Desktop Engineering Pick of the Week

[Bill Nordgren]

Editor's Pick: Create 3D Presentations Using Dryfork

Dryfork offers multiple environments to show relationships by incorporating 3D visual media, video, and sound.

by Anthony J. Lockwood | Published March 12, 2008

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Nearly a year ago, I recommended you check out a 3D presentation package called Dryfork. Now Version 2.0 just came out, giving me an excuse to tell you once again that Dryfork is something you need to check out if you ever have to give a presentation or if someone in your outfit has to. I’ve been playing with it and not only is Dryfork terrific stuff, but it is fun to use. It’ll also change the way you think about communicating.

The basic analogy I’ll draw for you is that Dryfork lets you create a show as you do with, say, Impress from OpenOffice.org or MS PowerPoint. The key difference is that Dryfork is for anyone who lives and works in a 3D world. Dryfork is inherently 3D and multimedia ready. This means you can mix the strengths of an everyday bullet-pointed slide show with an audio track, a movie, and zooming and panning images, text, and graphics in 3D. Multimedia just becomes a part of your presentation. Objects can move around as you want them. You can play with lighting effects or just have a quiet 3D image in the background.

You do all of that without anything being particularly difficult. For example, say you have a complicated concept where you could really get your point across with a movie instead of chattering on for a zillion words. Click and drag the video camera icon into your slide. Double-click, tell Dryfork where the AVI file resides, fiddle with settings to run the AVI as you see best, and you’re done. Want to lead your viewers through a series of steps? Try having Dryfork’s little guy walk from point to point, or maybe you can build a flythrough showing your concepts in rich 3D.

The point is that Dryfork is for communicating to the visually attuned, 3D minds of 2008. And it’s easy to use, even for a dumbbell like me. But what excites me most about Dryfork is not how easy it is to use. It’s what it can do for you after you make a cool presentation. I get a lot of PowerPoints to show me how way cool something is. The next day when I fire it up to see what’s going on, well, I hope that I had a chance to take notes and maybe an audio recording because most of the slides are almost useless without the narrative. You can avoid this happening with a Dryfork presentation. Do it right, and your Dryfork presentation will be as fresh as a newly beached cod whenever your client or potential client gets around to firing it up. That is worth its weight in gold.

Speaking of gold, the full enchilada Dryfork package costs something like $299, which is not a lot of money for the ability to make presentations that will blow the socks off potential clients. Check out Dryfork. You can start with the free trial download linked off of today’s Pick of the Week write-up or contact the company for a live demo. This is really different stuff. Spend the time to get to know Dryfork.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine

[Bill Nordgren]

Create 3D Presentations Using Dryfork

Dryfork offers multiple environments to show relationships by incorporating 3D visual media, video, and sound.

by DE Editors | Published March 12, 2008

Dryfork Media Corporation (Orem, UT) is offering version 2.0 of Dryfork, a 3D presentation software package that lets you not only create — but customize — professional 3D presentations that exude multimedia. Dryfork lets you say goodbye to the static page format by letting you embed the elements of 3D graphics, animations, and sound into a single page.



“Dryfork goes way beyond PowerPoint,” explains Bill Nordgren, president of Dryfork, in the live demo. “It’s the only environment for engineers who want to see their products in 3D in spatial relationships. With Dryfork, you can do things you wouldn’t normally do.”



Dryfork 3D presentation software is a platform to design and deliver self-running training modules; the object-oriented, 100 percent 3D presentation system was designed using Flexsim technology.

Said to be the first 3D presentation system for engineers, you can put to good use all your technical materials to communicate the content of your offering, and create an unconventional presentation using conventional "slides and points."

Like constructing a stage on which to place your virtual model, you use one of the five main screens in Dryfork’s Presentation Builder, to create your pages in a tree view in your toolbox: Narrative, Worlds, Inventory, Journeys, and 3D View. You also have options for Presentation Control and a help wizard.

In the Narrative tree, you can drag-and-drop page and point ordering, make new slide transitions, use the new “Cinema” action for showing multimedia full screen, wrap Text wrapping of points and 3D text object, create Sub points, and choose to continually replay a journey in a world.



In Worlds, you create a 3D world, on a grid, that you can rotate and size to fit your needs. In Inventory, which is like a library of clip art, a new screen display object allows text to stay in one position while navigating through a 3D world. This can be text, an image, or a video. You can also use transparency on a video object, or tap into tool tips for inventory objects.

“Dryfork goes way beyond PowerPoint. It’s the only environment for engineers who want to see their products in 3D in spatial relationships. With Dryfork, you can do things you wouldn’t normally do.”
— Bill Nordgren, Dryfork, President

In Journeys, you can save it and use it again in other parts of the tree. And in 3D View, you can use the automatic aspect ration, the new Sky Cube, which combines a reflective water surface with a skybox for an immersive environment in which to place objects in a 3D world. Last, there is the option to clean the “selected” box around objects in the 3D view.

Presentation Control lets you right click during the presentation to jump to any page in the presentation, a B key will blank the screen, or toggle back and forth. The Page Up and Page Down keys will move to the next or previous slide, and the R key will replay current point.

Using Actions, you can adjust them and capitalize upon the theme with refreshed data files, you can step and repeat, you can draw from the Inventory of dozens of templates that are supplied with Dryfork or you can populate this area with your own material.

You can adjust colors, textures, objects; select speed of page movement during the viewing of the presentation, and plan how you want your pager to appear. On the first page, for example, you can choose to keep your cover page at upper left, your screenshot or animated graphic will be added on the right, you can keep your logo in the lower left, and add text — all on a background of your own choosing. The background can be a landscape from multiple supplied templates, or it can use your own jpg, bmp, png, gif, or tif.

You can make an e-movie, using narrative of your own making, to show off the capabilities of your product in 3D space, over which you have total control. If you are placing a building, for example, on a site, you can insert figures, adding realism by providing points for them to walk between.

You can control lighting, rotate the objects in your grid, and you can even save many pages of presentation chatter by flowing them into running flythroughs where several screens move across the background you have placed on a single page, or series of pages.

So in addition to Dryfork’s ability to offer features that it shares in common with other popular presentation software such as a tree-view narrative outline, access to standard media file formats, and self-running presentations, Dryfork is compatible with standard 3D objects, it can show spatial relationships between things that need such clear definition, and it can maintain slide view during 3D environment presentation, offering video texturing and making full use of 3D animation.

In the end, what you get is an experience that you have created for your customer, not just a presentation. Between the immersive screen, toolbox of capabilities, and the multimedia options at your fingertips, all you need is a product worth selling. But hey, several thousand PC users can’t be wrong.

Not only does Dryfork offer a Free Live Web Demo (support@dryfork.com) to walk you through how to construct your presentation, but the supportive website offers a User Community, Forum FAQ, a Members List, Calendar, and a free trial download.