http://www.caligari.com Just though I'd pass it along. You just make an account, and then the software is 132 Mb, the manual is 51MB and the videos are 132 MB.

Quote:Dear Caligari community member, Today is an important day in the 23 year history of trueSpace. We are releasing a major upgrade to our flagship product with trueSpace7.6, bringing significant improvements in modeling, animation, rendering and workflows, plus new direct export to Virtual Earth. Most of these you might already expect if you’ve been following my regular Captain’s Blog. What you may not expect is that we are making trueSpace7.6 available to everyone at no charge, in a giant step forward to bring high-end 3D authoring tools to all who want them! trueSpace7.6 is far more than a SketchUp-style 3D architectural modeling tool. Instead, it provides a complete 3D authoring environment for any type of 3D content creation, whether that’s images, animations, objects for games, or content or worlds for online interactive shared spaces. trueSpace7.6's modeling tools feature a variety of surface representations including full polygonal editing, subdivision surface modeling, NURBS, metaballs, and implicit surfaces. Those are supported by400+ modeling tools like real-time Boolean operations with full construction history so you can move subtracted parts of your design at any time during your work, or even change a subtraction to an intersection. trueSpace 7.6 also provides advanced surfacing tools like layered materials, texture maps, normal maps, procedural materials, UVE projections, real-time DX9 pixel shaders that include shaders to simulate subsurface scattering, reflection, refraction, smoke, fire, water, anisotropicshader, metallic paint, glass – and those are just the real-time shaders! The animation capabilities are even more impressive.trueSpace7.6 supports key-frame and motion capture animation on fully hierarchical objects. Key-frame animations can be seamlessly blended with procedural animations and physical simulations, all of which can fully interact with each other. This means you can have a walking character animated by key-frames getting hit by a procedurally animated car and fly away in response to the collision thanks to physical simulation. In trueSpace7.6 you can also create fully articulated characters and interact with them using full body IK with editable direct manipulation widgets for joints (including physical stiffness), and apply physics or animated morphs for facial expressions. If you want to create a photorealistic images or a video, then the built-in Lightworks high quality offline renderer will give you spectacular rendering results including soft shadows, raytracing, global illumination in form of hybrid radiosity, image based lighting, caustics, tone mapping, HDRI, anisotropic reflectance,multi-pass rendering to Photoshop layers, motion blur, depth of field, lens flares etc. trueSpace’s award-winning direct manipulation interface with its easy-to-use 2D controls and 3D widgets has always been highly praised by users and press alike.For version 7.6 we have streamlined many workflows in extensive collaboration with our Beta testers. The UI is context-based and fully configurable, including toolbars, panels, widgets, layouts and projects. With universal drag-and-drop you can simply drop your model from the 3D workspace directly into an e-mail, written document, etc, and vice versa, clicking on the object in an e-mail will automatically open it in trueSpace. There are also a series of advanced editors. In addition to the 3D workspace and modeling editors, there are a universal 2D node link editor, a script editor,a non-linear animation editor, a material editor, a UV editor, and more. Plug-ins are now accessible from the real-time 3D workspace and we expect to release truly amazing plug-ins for trueSpace7.6 in the near future, as well as stimulate 3rd party creation of independent products both free and commercial thanks to the availability of an SDK. Finally, trueSpace7.6 is the only 3D authoring tool on the market which will allow you do all of the above in real-time shared 3D collaborative spaces where members of the design or animation team can maintain real-time interaction from anywhere in the world. We are taking the unprecedented step of making these tools available to everyone for free in order to stimulate content creation for the present and future online 3D environments, and so that any artist out there with a dream can fulfill their vision without finding themselves trapped by budget limitations. This is particularly true if their vision includes emerging 3D online worlds, where free and unrestricted communities of web artists can collaborate on 3D projects and even establish new kinds of communities the likes of which the world has never seen before, way beyond simple chats in isolated 3D rooms or 3D islands. Above all, trueSpace7.6 will empower you to create anything you dream up, whether you want to make illustrations for National Geographic, design products for Rolls-Royce, create buildings for Virtual Earth, make advertising or training videos, architectural walkthroughs, innovative video games, or animated films.All of these possibilities are now open to you simply by downloading trueSpace7.6 and learning what its powerful 3D authoring tools can do for you! To download trueSpace7.6, visit the link below: http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx Also, to aid in your learning process we have made all of our video courses, previously $79 each, available at no charge, and you can download those courses here. At a time when other companies are removing their low cost products to make it even tougher to get started in 3D, it gives us great pleasure to enable all artists regardless of age or income to create 3D in whatever field they dream of. We hope you enjoy your copy of trueSpace7.6. Roman Ormandy Founder Caligari Corp

[Edited by - Daaark on July 24, 2008 3:28:02 AM]

I've used 6.5 for awhile, does the interface still look like it was designed by a monkey on crack?

