By Don Burnett

I'd like to thank Aaron over at Richards Media Net for tipping me off to this news. I was extremely excited last night when I heard this finally released, because one of the best 3D programs for Windows (Caligari's TrueSpace 3D)  has now been released as a free product and is becoming part of Microsoft's Virtual Earth system. I haven't been following the developments behind this much on this blog,  this is some really great great news. 

You should run, don't walk to register and download a copy of this for FREE right now. This product started years ago on the Amiga platform and was known as the first tool out there with a true 3d modeling environment that you could move around your scene and model in real time wire frame 3D.

Many years after that, after it made the move to the Microsoft Windows  platform, it became the most affordable 3D tool out there and also one of the first to support real time rendering and shading and modeling without requiring the user to render out animation to a file. Over the years real time 3D rendering has advanced by leaps and bounds, with companies like ATI and Nvidia  rapidly creating new graphics cards with real time 3D offerings.

The industry is now split into two very different markets. Those who can use  real time 3D rendering  and those who need rendering out of animation to files. Non-real time rendering can be  a time consuming task but necessary for video and professionals who work in CGI and film.

This has lead to the decoupling of "offline" rendering to files, from real time as a separate module in many programs. This is also what has happened with TrueSpace. So for instance if your medium is game development like Microsoft's XNA studio, or WPF 3D for instance which requires real time 3D modeling then the free TrueSpace 7.6 download is all you will need to get started with real time 3D. You can save images and frames out to files using the real time renderer, which is extremely fast and just fine.  If your purpose isn't creating film quality rendering and you just need to create a "comp" or test renders. The file saving features built into the TrueSpace 7.6 should be just fine.

If you are attempting to be the next Disney Pixar, or DreamWorks then you will probably need to buy a separate offline professional grade rendering engine that will allow you to capture your animation as frames of a movie. There are several options available including V-Ray ($299), VirtuaLight, and LightWorks. Both Virtualight and Lightworks are included with the free download.  Each varies in what it can do, including some support for rendering over a multiple machines to improve times. However the big thing about 7.6 that the real time rendering support is now just fine for many tasks that you'd previously want to use a renderer for output. Don't take my word about the real-time quality go download it and try it for your self.

The real time rendering is so good that Microsoft bought it for it's Virtual Earth environment to offer folks using Virtual Earth a real time modeling tool that will let you add your models to Microsoft's Virtual Earth real time environment. TrueSpace has really redefined what 3D real time capabilities are all about. It also is a great complement to XNA Game Studio as well.

TrueSpace has always been quite competitive with many of the high end modeling and animation programs out there. To give you some perspective here is a chart that compares it to other systems out there (the previous 7.5 release) features and price with other systems:

With the 7.6 release they have added even more features:

As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth.

Other new features include an entirely re-written X format exporter lets you save your trueSpace creations to load into game engines such as XNA to develop games for Windows or the Xbox 360.The new export to Virtual Earth feature will let you place your 3D creations straight into Virtual Earth from trueSpace. Now you can place whatever you make into real world locations in Virtual Earth and share them with others!

Other new added features:

User Interface

• Role based editing
• User configurable Projects, Layouts, Panels, toolbars and widgets
• Link Editor
• Script Editor
• Panel Editor

Modeling

• Next Generation of SDS with direct surface manipulation
• Soft Selection
• Real time Edit of 1M+ polygon objects
• Polygon Reduction (with Normal mapping)
• Edge and face loops
• Procedural Modeling

Surfacing

• DX9 (SL2.0) pixel shaders and HLSL editing (this is a big deal with the new version of WPF supporting DirectX and HLSL)
• Procedural shaders editable in Link Editor
• Normal mapping
• Shader trees
• UV Editor is now modeless

Rendering

• LightWorks 7.4 rendering engine
• VirtuaLIght rendering engine
• Real time DX9 based photorealistic engine
• HDRI
• Caustics
• Multi-pass Rendering for Lightworks rendering engine with output to Photoshop layers

Animation

• Key frame editor integrated with DX9 Player View for real time pre-visualisation
• Procedural Animations integrated with physics simulation
• Next generation Physics engine

Collaboration

• Interactive Behaviors via Link Editor or Script editor
• Real time collaboration through robust collaborative server
• Real time avatars with user profiles
• Free collaborative Player

Software Architecture

• Distributed message-passing kernel with network engine and support for upcoming massively parallel, multi-core processing CPUs and GPUs
• True command driven Undo with construction history
• Live bi-directional real time bridge with trueSpace6 tools

Import Formats

• BVH animation and motion capture
• Improved X format
• Conitec 3D Game Studio Format
• DXF format (full layer support) compatibility
• 3D Formats: SCN, COB, SOB, WRL 1.0, GZ, WRZ, DXF, 3DS, ASC, PRJ, LWO, OBJ, LWB, IOB, GEO
• 2D formats: BMP, TGA, AVI, FLC, JPG, DIB, AI, PS, EPS, PNG, DDS

Export Formats

• BVH animation and motion capture
• COLLADA
• Improved X format and DXF format (full layer support) compatibility
• 3D formats: SCN, COB, CAN, WRL 1.0 & 2.0, DXF, ASC, 3DS, X, iSpace format
• 2D formats: • BMP, TGA, AVI, JPG, TIFF, PNG, PSD

If you are looking to get this software to do offline non-realtime rendering, you will need to buy an add-on offline renderer.