Why I buy this one ?
- Complete modeling, texturing, animating and rendering package
- Only application offering collaborative modeling across the web
- Advanced character posing and animating, including physics
- Open-ended architecture with support for scripts in widely used langauges such as vbscript and jscript
- Photorealistic real-time rendering, with freely distributable viewer application

What our customer's say!

"TS 7.5 upgrades the great tools in Truespace 4", Of course, by now, many 3D modelers are aware that TrueSpace 7.6 is now offered free of charge and you can now get it as a download from the Caligari website. It is entirely free from front to back. You get two modeling environments, 3 renderers, a modeling package with excellent 3D modeling tools, a keyframe animator, "bones", a tool for creating lifelike characters by creating a virtual skeleton for them, and you can have them flex and bend just like living creatures, textures and shaders that you can use to make your models look like anything you can imagine. It truly is an amazing all in one modeling, animation, and rendering tool.

If you click on my name you can find my review on TrueSpace 4 and most of it applies here. But in TrueSpace 7.6, there are many features that are upgraded and improved from version 4.3.

I like their new NURBS modeling tools. Unlike TrueSpace 4, this is true NURBS. And you can now draw on the ground plane, but the modeler, depending on the extrusion method will also allow you to draw curves on two other planes to create a three dimensional object. It corresponds very well to the spline modeler in Carrara 3, for those who are familiar with Carrara products. I have only started to learn how to use it, but it is a very powerful upgrade to the TrueSpace arsenal. And you have all the modeling tools you need to do NURBS modeling. You can stitch patches together for example, you can cut and manipulate curves and so forth.

NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-Splines), by the way, for the uninitiated, is a technique of modeling where instead of using flat planar surfaces,(polygon modeling) the computer uses three dimensional curves called patches. While it is more computationally intensive for a computer, it results in smoother looking objects. And this type of modeling is ideal for creating organic creatures and objects with soft contours. Tools such as skinning from shape to shape is supported (often called lofting in other modelers).

Of course, TrueSpace 7 has its arsenal of other great tools including metaballs which is like a virtual clay where you can take metaball primitives and bring them close together and they blend together much like a putty and you can build soft shapes.

Yes, regular polygon modeling is still supported. You have basic primitives, (cube, sphere, torus, plane, cylinder, cone), but these now have special tools that when you introduce them into a scene, you can manipulate them directly using something called a "magic ring" and stretch, deform, and modify them in various ways, without having having to go to any of the regular modeling tools.

Subdivision modeling (which in TrueSpace 4 was called NURBS) has a few new features in which you can take hard edged polygon objects and smooth them out and create organic objects as well. One of the new features with the subdivision modeler is that there are different levels of subdivision each of which can be manipulated and edited separately giving greater control over the smoothness of the entire object, and in addition, you can opt to only subdivide and smooth only parts of the object rather than the entire object. In TS 4 NURBS objects, you couldn't do this, you could only subdivide and smooth the entire object and not parts of it.

One of the great things about this new version of TrueSpace 7.6 is that you can apply virtually all modeling and sculpting tools to various types of objects. For example if you want to do an extrusion of a group of faces or patches in a subdivided object or a NURBS object you can do it now directly to the object itself. You can directly deform and sculpt using these tools, you can point edit. Before in TrueSpace 4 you were limited in what tools you could apply to what kind of objects. For example if you wanted to extrude from several faces of a TS 4 NURBS object, you would have to convert the object to a regular polygon object and lose all you NURBS capability such as manipulating its control mesh. But in TS 7's subdivision object, you can now extrude directly from the faces of the object without having to convert and you can still modify the control mesh of the object after doing the extrusion. So there is far greater flexibility than in earlier versions of TrueSpace.

Plastiforming is still supported. This is a tool unique to TrueSpace. Basically, it is an extrusion tool. What you do is take a plasforming primitive and a subdivided surface. Then you take the tool and move it through the surface and as you move the object in the 3D space it creates the shape as you move the primitive about. Think of a mole or gopher burrowing through the ground, as the mole moves, it creates the burrow behind it. That is what plasiforming is like. You can create canyons, caverns, caves which it. You could create trees and cacti with it.

There are two different view and modeling environments. There is the Workspace environment into which you can import a scene and do light modeling operations such as extrusion and point editing and it has a real time renderer which is often good enough to actually create animations or still pictures with without resorting to the full modeling environment and doing a full render. This is good for creating game environments or a realtime interactive scene (in which you have to have a realtime renderer) or if you aren't too demanding in having stark absolute photo realism in your animations in which you can create full animations in seconds rather than hours or even days using the full renderer.

There is as mentioned before the full modeling environment in which you have all the modeling tools and animation tools and the renderer. For your convenience, TS 7 comes with two renderers native to it, the Lightworks engine and the Virtualight engine. Both are capable of producing stunning photorealistic images and animations. The Virtualight is a little more sophisticated than the Lightworks engine and it supports caustics (refractive light passing through transparent objects such as magnifying lenses and being seen on surfaces behind the transparent object) and a few other effects which enhance photorealism. And if that were not enough, you can download for $300 the POV renderer from Caligari which is supposed to be the last word and the ultimate in rendering engines. (I haven't tried this renderer so I can't make any comment on it other than what I have read about it.) Both of the native renderers work quite differently and can give quite different looks to the appearance of objects and they can represent textures differently. So you have to experiment with both renderers to get the looks that you want. The Virtualight renders is also slower than the Lightworks renderer. And I would recommend using only to create very high quality still images.

Speaking of rendering, the viewer in TS 7 modeling environment is much improved. You can view scenes in the Open GL or 3D solid versions without the program crashing. In TS 4 if you viewed the scene in the solid 3D modes, you could do it, but there were bugs in it that would cause it to sometimes crash making it necessary to view the entire scene in wireframe mode especially if the crashes were frequent. Of course, in 3D modeling, it is best to be able to view the scene in a solid 3D view. Other improvements in the 3D view is support for more camera angles such as being able to view objects from the bottom. TS 4 only supported perspective and left, top, and front views, but TS 7 also allows right, bottom, and back views.

There are some other features which I still haven't figured out yet, and in later reviews I can cover these as soon as I learn what they are, but I do know that there is a script editor in TrueSpace 7 and you can build scripts for games, interactives, and so on. TS 4 supported Python for scripting, but this seems to support multiple scripting languages.