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| PUBLISHER: | Caligari | DESCRIPTION: | 3D Animation |
| REVIEWED: | Version 2 | RATING: | 9/10 |
Easily the most user friendly, and best value for money 3D modeling/animation package available, truespace has clearly been designed for users who may not have expertise in engineering and advanced physics, yet want to create impressive 3D models, and animations.
While lacking some of the 'high end' features found in applications such as 3DS MAX and lightwave 3D, Truespace offers all the basic tools you need for medium quality animation, without the high end price tag.
MAIN FEATURES AND BENEFITS
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impressive rendering engine, supporting raytraced
shadows and reflections, layered fog, motion blur and depth of field |
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Effective, easy to use modeling tools
such as lathing, beveling, sweeping, surface sculpting, planar deformations and
boolean operations |
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Extremely user friendly materials interface, enabling
the user to 'paint' individual objects, faces and vertices. Complete with procedural
textures and environment maps |
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Photoshop plug-in interface |
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Configurable real-time shaded and textured views
using custom 3DR drivers |
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Highly customizable and flexible user interface |
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Support for COB, 3DS, and DXF object formats |
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Capable of running with very low resource requirements |
DISADVANTAGES AND DRAWBACKS
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Truespace can become very slugging when working
with complex geometry, as compared with more expensive applications such as Lightwave
3D or 3dsMAX |
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Material editor cannot edit the transparency of
texture maps, and does not feature texture layers |
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Truespace often proves inefficient at managing large numbers of objects - providing no way of selecting objects except for 'clicking on-screen and hoping' |
REVIEW SUMMARY
While Truespace is not without its limitations, (though most have apparently been addressed with the release of version 3) for the price of purchase it does offer great value for money.
Most of the programs' limitations will probably only be noticed by advanced 3D modelers and animators, who would be more likely to look at packages such as 3DS MAX, Lightwave, and SoftImage anyway.
Unless your 3D workload and realism requirements are large, Truespace will no doubt deliver acceptable performance, in an environment which lowers the 3D learning curve immensely.
Written by Nick Smith