Cheetah3D currently offers a raytracer for rendering which supports radiosity and HDRI renderings. The renderer is fully integrated into Cheetah3D and is multi-threaded so that you can use both of your CPUs if you have a dual processor Mac.
Most parameters for the renderer are set in the Camera, Light and Material objects. New materials can be created with the node based material system.
You can render your final scene in three different ways:
- Use the menu command "Render
Render" - Assign the "Render" command to a hot key in the preferences window and then use that hot key.
- Use the render icon (the cheetah head) in the tool bar.
Cheetah3D's built-in renderer currently offers the following features:
- Multi threaded: The renderer is multi-threaded and supports up to 16 CPU cores.
- Node based material system: Create your own materials by connecting various shading nodes.
- Procedural shaders: Cheetah3D offers many procedural texture nodes.
- Resolution: You can render scenes up to a size of 4096x4096. The resolution can be set in the Camera object.
- File export: You can save the resulting images in many common 2D image file formats like .tiff, .jpg, .png, etc.
- Oversampling: Cheetah3D currently uses oversampling up to 64x64 to reduce aliases.
- Anisotropic texture filtering: Cheetah3D uses anisotropic texture filtering to filter color and bump maps. This results in less artifacts when rendering textured objects which are smaller than the original texture.
- Ray traced transparencies: Use the transparency or refraction property to calculate transparent or glassy objects. There is also support for calculating the fresnel term of transparent objects.
- Ray traced reflections: In Cheetah3D there are two ways to calculate reflections. The first one uses raytracing to precisely reproduce the reflections of objects in the scene - see the blue cube and the wood floor in the image above for a visual example. However, you can also use environment maps to produce fake reflections - see the information on environment maps below for more details.
- Alpha channel support: You can easily create icons with a transparent background by setting the background color to transparent in the Camera object.
- 1024 light sources: Cheetah3D currently supports 1024 light sources which should be quite enough for most scenes.
- Shadows: Cheetah3D currently supports ray traced shadows. To turn shadow calculation on you have to turn on the shadow property in the Camera and in the Light object.
- Bump mapping: In nature, most surfaces aren't entirely precise - subtle bumps, ripples or dents are vital for making realistic looking models. To simulate a bumpy surface you can use bump maps, which are grey scale images where black represents the lowest level of the bumps and white represents the highest level of the bumps. See the following two images which show a bump map and the final rendered result.


Environment mapping in combination with bump mapping.
- HDRI Backgrounds: HDRI backgrounds can be used for creating ultra realistic reflections and refraction or for Image Based Lightning. For a better understanding read the documentation of the HDRI and the Radiosity tag. The big example image at the beginning of this site demonstrates the quality of HDRI renderings.
- Radiosity and Ambient Occlusion: Cheetah3D supports both of these algorithms. They can be used to calculate the indirect illumination of a scene. Read the documentation of the Radiosity tag for a better understanding.
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