Ulead's Cool 3D has been with us for some time, always a fine application for, well, cool 3D text effects and some animation to jazz them up. With version 3.0, Cool 3D has grown up into a big time player which you'll absolutely want to have available no matter what kind of graphical work you're doing.
   What brings Cool 3D to the forefront is addition of vector editing and a really robust ability to bring in bitmap graphics and have them converted to vector format. Nowhere in the under-$1,000 category have I found a program which brings in bitmaps and produces vectors as well as Ulead's Cool 3D. I kid you not.
   I have been working on a web site for a small city in my area for several years and have always wanted to be able to show their Official Seal with a 3D look. It has never, ever been possible before: primarily because, of course, the Seal is rather complicated. I have used just about every program out there, and it has never worked without a lot of tweaking, manipulation and – to be honest – less than sterling output. The graphic you see on the left was done in one fell swoop. I asked Cool 3D to make it a vector and it did; then I manipulated it ever so slightly to have the bevel show up.
   By the way, Cool 3D warned me it might take a long time to render. About 15 seconds, it was. On a 400 MHz Pentium II. Can't wait to get a 1 GHz III!
   The ease with which this was done is a hallmark of Cool 3D. Everything is easy, and the effects are startling. That is because Cool 3D has what it calls an "easy pallete," it shows you little pictures of what the thing you want to do looks like and you double-click that (or drag it onto the image you're working on) and there it is.
   OK, but. We've seen stuff like this and that's about all you can do (forgetting that Cool 3D has a plethora of different things you can do in all aspects of the program). Not with Cool 3D. You can tweak these settings to your heart's content. Not only is it easy, but you see the effect at once. Don't like it. Tweak again. And again. Forever.
   We're going to show you one of the most simple things you can do with Cool 3D just to demonstrate its power. "Madison" is my grandaughter. She's adorable. You'll see. All we did here was type her name and set the typeface to Aachen Bold, popped into Cool 3D's Color and Light Pallete and changed the color to red. Now that looks pretty nice.
   But she's a nifty kid, so we wanted to jazz this up. The way to do that is by editing the vectors in the "M." (The "M" is important because she's named after my Mom.) So, we told Cool 3D to go into its vector-editing mode, changed the perspective of the "M" and made it a little bigger, too. Easy as pie. Two mouse clicks.
   You could do most anything in the vector editor, because you can edit each control point, change the type of the point from line to curve and vice versa. In fact, here we found the only shortcoming in the program: you can't select more than one point at a time. We wanted to move the left side of the first upright in the "M" over to be bigger, but it is very difficult to do if you have to relocate each point. Having the ability to select multiple points would be great.
  No matter. We still have a pretty fancy Madison. We told the vector editor to save the changes and send them to the main program window, and it did instantly. All of a sudden, we have an image which looks original, different and is Madison's alone.
   The next step will show you just how cool Cool 3D is. This program has always been known for its rather nifty effects and one of them is fire. We decided just for fun that we'd light our Madison up with some flames. How? One click. It looked so nifty we didn't even bother to do any tweaking.
   (I should admit that Cool 3D is a lot of fun to play with. Since you can undo multiple times, you can experiment quite a lot and once I got my Madison graphic the way I wanted it, I had a grand time with the colors and effects. But, once done with all that, it was time to do something useful. Or nearly so.)
   And so, this is the final product. It is, of course, Madison preparing to enjoy Halloween. What is so cool about this is the ability to import the background graphic with one click. It is a nice graphic and will look great on her web site (as soon as I get around to building it).
   So far, all I have talked about here is static graphics. But if you think Cool 3D is a static graphics generation and editing program, you are sadly mistaken. In fact, a huge amount of the power in Cool 3D is in its animation capabilities and a humungeous number of its presets are devoted to the niftyest, coolest and most sophisticated animations I have seen. Of course you can tweak all of these to your heart's content. And, as a bonus, all of this is very easy to do with the excellet interface Ulead has constructed.
   I was tempted to put a bunch of animations here for you to look at, but, in the interest of getting the page to load in a reasonable time, I'm suggesting you zip over to the Ulead site. What's amazing about these animations is that they are so easy to do. And we're not talking just spinning a word around, either. Not by a long shot.
   Having said that, I need to say a word about the output abilities of Cool 3D. Great. There you go. Animations in AVI and MOV, static graphics in a host of formats, including transparent GIF.
   The best news of all? Cool 3D is $59.95 in the download version and $79.95 in the box version. In this era of $500-plus programs, that would be something if Cool 3D had only a third of the capabilities. With what it does have, it may be the best bargain in graphics applications today.

   Link to the Ulead Cool 3D Web Site