Sphaera 3D 1.0d v102 review

Sphaera 3D is a Mac OS X application for creating 3D content.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 2818K Developer: eX-cinder Price: $0.00 Updated: 31 Jul 2006

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Sphaera 3D is a Mac OS X application for creating 3D content. It is written in Cocoa, it uses a lot of Mac OS X technologies.

Here are some key features of "Sphaera 3D":
Modeling
Polygonal geometries
Parametric surfaces: NURBs, B?zier
Usual primitives (Cube, Sphere, Cylinder, Cone...)
Other tools: Extrude, Revolve
Text and Mac OS X Fonts support
Lightwave object (v5.0) import

Animating
Deformations (Bend, Twist)
Procedural transformations (Point At, Follow Path)
Keyframing (linear, spline, periodic, algebraic)
Particle system

Shading
Procedural shaders components (Noise, Turbulence, Checker...)
Texture mapping
Rotoscoping (using animations as textures)
Shadow Eater technology, captures shadows as transparency (great for creating icons)

Rendering
Built-in Raytracer, optimized for multiple processors systems (MP)
Anti-aliasing
Transparent background rendering: ideal for creating OS X icons
Sound renderer

Application Support
Unlimited Undo/Redo
Color Customizing
Snapping Coordinates and Angles
International Units support

Interactive preview
Hardware accelereted OpenGL previewing
Multiple cameras/windows
Every frame / realtime playback
Aggressive multiple processors support: the geometry update pipeline is multithreaded, which makes MP acceleration available not only in the renderer, but also when working on your scene.

Export
QuickTime animations
TIFF image sequence
AU sound format

For Developers
Plug-in architecture at its core: every feature is part of a plugin (even built-in features)
Early version of the SDK will be made available soon, allowing one to write shaders, transformations and even a new renderer!

What's New:
GUI fixes (now possible to use shaders...).