Cheetah 3D
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Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D is a lean and fast 3D modelling, renderering and animation tool for Mac OS X with an easy learning curve. It offers many tools from powerful polygon editing over advanced subdivision surface modelling to HDRI and radiosity renderings. Support for many common 3D file formats rounds up its feature set.
Elegant user interface
Most 3D modellers on the market offer their own unique way of working. Switching between 3D modellers can be like learning a new language, since their interfaces can be very complex. Cheetah3D takes all the best parts and rolls them into an interface that you'll find powerful, intuitive and quick to use. Advanced operations will seem second nature in Cheetah3D - a real bonus for such a low-priced modeller.
Powerful modelling tools
Even more impressive is the power of the tools that are on offer. Cheetah3D doesn't just provide a full set of polygon and spline editing tools, but also more advanced tools like lathe, sweep, extrude, boolean and subdivision surfaces.
Models are arranged in a scene graph (with a complete transformation stack), so you just have to drag and drop the tools and objects together. Models further down the scene graph stay editable with all their parameters intact.
Fully integrated Raytracer
Cheetah3D offers a fully integrated multithreaded raytracer too, with radiosity, HDRI backgrounds, ambient occlusion, anisotropic texture filtering, bump mapping, environment mapping, reflections, refractions, soft shadows, and more. Photorealistic renderings are just a mouse click away.
Sleek Animation Tools
With Cheetah3D you can also animate your 3D scenes without any problems. A user friendly timeline with a powerful Key -and F-Curve- Editor allow even 3D novices to create stunning animations. Almost every object, tag and material parameter can be animated. The rendered animation can finally be saved to any QuickTime supported movie file format.
Built for Mac OS X
Cheetah3D has been written from the ground up for Mac OS X using Cocoa. Its not just a simple recompile of some Windows or Linux modeller which ends up looking, feeling and behaving like a not-very-Macintosh piece of software. Cheetah3D uses all the Mac OS X components we're all familiar with, like Open/Save panels, the colour picker, the font panel, a configurable toolbar and much more, so you'll feel right at home using it.
Cheetah3D features:
General features
- Written from the ground-up in Cocoa
- Nice intuitive Macintosh-like user interface
- OpenGL preview
- Quad 3D view
- Almost all parameters animateable
- Multiple undo/redo
- Polygons can have any number of edges (ngons)
- Full set of object, polygon and point selection tools
- Full transformation hierarchy
- Assign additional features to objects through tags
- Intuitive object, material and property editor
- Up to 16 different materials per mesh
- Fully integrated, multi threaded renderer
- Snapping
- Customizable hot keys
- Customizable toolbar
Scene objects
- Camera
- Point Light
- Area Light
- Distant Light
- Spot Light
- Folder
Nondestructive modifier objects
- Bulge
- Build
- Displace
- Shear
- Spherify
- Subdivide (Catmull-Clark, Stam-Loop, Linear)
- Symmetry
- Taper
- Twist
- Warp
Many parametric polygon objects
- Polygon object (ngon support)
- Cube
- Ball
- Cone
- Disc
- Plane
- Polyhedra ( [truncated] Tetra-, Octa-, Dedeca-, Icosahedra)
- Cylinder
- Torus
- Tube
- Stair
- Relief (height field)
Many parametric spline objects
- Spline Curve (linear, Beziere curve, Beziere spline, NURBS)
- Circle
- Rect
- Star
- Cog
- Flower
- n-Edge
- Helix
- Text (through any installed True Type Font)
Creator objects
- Lathe
- Sweep
- Extrude (great for 3D-Fonts)
- Polyplane
- Symmetry
- Chain (create chains with just a few mouse clicks)
- Boolean operations
– A union B
– A substract B
– A intersect B
– A outside B
– A inside B
Tags
- HDRI tag
- Radiosity tag
- Mode tag
– UV tag
– spherical mapping
– cube mapping
– cylinder mapping
– flat mapping
– frontal mapping
– assign arbitrary UV-coordinates to whole objects or just single polygons
Scripting
- Uses the well known and easy to learn Javascript language
- Uses the rock solid SpiderMonkey Javascript engine from the Mozilla project
- generate your own objects
- write custom file loaders and exporters
- write your own tools
- automate repetitive jobs
- etc.
Animation tools
- Key Frame Animation
- Almost every object, tag or material property is animateable
- Powerful time line
- F-Curve editor
- Key editor
- Various key interpolation types
– Linear
– Smooth
– Beziere spline
– Flat
- OpenGL animation preview
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Full set of polygon tools
- Polygon, edge and point mode
- Set and Reset crease
- Create polygon
- Fill hole
- Bridge
- Insert point
- Magnet
- Extrude
- Inner extrude (point/edge/polygon)
- Shell
- Jigsaw
- Scalpel
- Ring cut
- Weld
- Move, Scale and Rotate points, edges and polygons
- Move, Scale and Rotate along normal
- Rotate edge
- Collapse polygon
- Flip normals
- Triangulate polygons
- Array
- Split
- Clone
- Mirror
- Separate
- Crumple
- Set value
- Quantize
- Burn transform
- Import child
- Point slide
- Cover
- Catmull- Clark Subdivide (partial or full mesh; with creases)
- Linear Subdivide (partial or full mesh)
Many spline tools
- Create spline
- Insert point
- Soft interpolation
- Hard interpolation
- Equal tangent direction
- Equal tangent length
- Join segments
- Break segment
- Reverse sequence
- Mirror
- Set value
- Quantize
- Burn transform
- Import child
Renderer
- Fully integrated raytracer
- Multi threaded to support dual processor Macs
- HDRI backgrounds (probe, cross and panorama format)
- ambient occlusion for fast image based lightning (IBL)
- radiosity for indirect diffuse illumination
- adaptive antialiasing up to 128x
- anisotropic texture filtering
- environment mapping
- bump mapping
- fog
- ray traced shadows
- transparent shadows
- blured reflections
- exact soft shadows via area lights
- ray traced refraction (with fresnel term)
- ray traced reflection
- shaders via plug-ins
– marble shader
– wood shader
– velvet shader
– membrane shader
– SuperMat
– etc.
File formats
- 3D import:
– .3ds
– .dxf (limited)
– .lwo
– .obj
– .sia
– .stl (binary and ASCII)
– .jas
- 3D export:
– .3dmf
– .3ds
– .dxf
– .h (C header files)
– .jas
– .obj
– .mtl
– .sia
– .stl (binary and ASCII)
– .rib (limited)
- 2D import/export
– many common file formats (.jpg, .tiff, .png etc.)
– export to the Mac OS X icon file format (.icns)
- Movie export:
– all QuickTime supported codecs
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Cheetah3D System requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.3
- G3 processor
- 256 MByte RAM
- 16 MByte VRAM
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