COMPANY: Martin Wengenmayer | URL: www.cheetah3d.com | TYPE: Standalone | PLATFORM: Mac | PRICE: $149
		Cheetah3D 5 is the amazingly powerful 3D modelling, rendering and animation solution for Apple Mac OS X. It provides the most useful features you need to get the job done, and organizes them within a beautifully elegant user interface that's powerful, intuitive and quick to work with. Performing truly advanced operations in Cheetah3D will seem like second nature very rapidly. Cheetah3D provides a level of productivity that you will be hard pressed to equal in software ten times the cost! Lean and elegant user interface Most 3D modellers on the market offer their own unique way of working. Switching between them can be like learning a new language, since their interfaces are often rather complex. Seamless Mac OS X integration Accept no substitute. Cheetah3D has been written FROM THE GROUND UP for Mac OS X using Cocoa. Its not just a simple port of some Windows or Linux modeller which ends up looking, feeling and behaving like a disappointingly un-Mac-like piece of software. With Cheetah3D, you will feel right at home using it without having to learn a completely new user interface. Polygon Modelling Cheetah3D provides a comprehensive set of polygon modelling tools, including advanced features like boolean operations and surface subdivision. Models are arranged in a scene graph (with a complete transformation stack), allowing you to configure your mesh modifiers and objects using simple drag and drop. Models further down the scene graph remain editable with all their parameters intact. Spline Modelling Cheetah3D also offers powerful spline modelling tools, including spline extrude, lathe and sweep. These tools are needed if you want to create a 3D logo from a Bezier path, for example. Due to the native support of the PDF and SVG vector file format, you can easily move your 2D vector paintings from almost any Mac OS X drawing application into Cheetah3D, and then transform them into nicely animated 3D logos. All its takes is a few mouse clicks. Scripting Last but not least, you can create complex mathematical objects using the easy to learn Javascript API. The scriptability of Cheetah3D even allows you to create totally new parametric objects that can be integrated into the UI just like native Cheetah3D objects (such as balls, cubes and so on). For example, the menger sponge shown here was created by a small Javascript snippet. And you can even use the scripting features to write custom file loaders, tools, tags and so on. UV Editor Cheetah3D offers a powerful new UV editor that supports auto-highlighting. Selecting, moving, scaling and rotating UV coordinates is now pure pleasure within Cheetah3D! During editing, you can see your changes updated live in the 3D preview. Classical UV mapping (like cube mapping, cylindrical mapping and so on) is of course still available. UV Unwrapping Assigning UV coordinates to complex meshes (such as human figures) can be a painful experience in other 3D programs. But with the new UV unwrapping tool included with Cheetah3D 3.0, assigning UV coordinates to even the most complex objects can be achieved with just a few mouse clicks. Texture painting After you've assigned UV coordinates to your objects, you can start painting the textures right into Cheetah3D. Cheetah3D provides a variety of different brushes, as well as support for pressure sensitive graphic tablets, and rect, line and circle tools, etc. You can even paint with textures if you wish, rather than just solid colours. And best of all, you can see all your changes updated live within the OpenGL 3D preview. 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 allows even 3D novices to create simply stunning animations. Almost every object, tag and material parameter can be animated! Character animation Cheetah3D offers a full set of joint based character animation tool. Just create a skeleton with the new joint tool and bind it to a character. Now you can already start to create your first character animation. The Pose Manager will support you during the creation of an animation by allowing you to record often-used poses. The Take Manager especially makes the creation of game assets easier. For example, you can record various takes (animation clips) of walk, run or jump cycle of a game character. Last but not least you can export/import character animations from widely FBX file format. Morph Targets Morph targets are a technique to morph between many different polygon meshes. For example you create a happy and a sad face (morph target). Now you can smoothly animate the face from happy to sad.But you are of course not limited to two morph targets. You can create as many as you wont and mix them to new facial expressions. Morph targets can be also used for creating muscle animation. For example a pumping bicep if the arm bends. Fully integrated Raytracer Cheetah3D offers a fully integrated multi-threaded raytracer with support for radiosity, caustics, HDRI backgrounds, ambient occlusion, anisotropic texture filtering, bump mapping, environment mapping, reflections, refractions, soft shadows, and more. Photorealistic Render Manager The render manager in Cheetah3D allows you to monitor all running rendering jobs. It also allows you to compare the last rendering result with your previous renders, so you can easily determine whether the changes you've made to a scene or light setup have worked properly. Support of the EPIX file format With Cheetah3D, you can save your rendered images directly to the EPIX file format (including depth and material layer data). Later on, you can use Piranesi to quickly paint in textures, trees, cars, humans and other scenery with automatic perspective and masking.
					Frank Beckmann
				New in version 5 Cheetah 3D 5.0 adds a completely new node based material system which allows professional designers to create stunning new materials just by drag and drop. Additionally, the render engine was optimized to efficiently handle up to 16 CPU cores. The modeling tools have been extended by a new bevel tool and a bend modifier, and basic export to the Collada file format has been added. Cheetah3D 5.0 now also supports pivot points, as well as many small UI enhancements which accelerate daily work. New features: Rendering New node based material system Support for up to 16 threads New irradiance cache Material defs can be saved (with embedded textures) Many new 2D, 3D or 4D procedural textures (and more to come) New shaders (toon, shadow, optimized dielectric and metal etc.) Blurred refraction Renderer stops much faster Modeling Bend modifier Bevel tool Better edge delete Support for pivot points Other small enhancemnets UI New node editor Tag selector Automatic texture reload Script menu update menu item Object history in properties editor Material name editing in material browser Jump to linked objects if you double click a link property text field un-selection when moving mouse over 3D or UV editor File IO Collada export (only static scenes) FBX loader supports pivot point improved .sia loader/exporter New German localization Many small enhancements, optimizations and bug fixes