longer to run.
Spinning Objects
I didn’t know this until fairly recently (my excuse is I didn’t need to do it so I never thought about it). You can use Box Shot 3D to render spinning objects. Of course if you do this in the normal manner it will take a long time because you render the shape, save the image, rotate the shape slightly, render it again, save the new image etc. However, you can set this up to run overnigtht so you don’t have to be there as it happens. How? With a batch file.
Box Shot 3D can be executed from the command line so you can set up a batch file with one line:
for /L %%i in (0,1,359) do BoxShot3D.exe -cr %%i 20 -t Result%%i.png MyBook.box3d
This will execute BoxShot3D 359 times using the project MyBook.box3d and producing a sequence of rendered images called Result1.png, Result2.png … Result359.png.
It doesn’t get much easier than that! You can then use the images to make an animated GIF, Flash movie or video.
The Bad Points
Obviously, Box Shot 3D is not perfect. Here is what I didn’t like about it.
- The Help file/User Manual is very concise. There are no tutorials to help you get started. Having said that, you can produce good results using the default settings so I suppose this is not really a big issue. There is also an active blog on the Box Shot 3D website and users often contribute tips on what they have done.
- I do not like the supplied cover images – yeah, I know you are never going to use them but I would ahve like to see some other colour combinations for the sample covers.
The Good Points
I particularly like:
- the ability to use “bump” images to give texture to the final product image
- being able to save positions and lighting settings etc as presets – this is a great time saver
- being able to load external shapes
- dust jackets on the book shapes – you can use transparency in them so the cover of the underlying book shows through
- being able to set the number of books on a book stack and their degree of rotation
- the upgrade program
I haven’t mentioned the upgrade program yet but it is probably the best I have yet seen for a piece of software. When you purchase BoxShot3D you can download any newer release for free if it is the same major version. The current version is v2.13 so when V2.14 is released it will be a free upgrade. You’ll only have to pay if the major version changes eg, V2.13 to V3.0
Last Word
And so we come to the end of my Box Shot 3D review. Overall, this is the most impressive and complete virtual cover renderer I have seen.
If you overlook the rather bright cover images supplied with the product, it really is a tremendously versatile cover generator. For the price, I don’t think you can go past it. I know it has saved me literally hundreds of hours over the last couple of years generating product images so it has more than paid for itself.
You can download it and try it out yourself for free. The images contain a watermark but the complete functionality is available to you. If you then purchase it you receive a license key that removes watermarks from the images.
In my opinion this is a great piece of software.
Michael,
