Cheetah 3D 3.0.1 review

Now in its third major release, Cheetah 3D goes from strength to strength. It distinguishes itself from a lot of its competition in the modelling, rendering and animation arena by offering some extremely high-end features at an affordable price.

Previous users will notice the Materials browser in version 3 has been moved from a slide-out tray to its own pane within the interface, while the Material icons have also increased in size. These two changes make the Materials interface much easier to use - all it needs now is 'Tool Tip' pop-ups for material names. You can now drag and drop Materials onto objects in the Editor window, and there's built-in Spotlight searching for large material collections.

Cheetah's modeller contains a useful set of tools based on Spline and Polygon objects, which can be acted on by Creator objects - Extrude, Lathe and so on - and Modifier objects, of which the most important is the Subdivision object for creating smooth-flowing objects from low-resolution polygon cages. Cheetah's modeller also contains a Symmetry modifier, which enables you to sculpt symmetrical objects using only half the number of modelling operations. Version 3 adds some new modifiers: Array, Ring and Transform. The latter allows the conversion between local co-ordinate systems and should prove useful in animations.

While the interface lacks polish in some areas, it's extremely malleable and can be set up for the task in hand. There are Modelling and Animation layouts, as well as a new UV Editing layout, which is the big change in version 3. UV mapping is a way to seamlessly map textures onto irregular surfaces - in other words, where the standard cylindrical, cubic, spherical and planar mappings won't suffice. Bringing up the UV Editing interface places the UV Editing window next to the main Editor window, and the mesh of any selected object will be displayed in UV space in this window.

The first time you do this, the UV map will generally be a mess of overlapping polygons. The trick is to define seams on your mesh that will allow it to unwrap cleanly. Once that's done, you can define colour, bump and displacement maps in the appropriate channel of a material. It's then a matter of painting on your detail in the UV Editor. At present, only information in the Colour channel updates live; if you want to see the results of a bump or displacement map, you'll need to perform a final render.

Cheetah also provides a new Brush tool for painting, along with Eraser, Eyedropper, Paintbucket, Straightline, Square and Circle tools. It also boasts various Brush profiles, but as yet there's no provision to define your own. The Brush tool is, however, fully pressure sensitive and works well with graphics tablets.

Cheetah also contains a fantastic set of rendering tools - radiosity and HDRI rendering are fully supported, a feature previously unheard of in an application at this price. Another thing Cheetah does particularly well is render management: all completed renders are kept in a reviewable queue and can be inspected, saved or deleted as required. It really is an object lesson in how to do it right. Version 3 has added the ability to render panoramas, which can then be processed in third-party programs (such as RealViz's Stitcher) to produce 360 QTVR panoramas.

Probably the most intriguing aspect of version 3 is that it's an Intel-ready Universal Binary - in fact, it was the first Mac 3D program to be ported, beating the big boys by some margin. What's particularly interesting, however, is the rendering speed results we've been seeing. Informal testing on a dual-processor 2GHz Power Mac against a 2GHz Core Duo iMac, both with 2GB of RAM, shows the latter machine posting rendering speeds two to three times faster on complex HDRI and radiosity renders. This may be due to the Core Duo's 2MB of Level 2 cache, but whatever the reason, it's impressive. As is this new release of Cheetah. Your $99 will get you a lot of 3D technology, not to mention free upgrades to all 3.x versions. We highly recommend Cheetah 3D 3.0.1.