It's said to be customizable. I haven't run it yet. Because all it has done is crashed at the splash screen.

This is all I saw of the program the first few times I tried to run it.


Finally, after using RUN AS ADMIN, it opened:


Not sure what to think of it. I clicked on the 4 views option and it took a few second just to do that. It feels really slow and clunky, even when the scene is empty.

It's very strange. trueSpace 6 is an option on the main menu. When you click it, the program stops and loads up your scene in TS6. Everytime I click to change the viewports (like from 1 to 4) it does a slow fade to black and white, there is a lot of disk swapping, and then I eventually fade into a different viewport setup.



[Edited by - Daaark on July 24, 2008 2:10:29 AM]

Quote:Original post by TomG
Sorry to hear its running slow on your system. It should perform well, on anything from a 6600 upward. Older hardware (that doesnt support DX9.0c and pixelshader2.0) will run slow, you can try changing the hardware settings to get better performance (under File -> HW Settings). You can also swap over to the Model side once loaded, which uses older real-time rendering technology in that window (though you would lose access to the the new tools and abilities which are all in the workspace side).

If you like, send me an email (b-thgrim@microsoft.com) with the specs of your machine and we can see if there is something else going on that can be fixed up to help it run better.

Thanks!
Tom

Tom Grimes
Caligari Corporation
http://www.caligari.com/
http://www.tmgcgart.com/

Thanks Tom. I have a 6100 and it runs A LOT better when I tweak it to the DX7 mode. The interface is killing me. It take some forever to find what I'm after and I still haven't found the render options.

I also can't find how to import in a file. There is a file open dialog thing at the top, but it only seems to have truespace files, or image formats. Where is obj, 3ds, and those regular formats?

I've been watching the videos and I really like the animation features. When I saw how easy it was in that one video to put together a preset skeleton with a few clicks and then even have room to add your own little presets my jaw dropped. It looks to have a lot of features I have always needed to do what I want to do, but I could never get with the software that was in my range.

I just have to get around this crazy interface. Watching the videos make it seem like it's actually very easy to use and intuitive to the person who wrote it, just not to everyone else. [lol]


---

My trueSpace experience has been smooth as hell. [totally][wow][ignore]

Quote:Dear Daaark,

Unfortunately your registration at trueSpace Community Forums did not meet our membership requirements. Therefore your registration was deleted.

Thank you for your understanding in this regard.
trueSpace Community Forums

[Edited by - Daaark on July 24, 2008 2:00:59 PM]

+I also can't find how to import in a file. There is a file open dialog thing at
+the top, but it only seems to have truespace files, or image formats. Where is
+obj, 3ds, and those regular formats?

Not yet integratet into the Workspace. Switch to Modeler. Here import the files in the menu at the top. Or when it's an OBJ, load the LUUV Plugin and import your OBJ file by this plugin (would recommend that way). Then switch to Workspace.

To find your way into the GUI i would highly recommend to watch the learning videos at the caligari page. You can also set the Toolbars in the Workspace to 1D. They display text then, which may make some things clearer.

I'm not so fond of Blender also, but this interface is pretty 'shady' . Just a first impression. And indeed it works kind of slow even on my new qc system.

The TS interface is customizable. When you don't like the icons simply turn them to 1D and they will show the name of the tool instead. You can also customize the hotkeys. And you can modify your toolbars and put your toolbars wherever you want them to have.

The speed issue comes partially from running two render softwares at once. Plus the Bridge to connect them. Modeler is the old render software, Workspace the new one. To speed things up you can turn off the bridge.

Workspace speed also depends alot at the graphics card because of realtime display. You will surely never be lucky with an old card wih not enough ram. But you can speed up the realtime display by changing the hardware settings down to DX 7.