Product Reviews

Interiors is aimed at the novice to intermediate interior designer, with the aim of making the process as easy as possible. To this end it makes heavy use of libraries of pre-defined components, covering a wide range of fixtures and fittings, from urinals to gazebos to entire cafe bar set-ups. There's even a comprehensive collection of past and present Apple hardware featuring Cinema Displays, G3 towers and, of course, iPods.

If you buy the CD version, you get the whole package on disc, and if you choose the online version you can either download the entire set or just what you need at the time for a particular project. This new version also sees the number of potentially available components increase exponentially, with the introduction of 3DS import. This is the proprietary file format of 3D Studio MAX, a program unavailable on the Mac platform. So why choose it as the one-and-only import format? Simple: there are literally tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of freely downloadable .3ds models on sites across the web. In a short trawl we were able to track down a basketball, a motocross bike, a Boeing 747, a dolphin and a high-top sports shoe. Oh, and a Scud missile. All imported without a hitch into Interiors. Of course, this also means that - if you're up to it - you can now model your own components in another program and import them into Interiors.

Since the focus is on interiors, you'll need a space to put your components. Before you do anything, set up your general area using the Grid options palette, then you'll need to use one of Interiors' two Wall tools. The Four-wall tool lets you drag out simple, rectilinear spaces. The Wall tool, however, gives you more scope to design free-form spaces - this tool has been extended in version 3.6 to include drawing non-orthogonal walls. The operation of this tool may seem a little strange at first: every time you drag-click to draw a section of wall, a dialog box appears, prompting you to input the exact length of that section. In other programs you might expect this dialog box

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to be an option, but Microspot argues - quite rightly - that interior designers will be working from pre-existing wall measurements, so the drawing is simply to set wall direction and approximate length - the actual measurements can then be typed in.

Next, check your space using the View tools: Navicam and Tripod. These exist on their own palettes (and all palettes can be docked in version 3.6) and allow you to interactively pan, orbit, zoom and move around the model. They both work in slightly different ways: Tripod mimics a virtual camera on a tripod, whereas Navicam is a much more interactive tool.

When you start dragging in furniture and accessories from the Libraries window, you'll notice two rather clever features. First, components are supplied with 'locks'. This means that they sit on surfaces where you would expect them to: drag a picture object onto a wall, for instance, and its Z position and Y rotation are locked, meaning that it can't be moved or rotated into the wall. You can still position it anywhere on the surface according to its other two coordinates, however. The second is windows and doors: drag either onto a wall and they cut the required openings - doors even position themselves correctly at floor level. Even better, they do this in any thickness of wall - the doors and windows scale their depth automatically to fit precisely in the wall thickness, with no input from the user.

Once everything's set up to your liking, images can be exported from saved views, or you can export QuickTime animations. Animations are handled by drawing a spline - either point-to-point or Bezier - in Plan view. The spline can then be edited and tweaked to fine-tune the path, then a camera can be set to follow it. There's also an animation tweener window - like a timeline - that allows finer control of the camera's motion between keyframes on the path.

All rendering is implemented via OpenGL. Three plug-ins are supported: the interactive (used for all scene setting up), Preview, which gives you a more detailed 'snapshot' of the scene with shadows, and Final, which gives you full anti-aliasing and allows other attributes such as light colour and falloff to be displayed. The use of OpenGL means that render times are greatly reduced, but it's also a trade-off with the quality that a raytrace renderer can produce.

Interiors is an engaging product, with some robust new features in this version. The interface has a few rough edges (some dialogs look like the offspring of Aqua and System 7.0), but it should enable non-specialist users to get up to speed with interior planning and design fairly quickly.