Cheetah3D Version 7 Features Announced

Cheetah3D creator Martin Wengenmayer appeared on the Cheetah3D forum recently and listed some of the features that we can expect to see in the upcoming Cheetah3D Version 7. Whilst there’s no release date yet, the new feature list does sound impressive…

• New renderer
• NGon booleans
• Movie textures
• Soft selections
• Collada import
• Layers
• Big UI update
• and much much more

There’s a few in there that I’m pretty excited about, and I must confess I do know of some other features that are planned too but I’m sworn to secrecy on them!

New Renderer

My knowledge of rendering isn’t the best and I’m not sure what to expect here. Could we finally see the much requested render preview?

NGon Booleans

This is a big one. Booleans have never been particularly useful in Cheetah3D as the meshes that you end up with are quite messy. It’s very hard to move on and continue modelling after you’ve used a boolean at present. All this is set to change though. I can actually see this changing the way I model completely.

Movie Textures

Personally I’ve never really needed movie textures. I think this is because I largely produce still images with Cheetah3D. I can see a huge benefit here though and it’s something I’ve seen requested in the forum a good few times over the years. The possibilities here seem pretty endless. Initially I was just thinking about things like TV screens, but actually it could go way further than this.

Soft Selections

Soft selections is something I’ve personally requested. I first encountered them in Silo and what a great feature it is. If you’ve never used it, it’s quite hard to explain but I’ll try anyway:- Soft selection allows you to select part of a model and then take an additional softer selection of it’s surrounding points. The softer selection has less influence but whatever you do (move, scale) still has an impact. It’s an absolute must if you’re doing any organic modelling.

Layers

Probably the most intriguing feature on the list. I’ve not seen layers in any 3D application before. I’m not saying they don’t exist but it’s not something that I’ve used and I struggle to even understand how it would work. I’ve seen rendering to layers before in Strata but I don’t think this is what Martin is talking about. If anyone can enlighten me, I’d really appreciate it!

UI Update

A UI update is a scary thing for me! Does it mean that my tutorial that are all done in v5 and 6 will need updating? I have no idea at this stage.

That’s my thoughts. I’ve not mentioned the Collada import as I have no idea what Collada is really used for. Again I’m all ears if anyone wants to tell me!