While form·Z 4.5 is primarily the version that releases
the API and script language, it also offers some
significant enhancements and introduces a number of new features, either as plugins and scripts or as direct extensions. On the Macintosh side, v. 4.5 no longer supports MacOS 9, which has allowed it to transition to a native OS X application. This has increased its performance and stability rather dramatically. Some of the new features are summarized on this page.

Text Place

This tool has been extended and can now also place smooth text, in addition to facetted text. The outlines of smooth text are resolution independent splines, which can be edited as such after their initial generation. Similarly to the facetted text, smooth text may be a surface or solid object; it can be placed flat on a plane or it can be standing. It can be generated by itself or relative to one or two control lines, which are also editable as parametric splines. The edges of solid smooth text can be rounded circularly or elliptically, or they can be beveled. Examples of smooth text are shown below:

Smooth text generated between two control lines to which it is adjusted.

Rounding smooth solid text with (left to right) circular, elliptical, and bevel rounding.


Draft Sweep

This new tool constructs a smooth object by offsetting a source shape as it is swept along a path. This tool works similarly to the Axial Sweep but allows many more options for transforming the source shape as it is swept. That is, the source profile can be expanded and contracted according to either preset mathematical functions or formulas typed in by a user.



Draft Sweeping a circle along a helix using predefined functions sine, cosine, half-sine, and half-cosine.


A new tool called Frame, is available as a plugin. Clicking with it on an object transforms its edges into round beams and the whole object into a frame like structure.