Adobe Illustrator CS software is an essential tool for anyone who needs to express ideas visually in print, on the Web, and in any other medium. With powerful new 3D features, advanced typographical controls, smooth Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) in Adobe's vector drawing program, Illustrator CS, is designed for most types of illustration and original drawing not primarily based on photographic images. Working with "vector" lines and curves, which are modified by editing nodes and control points, the drawing and editing tools provided cover most graphic art tasks. Taking a leaf out of some entry-level design packages, Illustrator CS includes a wide range of pre-designed templates and sample artwork. These provide a quick way in to new documents, while removing much of the basic layout work. As a source of ideas, these provide useful stepping stones to quick artworks. It's something of a surprise that Adobe has only just got around to including 3-D tools in Illustrator. Its main competitor, CorelDraw, has had these since version 3, released 12 years ago. Adobe does it well, with new Revolve and Extrude commands producing solids of rotation and extrusions that can be coloured and lit. The other new effect, "Scribble", adds to the 70-odd shape effects in Illustrator's library. [+]

Bryce 5 is the first, important, new update since Corel bought this landscape-modelling application from Metacreations. With version 5, Corel introduces new Tree and Light labs as well as new Metaball and Tree objects. Additionally, new enhanced rendering options are combined with network rendering facilities to dramatically improve the quality of Bryce's resulting landscapes whether output as high quality static images or as animated sequences. The distinctive interface remains in Bryce 5, providing a tactile and visually intuitive environment which presents most options to the beginner from within the main screen whilst neatly hiding away the other numerous parameters within separate "lab" panels for the more advanced user. Unfortunately, the bewildering variety of interface controls puts a little too much emphasis on gloss rather than consistency, making things a little difficult when starting out, though the manual is backed up by an excellent help system within Bryce 5 itself. The new Tree lab gives the user good control over fine tuning trees, with separate parameters for trunk, branch and foliage as well as textures for both leaf and trunk. It is simple to create good imitations of real-life trees but perhaps a little surprising that there is not a predefined list of species from which to choose. Creating organic shapes is now possible with the new Metaballs object which blends spheres together in a natural-looking way based upon the spheres' proximity to each other. Animation of almost every element in the scene is simple and can result in some great looking sequences. As it includes a network rendering facility, which can be installed on any number of computers, it allows the user to take full advantage of the new enhanced rendering options. [+]