## Why Cheetah 3D?  ### Cheetah 3D represents the best deal in 3D software today There are powerful free programs, such as Blender, but just as a Mac pays for itself by being easier to use and more productive than the alternatives, Cheetah 3D is easier to learn and helps you get the job done quicker than “free” rivals. In my personal experience, not only is Blender harder to learn, but it’s harder to *remember* — even once I learn how to do something in Blender, I still need to look it up the next time I have to do it, and its reliably convoluted user interface seems to make everything harder to do than it should. Worse yet, most of your time learning Blender is figuring out the peculiarities of its internal structure, and not the underlying principles. Indeed, in terms of ease-of-use for a 3D package, Cheetah 3D outdoes its more expensive rivals too. You’re probably better off learning 3D concepts in a “simple” program like Cheetah 3D than a more sophisticated (and expensive) package like Modo or Maya or Cinema 4D (a program that Cheetah 3D clearly drew upon heavily for inspiration). Finally, even if you have access to and know how to use more powerful tools, you may find Cheetah 3D to be a useful program to use “in a pinch”. It’s lightweight and quick to launch. If you’re not doing anything complex, it isn’t resource hungry. It is a _true_ Mac application unlike almost every high-end 3D application (most of which wrap a totally non-Mac-UI in a window). With Cheetah 3D, you can have multiple documents open at once, copy and paste between documents. And it doesn’t take over the entire screen. Again, speaking from personal experience, I have found myself using Cheetah 3D more and more, and more expensive and/or powerful alternatives less and less, over time. ### Key Features Cheetah 3D is a remarkably simple and complete 3D package. It’s not complete in the sense that it does everything any 3D program *can* do (no 3D package can claim this), but it is complete in the sense that it does everything a 3D package *must* do to be generally useful. Specifically, Cheetah 3D has: * **Strong mesh modeling tools** (essentially on par with dedicated polygon modelers) — Cheetah 3D has all the tools you need to build polygon meshes. * **Decent spline-based modeling tools** — splines are native objects, and you can non-destructively create meshes from splines using the sweep, extrude, and lathe creators. * **A solid scene graph implementation** — you can view and manipulate 3D scenes both directly (by examining the scene from different points of view) and as a hierarchical schematic of objects in the scene (a “scene graph”). * A **non-destructive modifier chain** — you can apply modifiers to meshes while keeping the original meshes around. > ###### Non-Destructive? > > By “non-destructive” I mean that you can turn A into B while not “destroying” A and still being able to retrieve or perform operations on A. Non-destructive operations can be removed or adjusted later. > > If you’re familiar with Photoshop, a **filter** is **destructive** (once you’ve used it on a layer, that layer is gone) whereas a **smart filter**, **layer style**, or **adjustment layer** is **non-destructive** (you can turn off the adjustment layer and your unmodified image is still there). * **Node-based materials** (shaders) — the material system is powerful and flexible, although it can be a little intimidating to newcomers. * **A good, fast rendering engine** — the ray-tracing engine is both quick and produces high quality results. * **Scriptability** — you can write extensions and macros in Javascript. * **Character animation** features including inverse kinematics and constraints — all the tools to pose models and perform simple animations * **Dynamics** — you can use dynamic simulations (or "physics") to both create scenes (e.g. piles of objects) and animations (collisions, gravity, and so forth) > **Note:** Cheetah 3D 8.1.1 also has soft body/cloth and rope simulation (manual: Tags › Soft Body, Rope, Anchor), not yet covered here. > **AI draft:** generated from the Cheetah 3D 8.1.1 manual; not yet reviewed by the author. * **Broad file format support** — Cheetah 3D 8 opens FBX, OBJ, 3DS, Collada (DAE), STL, DXF, Silo (SIA), SceneKit (SCN), and USDZ files, and also knows about glTF/GLB. FBX is as close to an industry standard format for 3D models and animation data as there is, and you can both import and export FBX models with near complete support for the features implemented in FBX > *End of AI draft.* > **Note:** needs checking in Cheetah 3D 8.1.1: which of these formats can be exported as well as imported (the app’s Info.plist registers glTF/GLB without an open role, so probably export only). Cheetah 3D may lack certain specific features but it ticks all the big boxes, which is remarkable for such an inexpensive, lightweight, and easy-to-use program. Many far more expensive packages simply do not address one or more of these major points at all. This also means Cheetah 3D can work as part of a more sophisticated workflow. You can use it for modeling but rig and animate in another package and then come back to C3D for rendering. ### What’s New in v6? > **Note:** this “What’s New in v6?” list is two major versions old; delete it or replace it with a summary of Cheetah 3D 8. The key new features in Cheetah 3D v6 are: * Bullet Physics integration * Isosurfaces (Metaballs) * Animation (keying) of splines and polygon meshes * Improved file import/export — uses latest FBX SDK (v2012.2) * 16-bit textures (per channel) * New modifiers (crumple, shell, smooth) * Improved bevel tool * Improved sweep creator * Improved camera — navigation and orthographic preview * Lion fullscreen mode * Object search * Extended Javascript API All of these new features (and more, of course) are discussed in this book.