Cheetah 3D logo
Feature List
Try Cheetah3DBuy Cheetah3D
GENERAL FEATURES
  • Written from the ground-up in Cocoa!
  • Universal Binary application
  • Highly intuitive, thoroughly Macintosh-like user interface
  • OpenGL preview
  • Quad 3D view
  • Customisable UI layout
  • Almost all parameters can be animated
  • Polygons can have any number of edges (ngons)
  • Full set of object, polygon and point selection tools
  • Full transformation hierarchy
  • Additional features can be assigned to objects using tags
  • Intuitive editors for objects, materials and properties
  • Up to 16 different materials per mesh
  • A Fully integrated, multi-threaded renderer
  • Drag and drop materials onto your polygon selections
  • Link external 3D files into the scene
  • Multi object selection
  • Character animation tools
  • Snapping
  • Customisable hot keys
  • Customisable mouse controls
  • Customisable toolbar
SCENE OBJECTS
  • Cameras
  • Point Lights
  • Area Lights
  • Distant Lights
  • Spot Lights
  • Folders
  • Smart Folders
  • Joint
MODIFIER OBJECTS
  • Array
  • Bulge
  • Build
  • Displace
  • Ring
  • Shear
  • Spherify
  • Subdivide (Catmull-Clark, Stam-Loop, Linear)
  • Symmetry
  • Taper
  • Transform
  • Twist
  • Warp
PARAMETRIC POLYGON OBJECTS
  • Polygon object (ngon support)
  • Cube
  • Ball
  • Cone
  • Disc
  • Plane
  • Polyhedra ( [truncated] Tetra-, Octa-, Dedeca- and Icosahedra)
  • Cylinder
  • Torus
  • Tube
  • Stair
  • Relief (height field)
PARAMETRIC SPLINE OBJECTS
  • Spline Curve (linear, Bezier curve, Bezier spline, NURBS)
  • Circle
  • Rect
  • Star
  • Cog
  • Flower
  • n-Edge
  • Helix
  • Text (through any installed True Type Font)
CREATOR OBJECTS
  • Lathe
  • Sweep
  • Extrude (great for 3D-Fonts)
  • Polyplane
  • Symmetry
  • Chain (create chains with just a few mouse clicks)
  • Boolean operations
    • A union B
    • A substract B
    • A intersect B
    • A outside B
    • A inside B
TAGS
  • HDRI tag
  • Radiosity tag
  • Render tag
  • Mode tag
  • Spline Tracking tag
  • Target tag
  • UV tag
  • Skeleton tag
  • Morph tag
  • IK Angle Constraint tag
  • IK Point Constraint tag
SCRIPTING
  • Uses the Javascript language — leverage your existing knowledge of JavaScript to automate Cheetah3D!
  • Uses the rock solid SpiderMonkey Javascript engine from the Mozilla project
  • generate your own objects
  • write custom file loaders and exporters
  • write your own tools
  • automate repetitive tasks
ANIMATION TOOLS
  • Key Frame Animation
  • Auto-Keying
  • Fly Through Animations along splines
  • Almost every object, tag or material property can be animated!
  • Powerful time line
  • F-Curve editor
  • Key editor
  • Various key interpolation types
    • Linear
    • Smooth
    • Bezier spline
    • Flat
  • Forward kinematics (FK)
  • Inverse kinematics (IK)
  • Constraints (Angle/Point)
  • Pose Manager
  • Take Manager
  • OpenGL animation preview
SPLINE TOOLS
  • Create spline
  • Insert point
  • Soft interpolation
  • Hard interpolation
  • Equal tangent direction
  • Equal tangent length
  • Join segments
  • Break segment
  • Reverse sequence
  • Mirror
  • Set value
  • Quantize
  • Burn transform
  • Import child
FULL SET OF POLYGON TOOLS
  • Polygon, edge and point mode
  • Set and Reset crease
  • Create polygon
  • Fill hole
  • Bridge
  • Insert point
  • Magnet
  • Extrude
  • Inner extrude (point/edge/polygon)
  • Shell
  • Jigsaw
  • Scalpel
  • Ring cut
  • Weld
  • Move, Scale and Rotate points, edges and polygons
  • Move, Scale and Rotate along normal
  • Rotate edge
  • Collapse polygon
  • Flip normals
  • Triangulate polygons
  • Array
  • Split
  • Clone
  • Mirror
  • Separate
  • Crumple
  • Set value
  • Quantize
  • Burn transform
  • Import child
  • Point slide
  • Cover
  • Catmull- Clark Subdivide (partial or full mesh; with creases)
  • Linear Subdivide (partial or full mesh)
UV TOOLS
  • Powerful UV Editor
  • Various selection types
  • Move, Scale and Rotate
  • Save UV Mesh to PDF
  • LSCM UV Unwrapping
  • Autoseam
  • Different mapping types
    • spheric
    • cubic
    • cylindric
    • flat
    • frontal
TEXTURE PAINTING
  • Live OpenGL preview of painting
  • Brush
  • Rubber
  • Fill
  • Rect
  • Circle
  • Line
  • Various brush types
  • Supports solid and texture colours
  • Support for pressure sensitive graphic tablets
  • Paint displacement and relief maps with live 3D preview
CHARACTER ANIMATION
  • Live OpenGL preview of skinned meshes
  • Joint tool
  • Vertex weight painting
RENDERER
  • Fully integrated ray-tracer
  • Multi-threaded to support quad processor Macs
  • HDRI backgrounds (probe, cross and panorama format)
  • ambient occlusion for fast image based lightning (IBL)
  • radiosity for indirect diffuse illumination
  • caustics
  • adaptive antialiasing (over- and under-sampling)
  • anisotropic EWA texture filtering
  • texture baking
  • lightmap baking
  • environment mapping
  • bump mapping
  • fog
  • blurred reflections
  • ray traced depth of field
  • ray traced shadows
  • coloured shadows
  • exact soft shadows via area
  • ray traced refraction (with fresnel term)
  • ray traced reflection
  • panorama projection
  • shaders via plug-ins
    • marble shader
    • wood shader
    • velvet shader
    • membrane shader
    • etc.
FILE FORMATS
  • 3D import:
    • .3ds
    • .dxf (quite limited yet)
    • .fbx
    • .lwo
    • .obj
    • .sia
    • .stl (binary and ASCII)
    • .jas (binary and ASCII)
  • 3D export:
    • .3dmf
    • .3ds
    • .dxf
    • .fbx
    • .h (C header files)
    • .obj
    • .mtl
    • .sia
    • .stl (binary and ASCII)
    • .jas (binary and ASCII)
  • 2D import/export
    • many common file formats (.jpg, .tiff, .png, .exr etc.)
    • import SVG path data
    • import PDF path data
    • export to .hdr
    • export to .epx
    • export to the Mac OS X icon file format (.icns)
  • Movie export:
    • all QuickTime supported codecs
  • Other:
    • Copy & paste paths from EazyDraw to Cheetah3D
    • Copy & paste paths from Intaglio to Cheetah3D
LOCALIZATIONS
  • English
  • Japanese
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
  • Mac OS X 10.4
  • G3/G4/G5/Intel processor
  • 16 MB VRAM