TrueSpace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is trueSpace. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
| trueSpace | |
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 Screenshots of trueSpace7 |
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| Developer: | Caligari Corporation |
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| Latest release: | 7 / January 24, 2006 |
| Use: | 3D computer graphics |
| Website: | http://www.caligari.com/ |
trueSpace is 3D computer graphics and animation software developed by Caligari Corporation.
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[edit] History
In 1985, company founder Roman Ormandy began working on a prototype 3D video animation package for the Amiga Computer, which led to the incorporation of Octree Software in 1986. From 1988 to 1992, Octree released several software packages including Caligari1, Caligari2, Caligari Broadcast, and Caligari 24. Caligari was aimed toward providing industrial video and corporate presentation software. Caligari Broadcast was introduced with the hopes of offering professional 3D animation capabilities at a fraction of the cost of comparable systems. In 1993 Octree Software moved from New York to California and became known as Caligari Corporation. In 1994 trueSpace 1.0 was introduced on the Windows platform.
[edit] Overview
All of Caligari's products feature an immersive real-time interface that allows users to intuitively and directly manipulate objects in a fully-rendered 3D space, which helps to enhance and accelerate the design process.
trueSpace is a full-featured modeling/animation/rendering package. It operates out-of-box but also features a plug-in architecture that allows the user to create tools to enhance the core package.
- trueSpace is currently at release version 7 (also known to its users as tS7). A recent point upgrade has brought it up to version 7.1 and added some new modelling features.
Not only has Caligari enhanced the award-winning modeling, surfacing and rendering capabilities of trueSpace, the latest version trueSpace7 has revolutionized the way 3D content is created, communicated and shared with others allowing all aspects of real-time design, modeling and animation within a virtual 3D space shared by remote participants over the broadband internet.
- trueSpace7's easy-to-use authoring tools are seamlessly integrated into the underlying collaborative process.
The trueSpace7 collaboration server enables multiple participants to connect to a shared 3D space to create and manipulate shared content in real-time.
[edit] Modeling
[edit] Animation
[edit] Rendering and Surfacing
Currently tS has two native internal rendering engines and also support for DX9 pixel shader output quality images alongside the traditional style Render engines.
VirtuaLight
tS7 also introduces support for the VRay rendering engine developed by the Chaos Group
[edit] Surfacing
- DX9 (SL2.0) pixel shaders and HLSL editing
- Procedural shaders editable in Link Editor
- Normal mapping
- Shader trees
- modeless UV Editor
- Advanced UV Editor with real time UV mapping controls
- Unwrapper with Slice
- Breaking and welding of vertices in a UV map
[edit] Rendering
- LightWorks 7.4 rendering engine
- Vray Rendering Engine (for trueSpace7 versions only)
- VirtuaLIght rendering engine
- Real time DX9 based photorealistic engine
- HDRI
- Caustics
- Multi-pass Rendering for Lightworks rendering engine with output to Photoshop layers integrated into trueSpace7
- Hybrid radiosity, ray tracing, Phong shading
- Image-based lighting
- Non-linear tone mapping editor
- Post process editor
- Advanced shaders (color, reflectance, transparency, displacement, background, *foreground, post processing)
- Volumetric, Anisotropic reflectance
[edit] Features
One of the most distinctive features of trueSpace is its interface, using mainly 3D widgets for most common editing operations. tS can also be scripted, using Python for creating custom scripts, tools and plugins. tS7 introduces the use of VBScript and JavaScript as scripting tools for developing plugins and interactive scenes.
Its interface aims to make it easy for anyone to create 3D objects and scenes. Capabilities of the software include creating visualizations and animations with realistic lighting (through the use of radiosity) and organic modelling using NURBS, subdivision surfaces and metaballs.
The software has two native formats: one for standalone objects (with the file extension .cob), and another for the scenes (with the file extension .scn). Objects in trueSpace can be embedded in Active Worlds. In addition to its native formats, trueSpace can also import and export several additional model types.
