Argon is the middle product in a range of graphics tools from Ashlar-Vellum and costs $995. The company advertises its products as "Software that works the way you think". I'm always sceptical about such bold advertising claims so I'll be wanting to see if their claims are really true or just hype as I learn how to use their product.

So, what do you get for your money (or even better, your boss's money?)

The box is robust and is intended for storing the spiral bound manuals after you start using the software. They even show you how to fold the flaps to achieve this. Okay, it's not rocket science, but if the rest of the package has the same attention to detail, we're onto a winner. Inside there is a CD and three manuals, each measuring 8.5" x 8.5" (22 cm x 22 cm for those of a metric disposition). The Getting Started book is only a quarter of an inch thick, but once you've learned what is in it, you'll put it back in the box. The other two (Volumes I & II of the User Guide) are each an inch thick. They are all printed in black and white with grey shading. The manuals are clear and easy to read with clean illustrations. I suspected that I was going to like this.

The manual says that the minimum system is a PII with Win 98, 256 mb of Ram and 150 mb of hard drive space, although they recommend a P4 or Athlon, with Win NT or 2000, 32 mb of video memory, half a gigabyte of RAM and a quarter of a gigabyte of hard drive. I installed it on a PIII running at 700 mhz, 512mb of RAM, Win 2000 and a NVidia TNT graphics card with 32 mb of memory. It used 162 mb of my hard drive. Argon also runs on Macintosh, but the version for OSX is not due to be released until the middle of 2002.

I started working my way through the 3D Modelling "Getting Started" manual. I was impressed. The book was well written, all new terms were explained and it was very logical. They don't try to tell you everything about a group of tools, they let you start making something, telling you first which tools you are going to use. Every step is preceded with an explanation of what the step is intended to create, with easy to follow illustrations.

However, I made a mistake with some of the lines in the piece I was making for the tutorial. I tried to find out how to join two adjacent vertices, but after quickly checking out the menus I decided to find it in the on-line Help section.

I got the following message: "the on-line help section was not finished because we put so many new features into the software". A rather weak excuse, I thought. They provide a link to their web site where you can download either a PDF or the Help section (either 10 mb or 7 mb). This is not good enough.

It might be easy enough to download it, but if you buy $995 worth of software, you expect it to be finished and that includes the Help files. The 7 mb Help file was created on 20th December 01, the executable was made on the 19th November. The Software arrived in February 2002 and this review was done during March. Were they trying to get a month's sales in before Christmas? Is this the sort of thing you buy as a present?

It's irritating to have to spend 43 minutes downloading something that should have been included in the review copy. Ashlar-Vellum's quality control seems to have slipped a bit at the production stage.
The downloaded Help files had a few "This page cannot be displayed" notices, but the pages that were there were well written and useful. Okay, perhaps the production schedule was a bit too optimistic, perhaps they misjudged the time needed to write the Help files and do the same high quality job as the rest of the package, but even including the work done to the publication date would have been better than nothing. The Help file had probably been in existence for 6 weeks when this package was shipped. No excuses for not including it.

	The tutorial makes the metal chassis from a set of roller blades. You are taught to use some of the more common tools and are introduced to their "Drafting Assistant". Don't be alarmed, it's not another animated paper clip! When you select a tool to use, you get temporary lines appearing showing where intersection points are.

When you start the program, the interface looks clean and uncluttered.



You have the usual menu entries across the top, with a useful message line just below. This tells you what to do to use the tool you have selected. You also have a toolbar at the top for changing the zoom and display options. Down the left side you have groups of tools. The icons are reasonably easy to understand. The toolbars float, you can put them anywhere you choose. You can even tear off the sub-menus and use them as a toolbar, a really clever option if you are using a particular group of tools a lot.

To the right is the trackball which allows you to alter the view interactively or change to one of the preset views. Argon allows you many options in setting views, but the 4 views display (top, left, front and perspective) isn't there. You have one window to work in and you have to change the view to access the part of your model that you are working on. On other 3D programs I've found this method to be sometimes irritating, but with Argon it was so easy to change views that I grew to like it. With Argon's Drafting Assistant, aligning things with other points or lines is remarkably easy. However, it sometimes presumes that you want to do something else and does what it thinks you want. I found that I was constantly turning off the thing to align something where I wanted it, then turning it back on.
Another useful feature is the data entry fields at the bottom of the display.



Make a square (for example), then type in the values you want (such as the length of the sides) to change its shape or position. I found it easy to make accurate shapes. There is also a memory indicator to show how you are doing for RAM and Virtual Memory. The manual warns Macintosh users to be careful if only 5 mb is left as the program may crash.

I crashed the program once. I did a render to see what my work looked like, decided that it was okay and that I didn't want to wait for the rest of the piece to render, so I hit Escape to stop it. It fell over and I had to close the program. When I started the program again, Win 2000 ran like a lame dog, I had to re-boot. Argon has a high memory requirement and I felt that even with a machine that exceeded their specifications, my PC was having trouble keeping up. I've used Rhino, which does a similar job, but it even runs on a wind-up clock, so I'm not sure why Argon requires so much memory. Slow response became annoying when I made the modem model (see below). The memory count was 186 mb (on a 512 mb computer). It showed the hourglass icon whenever I changed the viewpoint. (this might have been video memory, only 32 mb) In the end I stopped working on the model. It had hardly reached the level of complexity of some of the things I have made with other 3D programs, but Argon felt like we were wading through treacle.

There are layers so that you can selectively work on a group of objects without affecting other things. At the end of the tutorial you render the skate model.

I had a quick look at the supplied textures. They give you enough to get started with; 114 including lots of wood textures. Their textures are nice but what if you want to put your own texture onto something you have made? Here it becomes a bit clumsy. You have to drop your texture into one of Argon's directories, then apply one of the supplied textures to the model (as your texture won't be displayed). Then you edit the object's properties and select the texture you really want. I tried to do this but it had the "Texture file" box greyed-out when I had a metal texture on my object. I changed this to rock texture, then swapped this for my own texture and it worked. What's wrong with the "import texture" procedure that nearly every other program uses?

I was pleased with what I'd produced with the first tutorial, but there was more. Argon can make your model into engineering drawings. Three clicks and it converts the view into line drawings. You then use the dimensioning tool to measure between points and put captions on.



In this aspect, Argon acts as a CAD package. Not only can you show a client what the finished product looks like, you can give them accurate drawings to make the real one.

I enjoyed their Getting Started tutorial. Congratulations to the person who wrote them, you've done a good job. The other two books explain all the tools in detail. This is one serious piece of software, and you are not going to learn how to use it in a couple of days. It doesn't matter how well written software is, if the manuals do not provide the answers and you don't realise what you can do with it, they have wasted their time. Did I mention that you can do animations? Argon produces Quicktime movies. It uses NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) and even goes to the trouble to tell you what they are and provides a couple of examples of how they would be used in industry.