Martin Wengenmayer has been busy shoehorning more features into his wonderful Cheetah3D app. In the three months since the release of version 3, Cheetah has seen the release of no fewer than three point upgrades version 3.3 is the latest.
Cheetah3D is a complete modelling, rendering and animation application that's Mac only, Universal Binary and incredibly inexpensive. It covers all the bases, providing modelling with splines, primitives and subdivision surfaces, as well as other higher-end functions such as deformers and symmetry modifiers. Direct texture painting is handled by the UV unwrap tools, while animation is based on a classic timeline with function curve capabilities. It also has some sophisticated rendering tools, and the Universal Binary version is a startling two to three times faster on Intel Macs.
The first of the new features is Smart Folders. These allow easier exchange between Cheetah and other 3D applications. Basically, if an imported file is put in a Smart Folder, any changes made to the model geometry in the originating program will automatically update in Cheetah. This means you don't have to reapply materials in Cheetah if you need to tweak the geometry in another program. This feature was put in at the request of SketchUp users, and while it doesn't preserve tags across imports, it's still an enormous time-saver.
A lot of people use Cheetah for its rendering alone, so Caustic support was added in version 3.2. Caustics are the concentrated, focused reflections that you see when sunlight shines through a magnifying glass, for example. These add a finishing touch of realism to scenes, and the photon-mapping algorithm used to implement caustics will have implications for internal lighting in later versions.
Speaking of lights, all light types have been subsumed into a Universal Light object. The light type (Sun, Spot, Area) is now a sub-property of the light object, so the light type can be changed while preserving all other parameters. Another small but significant change is the ability to save .jas files as binaries, which greatly reduces files sizes and load times.
The big feature in version 3.3, though, is the addition of Depth-of-Field rendering - that is, mimicking the blurring of focus in cameras with objects closer to or further from the focal point. Cheetah implements this by putting a blue grid, orthogonal to the current camera, that gives you some indication of where the focus cut-off point will be before you start to render your model. As with any program, Depth-of-Field rendering takes time, but this can be mitigated by dropping the number of samples to produce rough feedback renders. In fact, Render Management has always been a strong point in Cheetah, although it still lacks the ability to test render only a portion of the current camera view.
There is a range of other tweaks and improvements - a new Blueprint object that acts as a modelling template, for example - and Martin is always open to new suggestions for improvements, so download a demo today and get creating.
Download a demo today and get creating.Author: Tim Danaher
Cheetah3D 3.3