I have been using Box Shot 3D for a few years now and it just keeps getting better and better. Since version 3.1 many new shapes have been added – quite a few as a result of user requests. However, you can also import 3DS files if the shape you are after is not there as standard.

Best of all, you can have multiple shapes in a scene. This provides tremendous flexibility as you could have, for example,  coffee mugs, DVDs and a book in a scene.

Please keep in mind that any images shown here are compressed JPEGs to reduce page load time so the image quality is not going to be spectacular. Don’t let that confuse you. Box Shot 3D generates print quality images.

There is a number of sample scenes to get you started quickly a couple of which are shown below.

I have been impressed with what can be achieved in a very short time using Box Shot 3D. On one of my sites I use it extensively to generate images of printed books for sale. I simply scan the cover then use Box Shot 3D to generate  a realistic looking image of one or a stack of books. It is far, far quicker than getting the camera out, setting up the lights, arranging the book and taking the photo. Box Shot 3d is a tremendous time saver for me.

Download a fully functional trial version and see for yourself what it can do for you. I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Oh, and it is available on Macs and Windows.

BoxShot3d Version 3.1 was released this week. It contains some new shapes and additional features. If you look at the comments on the BoxShot3D website you will see that this release has been very favourably received. Once you have used BoxShot3D you will understand why everyone is so effucive about it.
Some great new shapes have been added including books with a flat spine, monitors, iPad and iPhone shapes. (Click on the images to see a larger image.)

BoxShot3D also has shapes for mugs and paper coffee cups. And it has had bottles, cans and tagged boxes for quite a while. Of course if none of these shapes are what you are after, you can always import 3ds shapes.

The flatspine hard cover book is one that was of great interest to me for one of my other websites.

BoxShot3D makes it incredibly simple to create great cover or product shots for real and virtual products. I have used it to save the time that would be spent setting up the camera and lights for a studion shot of something and where I don’t have the physical product to photograph.

People buy with their eyes and numerous formal and informal studies have shown that pages with images of a product result in more sales for that product than those that don’t have an image. If you have a digital product, whether it is an ebook, a program, music, video, etc you can quickly produce an image for that product.

BoxShot3D is a great program that continues to improve and is available for both Windows and Mac. Have a look at some of the shots in the gallery on the BoxShot3D website and see what it is capable of. You can also download and try it for free while you decide whether to buy.

Click Here to Visit The BoxShot3D Official Website.

As you already know, I am a fan of BoxShot 3D. It has an extensive range of features, is available in both Windows and Mac versions,  and is extremely competitively priced.

One of the things that has continually impressed me over the 3 or so years that I have been using BoxShot 3D has been the responsiveness of the developer to customer questions and requests.If someone has a question it is answered promptly. If a bug is reported it is fixed promptly.

New features are being added to the application all the time and, mostly, the new version of BoxShot3D is issued as a point release which means that it is free. There were extensive new features added between BoxShot3D 2.x and 3.0 which fully justified its new version number. And judging by the comments on the site everyone was encouraging Vitaly to make it a new version and charge for the upgrade. And the upgrade was well worth it as I noted in a previous post.

Well, the good news is that there are even more improvements coming next months. Version 3.1 will be released and will include some

• Width and Height parameters for booklet, brochure, image and stack of images shapes
• Scale sliders in the Transformation page (useful for changing the size of imported 3DS files)
• Faster loading of CMYK and grayscale images on Mac
• Automatic checking for updates
• More folds in vertical booklets
• A hard cover book shape with flat spine
• Some new shapes

One of the new features is one that I requested – so I’m excited.

As I said, the developer listens to his customers and does whatever he can to accommodate their requests.

If you do any sort of online marketing or advertising you should check out BoxShot3D. You can download a demo version to try before buying to see whether it does everything you want. If you have used any other box shot program I think you will be amazed at what you can do with BoxShot3D.

Oh, and don’t judge Boxshot3D by the banner below – there is only so much you can fit in an animated gif. Check out the original images on the BoxShot3D website…

Boxshot 3D is continually being enhanced with new features. If you haven’t heard of Boxshot 3D, it allows you to produce incredibly realistic-looking images for ebook covers, box shots (software, CD, DVD), pill bottles and cans, busines cards and membership cards and lots more.

The latest feature that is expected to be released this month is Stepback book covers. Stepback covers are those that are not quite as wide as the book so they allow a part of the underlying page to show through. The sample image below shows where it is going.

Stepback Book Cover produced by Boxshot 3D

Once finished, this will be a great feature that will make Boxshot 3D even greater than it already is. You can download BoxShot 3D to try before you decide to buy. Once you have played with it a bit you will be amazed how flexible it is and how much time you can save. And, if you are selling virtual products, such as downloadable ebooks, you will be amazed how much your sales will increase with a good product image.

Click Here to Visit the Boxshot 3d Website.

As many of you already know, I am a fan of BoxShot 3d (read my review post to see why). It is really a virtual cover renderer although most people call this type of software a virtual cover generator. Okay, so what is it?

