trueSpace is free 3D computer graphics and animation software developed by Caligari Corporation.

History

The company was founded in 1985 by Roman Ormandy. A prototype 3D video animation package for the Amiga Computer 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 wanted to provide inexpensive yet professional industrial video and corporate presentation software. 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. In early 2008, the company was acquired by Microsoft and trueSpace 7.6 was released for free^[1].

Overview

trueSpace is a modeling/animation/rendering package. It 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 7.5 and added some new modeling features. It also has an interface that beginners will find easy to learn.

Caligari has enhanced the modeling, surfacing and rendering capabilities of trueSpace, and the latest version trueSpace7 allows all aspects of real-time design, modeling and animation within a virtual 3D space shared by remote participants over the broadband internet. The trueSpace7 collaboration server enables multiple participants to connect to a shared 3D space to create and manipulate shared content in real-time.

• Collaboration
• truePlay Content Viewer
• Examples of Content

Modeling

• Polygon modeling
• NURBS
• Subdivision surface

Animation

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. These engines are:

• LightWorks (from LightWork Design Ltd)
• VirtuaLight

tS7 also introduces support for the VRay rendering engine developed by the Chaos Group.

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

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

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.

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.

References

External links

• Caligari's Official Website
• Microsoft acquisition announcement on the Caligari forum
• Caligari Sponsored Forums
• YouTube trueSpace Videos
• Very large trueSpace resource site
• TrueBones Motion Captures in .BVH format for TrueSpace

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