Cheetah3D 5.3 Now With 64-bit

Independent software developer Martin Wengenmayer has announced the release of Cheetah3D 5.3, a major update to his very popular, professional level 3D modeling solution for Mac OS X. Developed from the ground up utilizing the latest Cocoa technologies, Cheetah3D is a lean, fast, and elegant 3D modeling, rendering, and animation package with an easy learning curve.

Perfect for graphic designers, architects and casual users alike, Cheetah3D provides the most useful features needed to get the job done, and organizes them within a beautifully elegant user-interface that is powerful, intuitive and quick to work with. It offers many powerful tools, like subdivision surface modelling, joint based character animation system, UV unwrapping, texture painting, PDF import, global illumination renderer, and much more. The possibility to extend Cheetah3D with JavaScripts and support for many common file formats, like FBX, 3DS or Collada, rounds out its feature set.

The biggest change in Cheetah3D 5.3 is undoubtedly the 64-bit version for Intel 64-bit CPUs. Now Cheetah3D can use all the memory installed in your Mac, and will allow you to create much more complex and more impressive scenes. To deal with these complex scenes, the Cheetah3D raytracing core has been accelerated considerably, and Altivec/SSE optimized. The handling of complex geometry has also been considerably improved: huge meshes with millions of polygons now render up to 10 times faster.


On the user interface side, the already convenient and easy-to-use Render Manager has been rewritten completely and is now even better. For example, for easier finding of old render jobs, a thumbnail preview is now available. The pose manager functionality has moved to a tag to allow saving poses locally and making it more conveninent and faster to work with character poses.

Major new features in Cheetah3D 5.3:
* 64-bit version for Intel Macs
* Altivec/SSE accelerated raytracing core
* Altivec/SSE accelerated wire frame rendering
* Redesigned UI of render manager (with thumbnail preview, job manaeger in main window, etc.)
* Moved pose manager functionality to new pose tag
* Tool settings can be saved to preferences
* More effienct preferences loading/saving
* And much more

"Performing truly advanced operations in Cheetah3D will seem like second nature very rapidly," said Dr. Martin Wengenmayer, Cheetah3D's developer. "With its seamless Mac OS X integration, Cheetah3D has been written from the ground up using Cocoa. Its not just a simple port of a Windows or Linux modeller which ends up looking, feeling and behaving like a disappointingly un-Mac-like piece of software. With Cheetah3D, you will feel right at home using it without having to learn a completely new user interface. It packs a terrific punch for it's tiny price. In fact, the program provides a level of productivity that you will be hard-pressed to equal in software ten times the cost."

Language support:
* U.S. English, German, and Japanese


Pricing and Availability:
Cheetah3D 5.3 is priced at $149.00 (USD) for a single-user license. Customers may upgrade from Cheetah3D 1.x - 4.x for $69.00.


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