Sadly it doesn’t interact with other objects in a shared 3D space, so there are no shared lighting settings and visibility is by layer order rather than distance from camera. It offers detailed control over text formatting and includes some fun deform and shatter effects. This is the real-world effect that makes a police siren change pitch as the car passes, and it’s a nice touch that it can be applied automatically based on 3D animation of objects.ģD titles finally make an appearance in the form of Boris FX 3D.

There’s a small suite of audio effects, including the ability to apply Doppler Shift. It now supports Alembic 3D for complex animations created in software such as Maya or Cinema4D – not something I’ve had the opportunity to test. The software already supported basic internal animation a 3D model, such as for spinning propellers of a plane.

FX Home suggests this is useful for auto-generating cityscapes from a handful of building models. Particles can be spawned on a regimented grid. A neat trick is to create a block-colour plane to simulate colours in the live action footage – green grass, for example – and set the plane to be invisible but still reflect off the 3D model. Metallic objects can have a matt or gloss finish and pick up reflected colours from their surroundings.

The bottom line here is that 3D models can be made to look much more convincing than before. Then again, ray tracing would have crippled performance, whereas this implementation keeps the software reasonably responsive. It’s also frustrating that 3D models’ properties are only available in a pop-up window, which must be closed in order to see the model under your own project’s lighting. Ray tracing tracks beams of light as they bounce around a virtual 3D space, and Hitfilm’s 3D render engine feels like an early prototype of the concept. It’s still a long way short of the ray tracing techniques used elsewhere to produce highly photorealistic 3D graphics. 3D models can now reflect colours from other objects to produce livelier lighting effects

Hitfilm 4