Perspector: Adding 3D shapes to PowerPoint

We have recently come across a useful little PowerPoint add-in to allow you to add 3D shapes into PowerPoint. It’s from a small company called Perspector.

In essence it enables you to create 3D shapes to add into your presentation. The biggest advantages that the programme has is that it stores the animation as image files so that the person you email the images to does not have to have the software running on their machine.

We played around with the software for just under two hours and here are some of the shapes that we have been able to create.

We knocked up this funnel picture quite easily. You can change all of the colours while you are making the picture.

We particularly like this one which enables you to lay out a number of PowerPoint slides or pictures. This was particularly fast and easy to use. In this case we took some of the inside slides from one of our free PowerPoint templates.

It is also possible to create animated gifs to go into your presentations, although the downside of animated gifs is that the file-size becomes quite large. It also takes quite a while to render down the software. We made a simple spinning cube. It took around 18 minutes to render and the cube alone had a file size of 2.2MB.

The software is quite expensive at £50 ($99) for the basic package and £150 ($299) for the professional version. You can download a free trial at the Perspector website.

An alternative would be to use an Open Source 3D package like Blender. The real advantage of Perspector through is the ease of use.

We hope to use the Perspector tool to make some new PowerPoint templates. Stay tuned…