Cheetah3D upgrades to 4.6, gains video tutorials

A new version of the Cheetah3D animation suite has been released, bringing the software up to v4.6. The program handles a majority of the tasks in creating 3D animations, including modeling, pose managing and rendering. The update primarily introduces an auto-saving option, to protect against losing a project; when turned on, it will save work in Cheetah every few minutes, minimizing the amount of data lost in case of a system or application crash.

Addtionally, the software now supports rendering movies at arbitrary framerates, and importing NURBS and patches from FBX files. The lightmap baking renderer has been improved, and finally, the engine uses shared file loaders in order to conserve RAM. Cheetah3D 4 runs on Mac OS X 10.4, and costs $150 new or $70 as an upgrade from v1, 2 or 3.

Released alongside v4.6 is a new set of video tutorials, made with the help of Andrew "fused" Heyworth. The Cheetah3D for Beginners series contains over four hours of footage, and documents all the major sections of the suite. The collection is priced at $30.

Filed under: education, software, Graphics/Web Design