Well, let’s say you have written an ebook and made it available for people to download. Anyone who has sold anything online will tell you that people respond better (= buy more) if they can see an image of what it is that they are considering purchasing.  Since there is no physical product with an ebook, how do you get an image that will make people want to buy it? This is where virtual cover generators like BoxShot 3D come in.

You create or find an image you would like to use for the front cover, the spine or side, and the back cover. In BoxShot3D you tell it what sort of book image you would like – hard cover, soft cover, report with various bindings etc. Then you tell it the images you wish to use for the front cover, spine etc and finally you tell it to render it.

BoxShot 3D uses raytracing to produce a very realistic-looking image complete with highlights, shadows and reflections. If you could take an ebook photo this is what it would look like. The icing on the cake is that you can apply texture to the cover images as well. For example, you might decide that you would like your cover to look like it is embossed leather. Well you can make it look just like that. I am not aware of any other ebook cover software that does that.

I have primarily used BoxShot 3D for ebook covers and real book covers, believe it or not. Why real book covers? Well, often I have a scanned image of the book cover. Rather than have to get the camera out, set up the book and take a photo, I find it quicker and easier to tell BoxShot3D the type of book, the image and get it to render it! Not only that, but I can get it to render a book on a pile of books – something I can’t do if I only have one copy of the physical book.

There are many other shapes that BoxShot 3D has that I haven’t used yet but as the number of my websites grows I find I will be using more of them. The next version of BoxShot3d will include even more shapes. In the meantime, if there is a shape that Boxshot3D doesn’t have you can import 3D Studio Max shapes. How good is that?

This is an extremely versatile piece of software and I have not seen anything else that provides so much functionality. And it is available for both Windows and Macs. Have a look at it and see what I mean. You can even download a demo of the product to see how well it works and how easy it is to use.

Click Here to Visit The BoxShot 3d EBook Virtual Cover Generator Official Website.

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.

Click Here to Visit The BoxShot3d Website.

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,

Click Here Go to The Box Shot 3D Official Website.

The latest version of Box Shot 3D  has been released today and I have just installed it.

At the moment I am busily playing with, er, I mean, evaluating it. It looks great! The two most exciting features for this version are dust jackets and being able to customise the stacks of books. As I said, it looks good and I think this be a very popular release.

Anyway please bear with me for a little longer and I’ll have  the full review very soon. Promise!

Hi everyone, welcome back.

I was going to post my review today but I have just checked out the BoxShot3D website and notice that they will be releasing an updated version very soon. The current version is 2.12.1 and 2.13 will be out “any day now” so I thought I would wait before posting the review since it has some really nifty new features and it wouldn’t be entirely fair to review an earlier version than the one you will see by the time you check out their site.

What are some of the new features? Well, for a long time now you have had book stacks but soon you will be able to adjust the number of books in the stack. You have been able to produce membership cards for a long time also and now you will be able to include height or depth information so the lettering on the card looks like it is raised – just like a real card. You can do the same with book covers to give them an embossed or leather look.

As I said, these are great new features and I am looking forward to it being released so I can play with them – er, I mean, evaluate them.

Talk soon.

Well, chances are, if you are on this page, you already know! However, I thought I may as well quickly describe what it is in case any of you don’t know.

BoxShot3D is a piece of software that enables you to produce realistic images of product boxes, books and ebooks, CDs, DVDs, drink cans, bottles and more using ordinary 2D images.

You will find, for example, that if you want to sell an ebook online,  you will sell more if you have a product image looks like a real book. With BoxShot3D you can use just a front cover image although you should really have a side (or spine) image as well. The final image has shadows, reflections, highlighting so that it looks just like you took a photo of whatever it is you’re selling.

I used to do all this manually and it was tedious and the result was very… “ordinary”, shall we say. Sure, I got faster the more I did it but it was still time-consuming, and, since I am not a graphic artist, the result was not what I would have liked.

BoxShot3D was a definite boon – select the shape, provide an image or two, click Render and after a few minutes (more or less depending on the size) I had an image that was preofessionally done.

Seriously, if someone as graphically-challeneged as I am (you’ve seen this site!) can produce a professional product image using it, anyone can.

There is a lot more that can be done with BoxShot3D but that will be covered in the full review. Stay tuned and I’ll hope to have the review done in the next couple of days.

Ser

Boxshot3D Review Is Coming!

G’day this is Michael.

Thanks for dropping by. This is my newest website dedicated to Boxshot3D – eBook Cover and Boxshot Software for Windows and Mac.

What you will find here is a comprehensive review of its features and I will be updating the site as new versions of the product become available. I have been using this product for a year so I will be giving you facts based on my personal experience with it.

The product has been around for a while although the latest release has not been out very long. I am currently putting it through its paces and will prepare a review shortly to let you know what I found. So keep checking back to get the latest info on the Boxshot3D review.

Talk to you soon.