Swift 3D

» see erain.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Flash drew in vectors, which is why those sites stayed small enough to load over a modem. Vectors are flat by nature. If you wanted a logo to turn in space, or text to fly in with a bevel on it, you either faked it by hand frame by frame or you found a program that could take a real 3D scene and render it back out as vector shapes. Swift 3D was that program.

Electric Rain, Inc. started in 1995 in a Boulder basement, founded by the brothers Mike and John Soucie. They announced Swift 3D on 7 March 2000 and started shipping it on 4 April at a retail price of $139. The press release is still on the web today and reads like somebody who had just been to a trade show and could not quite believe his luck: "Having the world's top Flash users walk up to our booth, watch a demo and say, 'This is exactly what I need,' was a huge boost for our company," Mike Soucie said of the unveiling at Flashforward2000 in San Francisco.

He was right about the demand. Over the next decade the line grew into a standalone application plus plug-ins that lived inside other people's software, including a 3ds Max exporter and one for Photoshop CS4 Extended. Version 3 arrived in September 2002 at $169. Version 5 added support for Papervision3D, the library people were using to get real-time 3D into Flash. Version 6 shipped on 8 June 2009. Along the way the company sold over a hundred thousand units and licensed its rendering technology to firms with rather larger names, Autodesk and Microsoft among them.

The press archive is the clearest thing the company left. Fifty releases, the first dated 7 March 2000 and the last dated 8 March 2010, announcing Swift 3D MAX V4 with support for 3ds Max 2013. After that date Electric Rain says nothing in public ever again.

It kept selling, quietly, for another ten years. Then in the autumn of 2020 the company's own site stopped being a company site. The Internet Archive has erain.com serving a normal nine-kilobyte page on 6 September 2020, a four-kilobyte one on 16 September, and from 27 October 2020 a page of 1,179 bytes, which it then served unchanged for the next three years. Today a request to erain.com times out.

~ the case file ~

~ the intro you had to sit through ~

Turkish web design went through the Flash intro the way everybody else did, and for a few years around the middle of the decade every company site worth a budget opened with a logo rotating in space over a soundtrack, with a skip link in the corner for people in a hurry. I was a student looking at those pages on a connection where the intro took longer to arrive than the site behind it. I never once wondered what had made the logo. Production tools work like that. The output is on every screen and the name is on nothing, so the designers who opened it every morning knew it by heart while the rest of us looked straight through it.

~ the shop with no till ~

What makes this one strange is that swift3d.com is still live. Not archived, not parked: live, with the full product line down the left side and a news item boasting about 3ds Max 2013 support. It is a 2013 shop front answering requests in 2026, and it still ships the brochure for software that needs a dead plug-in and an operating system of that era to run.

The till is gone, though. Every purchase link on that site points at erain.com, which is the hostname that stopped answering six years ago, and the site's own /Store/ path returns a 404. The press pages and the download pages answer fine. Somebody has also sold the home page's right-hand column to an advertiser: a tall banner for a YouTube to MP4 converter, sitting on a frozen corporate site for a discontinued 3D package. A corpse with an ad slot is still being paid for by somebody.

~ the october that did it ~

Adobe had announced years ahead of time that Flash would stop on 31 December 2020, and browsers were already stripping out the plug-in through that autumn. Swift 3D had no life after that date, because the file it existed to produce was the file no browser would open. The company's site went dark ten weeks before the deadline, which is about the gap you would expect between realizing a product is over and getting around to the hosting bill.

There is one more trace, and it is better than any goodbye post. The sibling domain electricrain.com still serves 528 bytes: a black page with the Electric Rain logo on it, and underneath the logo a commented-out block of verse nobody was ever meant to read. It is Tolkien, the walking song: "The Road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began." Somebody typed that into the markup and then wrapped it so that it would never display.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

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