Falcon

Cheetah’s new renderer is a unidirectional path tracer. The key takeaway is that it’s a physically based renderer (PBR) rather than a ray tracer (like Cheetah’s old renderer, which is still available should you wish to use it). Because of this, it takes longer to render a final image than Cheetah 3D’s old renderer for simple things, but it correctly models a lot of lighting effects that are “faked” by the old renderer at no additional cost in render or setup time.

Note: apart from Key Points, this chapter is general beginner material (much of it written for v6) rather than Falcon material, and some of it contradicts chapter 3; retitle it or fold it into chapters 5 and 8. 4.7 and 4.8 are stubs.

• Key Points
• Primitives: Basic 3D Objects
• The Properties Panel
• Selecting and Moving Objects
• Meshes
• Editing Meshes: Core Polygon Tools
• Selecting Parts of Meshes
• Fine-Tuning Meshes
• Mesh Smoothing
• Creators
• Materials Overview
• Lights and Lighting
• Image-Based Lighting
• The Sky Light Object
• Rendering
• Camera Objects