Dirk DeJong, product manager of Boris Blue, talks about the Windows-only 3D extrusion package Boris Blue 2.5, now available for Adobe CS3, when it might be coming to the Mac, and the most extreme thing he’s ever seen a customer do with it.

The biggest new features in 2.5, as opposed to 2.0, are additional plug-in integration. In 2.0, we first supported AVX plug-ins for Avid systems. Blue 2.5 adds plug-in support for Premiere and After Effects CS3. Along with that, we expanded the hardware support. As you probably know, one unique thing about Blue is that is does accelerated rendering, not just for previews but for the final render, relying on the graphics card. Before 2.5, it was actually limited to NVIDIA graphics cards. This release has support for ‘ APIs graphics cards as well. With the Avid users, we knew they were pretty consistently using NVIDIA, since that’s what Avid tests and approves and recommends. But the Adobe users are on all kinds of cards, so we knew we needed to expand the hardware support for that.

Yea, there will be a point release. Before that, though, there are a few things we have to deal with at the moment. There will be an update for Vista. Hopefully, though, the next versions of Adobe CS won’t require a change on our end. Generally, with After Effects especially, they are backward-compatible that way. But if necessary, will be hammering on the late beta builds to make sure it all works seamlessly.

Primarily because that was a user base who had cards that we knew were well tested by us and it would work well for just about anybody who bought an Avid in the last two and a half years and was using a supported setup. Adding the Adobe support, from my end at least, was a surprisingly smooth transition. Both Premiere and After Effects, of course, are using OpenGL resources as well. So far, all the host applications overall have been good about sharing those resources.

The main focus for 2.5 was the hardware support and host extensions, along with some nice presets. But 2.5 followed along pretty closely to 2.0, which we launched last fall, and there are a lot of cool features inside 2.0 worth mentioning again. People often ask, ‘What does Blue offer me beyond what Boris Red does?’ Basically, there are a lot of tools in Blue for creating more sophisticated 3D effects more quickly. One really significant one is having split-views in the composition window, like a 3D modeling program. You can set up a split view where you have orthographic views-left, right, top and then a world view-and you can look at your render camera at the same time. With 2.0, we added nee camera features. But to actually be able to use those camera features meaningfully, we knew we had to offer a better user interface for composing in 3D. Now you can have the 3D camera stay locked on a specified target as it animates, or even, the target can be another object. You can put the camera on a Bezier path and have it stay oriented on the path. To be able to see what you’re doing when you create this way you need to be able to step out of the actual camera’s view to be able to place those kinds of things and animate them with efficiency. So that is a significant highlight in Blue 2.0 that carries into Blue 2.5.

Also, Blue offers what we call “3D deformers,” meaning, you have all these 3D shapes that can be extruded vector shapes or extruded .eps files, and the text, or spheres, cylinders, cube or even free-hand splines that you can draw. We support extruded models, which is not new and has been there all along. Deformers are like filters which, rather than operating on pixels, they actually deform the mesh of a 3D object. With version 2.0, we added a lot more of those kinds of deformers, offering a much bigger variety of effects you can do in that area. There’s Ripple, Curl, a nice shatter transition effect-like a real 3D shatter-different ways of twisting and bending objects. That was greatly expanded in 2.5.

There are new image processors, or filters as you know them in AE and Boris Red. We’ve added a film grain and a film process and a bunch of glow filters, all things that are popular effects for the logo animation that Blue lends itself to. The other thing we included was more of the Boris Continuum filters. They can now be real time within Boris Blue-things like glare, glitter, lens flare, a scan line filter, a lightning filter, which can all now be viewed in Blue 2.5. Many, more filters can now flow into Blue from our other products.

I think that, in a way, Blue was born out of a feature request of Red users. Some people user Red for titling and simple filtering, using it as a plug-in. But then, some Red users-the power users-started creating more complex and sophisticated 3D extrusions in logos or show opens. I think they liked the way it looked in the end, but the actual process of getting there, whether in the UI for working on it but mainly the actual render times, being software-based, were definitely not fast. Most of these users are editors, not 3D modelers, so there sense of render times is different. They just don’t have the same tolerance that a 3D modeler would to do that kind of stuff. Originally, I think it might have been conceived of that it could be a feature of Red. But we quickly realized that it made sense to go and do it as its own thing. These graphics cards, when you look at the kind of games people are playing on computers, you say, ‘Oh, obviously there’s power there for doing 3D in real time or near real time. And the quality of those 3D effects was such that we felt like we could make something that could take advantage of that. But we also knew that it wouldn’t immediately support all the hosts that Red did. We imagined the initial Blue users would already be using Red-the kind of Red users who want to do lots of 3D-though I’ve been surprised at how many non-Boris users have picked Blue up. The actual interface and control windows are very similar in both products. If you know Graffiti, or Red, you’ll be able to pick up Blue pretty quickly.

At this point, we have plug-ins for Avid and Adobe on Windows only. Most of our products are for Windows and Mac, however, so we’re actively developing a version of Blue for the Mac.

We’re hoping for an IBC timeframe. That’s big for us, because probably half of our user base is on the Mac.

For someone who owns Red, we sell them Blue for $295; it’s normally $995. We try and make it so users don’t have to choose. If you have the hardware to run Blue or to plug into a host that it currently plugs into, then it makes sense to get both, especially if you’re looking to do a lot of 3D logo and object work. With version one of Blue, it was a simple message because it was standalone only. So for people who needed the convenience of a plug-in right in the NLE timeline, there was Red. But now it’s not such a simple message. When I find out what users really hope to achieve with the programs, I can usually give a good recommendation. We try to demonstrate that with reviews and the content on the Web site, as well as make everything available as a trial version for download. This way, users can install them both, use them both and then buy which one or ones they think they need.

The crazy stuff, believe it or not, happens quite a bit. We’ve been working really hard to get a lot of user stories, and we get a lot when we run contests. Among some submissions, there was one guy who essentially built, for a broadcast spot, a tractor out of extruded objects. I’ve been working here a lot of years and I’ve done a lot of extreme things with our software but I never saw something quite like that. This guy was more of an editor, but that’s the funny thing: if he were an animator, he would have any number of 3D modelers out there to work with. He described his process of discovery for us. He said, ‘OK, if I use the letter “I” and extrude it for the sides; and for the treads of the tractor wheels, I can use this character or spline,’ and so on. People find a way to do what they want.

Absolutely. That’s why we always have a spec of what a product’s going to be but we definitely let the beta process mold the product. You discover what it’s really about for your users, so you adjust. As a product manager, interacting with beta testers is one of my favorite things.