Product ReviewsMultimedia software
Since its last major release, Cheetah3D has been steadily adding features and consolidating its feature set. Version 4.4 may be the last release before the next 'big one', so it's worth seeing what developer Martin Wengenmeyer has managed to shoehorn into his elegant little application. The biggest addition to the program in version 4 was the Skeleton-based animation system, vital for setting up jointed characters with smooth exterior skins. Since then, the system has been refined with a new 2D Inverse Kinematics (IK) solver - basically this means that it's much faster for systems whose joints lie in the same plane, such as arms and legs (it doesn't have the calculation overhead of the extra degree of freedom of the full 3D solver.) To further speed up IK work, motion sequences can be 'baked' in the Take Manager (meaning they don't need to be recalculated). And since Cheetah is also fully FBX-aware, motion sequences can be exported to other animation systems, and, indeed, Cheetah is becoming ever-more popular as a front end to the Unity game-development engine. Finally, variable joint stiffness has been added for extra realism, and also the ability to add mesh weighting to joints at the end of chains. Cheetah has always been famous for its rendering engine - one of the most multiprocessor aware, multi-threaded implementations of any application, on any platform. Version 4 stuck with the old renderer, but version 4.2 added a brand-new bucket-based renderer (like modo's), written from the ground up. Each render area (or 'bucket') is handled by a single processor or core. The benefits are that memory management is much simpler, and the renderer uses less memory overall. However, the new renderer doesn't split your image into discrete
At the same time, the antialiasing has been rewritten to use an underand over-sampling algorithm instead of the older super-sampling, resulting in the elimination of some artifacts that had plagued the old renderer. The new renderer appears slower at first, because Cheetah's cameras still default to 4x over-sampling. Half of that gets results in the new renderer which are easily as good as in the old one. Also, with the new Leopard support, the renderer can use more than 2GB, eliminating out-of-memory crashes on large scene files. Another rendering projection has been added - Orthographic. This is particularly useful for rendering Architectural elevations where you need to eliminate perspective. Also added to speed up rendering performance and to further Cheetah's game-creation credentials is texture and lightmap baking. This essentially takes the results from calculation-intensive HDRI and radiosity calculations to enable you to generate UVmapped textures from them. These can be re-applied to model geometry and the ordinary raytracer used without Global Illumination. Remapping of the textures is done automatically and the resulting renders can show a 4-5 times speed improvement on animations (this is the technique used to squeeze realism out of computer games). Other, smaller, but notable, improvements include support for 3D Connexion's SpaceNavigator 3D joystick, auto-highlighting of the Transform tool, a Sky Light to quickly reproduce Sky/Sun illumination, and a lot of the modelling tools (especially those relating to subdivision surfaces) have been written to be multi-processor aware, which is quite something for an app at this price level. Another worthwhile, free upgrade to a great little app. Roll on version 5 and the new materials system. By Tim Danaher |
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