With Cosmic Blobs, have fun by the gobs

With Cosmic Blobs, have fun by the gobs
Interactive program for kids makes 3-D works of art come alive

By ANNE REEKS
For The Chronicle

While you can't judge a book by its cover or software by its title, those supposed superficialities sometimes say a lot about what's within.

So it is with Cosmic Blobs Lab Rat Edition (Ages 7-14, $40, SolidWorks Corp., Windows, www.cosmicblobs.com), an ingenious and amusing 3-D graphics program that's both easy to use and powerful. Kids can create artworks that seem to pop off the page and then make them do just that via animation.

But before I discovered Cosmic Blobs' inner virtues, the name hooked me. I pictured pudding-shaped aliens with a Zen sensibility or gelatinous rodents oozing out of their cages. Either way, it sounded like fun.

How nice that the reality is better than my high, or at least hopeful, expectations. The maker of Cosmic Blobs, SolidWorks Corp., does graphics software for engineers, artists and architects and knows 3-D, inside and out. However, such, ahem, solid credentials might not have translated as well to the children's market.

After all, the pocket-protector crowd doesn't demand razzle-dazzle and might prefer the challenge of complicated controls. Kids expect all the trimmings plus simple and straightforward means to the desired
end.

Cosmic Blobs delivers on all fronts. It's well-organized. A colorful, drippy, acid-green-accented frame around the large workspace holds tools and materials and has the feel of a mad professor's lair. Very cool. Jars hold different-shaped blobs to use as raw material, similar to modeling clay. Instruments to bend, stretch, shrink, flip, flatten and otherwise mold the blob are displayed as disembodied hands doing the action.

The interface is entirely self-explanatory. No words are needed. But amusing sound effects accompany every poke or pull. Once shaped, blobs can be painted, decorated with features and accessories and then animated, accompanied by music and a backdrop. Creations can be saved in various formats, e-mailed, printed in 2-D or 3-D, pasted into a report or even used as an online avatar.

The product Web site, www.cosmicblobs.com, has a trial version of the program, handy instructional videos — intro, special features, basic and advanced animation — and a gallery of models to crib
from.

Sadly, none of this creative and functional largess means I managed to make anything impressive with Cosmic Blobs. Experimenting was a hoot, though. No doubt, more artistic types one-fifth my age could craft amazing animals, monsters and robots. But I'm wise to stick with words.
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