NEW YORK, Seybold Seminars, March 17, 1998 - NewTek, manufacturer of industry-leading 3D animation and video production products, today announced Inspire 3D, an animation software tool aimed at new-media professionals, including graphic artists, multimedia developers and Web designers. The very affordable Inspire 3D delivers high-quality 3D modeling and rendering capabilities, custom designed for the new-media market segment. An important component of the product is an interactive, multimedia tutorial designed to make users instantly productive.

"NewTek has spent years focusing successfully on production environments for 3D tools, and with Inspire 3D we are applying that research and technology, and our cumulative expertise and reputation, to the growing number of new-media professionals," said Steve Herrmann, director of marketing for NewTek. "Inspire 3D fills an important gap in the current 3D animation offerings: It combines the high-quality, easy-to-use features that graphics, multimedia and Web designers demand, but at a price point that makes sense for people who are not immersed full-time in 3D animation. What's more, for new-media professionals who later decide to become more heavily involved in 3D, NewTek offers an easy upgrade path from Inspire 3D to LightWave 3D to preserve their investments in time and money."

Inspire 3D brings high-quality 3D output capabilities to a sophisticated market, in an application that is both smart and easy to use. Inspire 3D leverages technologies that NewTek developed for LightWave 3D, with a feature set specifically for use in multimedia, Web and print applications.

Inspire 3D includes tools for modeling, surfacing, lighting, animating and rendering 3D images. It supports VRML and VRML 2 for creating real-time 3D environments for the Web. It can render single images at up to 8,000 by 8,000 pixels for print, while rendering animations, image sequences or Web pages at more modest multimedia resolutions.

Inspire 3D Addresses Real Needs of New-Media Professionals
The new-media segment of the 3D animation software market is growing rapidly in size - it is expected to jump from $46.8 million in revenues in 1997 to $187.8 million by 2004, according to market researchers at Frost & Sullivan - as well as importance. As Frost & Sullivan recently reported: "In 1997, most 3D animation is created by professional artists for games, broadcasting, etc. By 2000, the majority of users will be businesses using animation to augment corporate presentations, modeling, training or Web page development." Today's new-media professionals rarely depend entirely on 3D technologies for their livelihoods, but many can greatly benefit by adding 3D to spice up their work in graphic arts, multimedia development or Web design. Low-end software cannot offer the quality these professionals require, while the highest-end products represent feature (and price) overkill.

For all these new-media professionals, Inspire 3D's streamlined production-oriented interface and specially produced online tutorial make it easy to get up to speed quickly and to stay highly productive over time. New users can create graphics rapidly, while experienced users will applaud the production work flow capabilities.

The interactive, multimedia tutorial included with Inspire 3D enables even novice 3D users to get up and running almost instantly. Dynamic, step-by-step and practical demonstrations and explanations cover every aspect of the types of 3D tasks that new-media professionals will face day-to-day, ranging from building a sphere to creating life-like animations. Users can search the on-line tutorial for specific functions and capabilities in Inspire 3D, becoming quickly productive with a very low learning curve.

Web developers, in particular, will appreciate Inspire 3D's polygonal modeler, which is unrivaled at any price for creating efficient poly count models and for low-level editing of these polygonal objects. Print graphics creators, for whom the resolution of the rendering engine is essential, will find that Inspire 3D's 8,000 by 8,000 pixel rendering of single images provides the highest maximum resolution available in this price segment. Inspire 3D's rendering engine uses technology from the award-winning LightWave 3D rendering engine, which is used in major motion picture and TV studios and other environments where rendering quality is of the utmost importance.

Specific Inspire 3D features include the following:

• work flow based on a Hollywood-tested production environment;
• compatibility with the tools that new-media professionals already use, including Photoshop®, QuarkXPress®, Illustrator®, Freehand®, Director® and others;
• Super Photo-realistic rendering engine with a full, time-based selective ray tracing engine that includes support for reflection, refraction and shadows;
• true time-based motion blur;
• the revolutionary MetaNURBS modeling technique, which delivers the high-performance organic modeling style of NURBS with the ease of use of a polygonal modeler, and which performs real-time conversion between polygons and NURBS to automatically create high- and low-resolution versions of a model;
• "power" tools such as Booleans for sophisticated operations such as combining objects in various ways;
• an interactive tutorial designed for immediate productivity;
• layout tools for creating life-like animations and controlling motion;
• the ability to modify or animate a wide range of attributes in a scene, including light intensity, fog strength, camera zoom factor, motion blur length, color saturation and surface glow values;
• cel shader rendering tool for rendering 3D objects in a cartoon style;
• built-in compositing features for building sophisticated, layered images for print or animation, and for combining 3D elements with 2D images or multimedia;
• many surfacing options for detailing models, including layering multiple textures on top of one another;
• real-time views of solid models to more quickly position textures, set up lighting and visualize objects;
• a Bones feature for character animation and organic deformations of models; and
• hundreds of license-free interactive 3D clip art items, including objects, images and fully animated scenes.

Price and Availability
Inspire 3D is due to begin volume shipments this month. It will carry a suggested retail price of $495 and will be available directly via the Internet, through catalog sales and at retail outlets such as CompUSA and Fry's. Inspire 3D runs on Windows 95, Windows NT and Power Macintosh platforms.

About NewTek With headquarters in San Antonio, NewTek is a leader in providing full-featured video editing and special-effects tools that allow anyone to produce professional video and graphics. The company's products are used worldwide on projects from home video to feature film, including some of the most widely anticipated recent blockbusters, such as Men In Black, Titanic, HBO's From the Earth to the Moon, Lost in Space and The Jackal. Contact NewTek at 8200 IH-10 West, Suite 900, San Antonio, TX 78230. Phone (210)370-8000. Fax (210)370-8001. (http://www.newtek.com)