Feature List
General Features
- Written from the ground-up in Cocoa!
- Universal Binary application
- Native support for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs
- Full support of Retina displays
- Highly intuitive, thoroughly Macintosh-like user interface
- Metal 3D preview
- 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
- Physical sky lights
- Folders
- Smart Folders
- Joint
Parametric Polygon Objects
- Polygon object (ngon support)
- Ball
- Capsule
- Cube
- Cone
- Cylinder
- Disc
- Fractal
- Plane
- Polyhedra ( [truncated] Tetra-, Octa-, Dedeca- and Icosahedra)
- Relief
- Stair
- Torus
- Tube
Parametric Spline Objects
- Spline Curve (linear, Bezier curve, Bezier spline, NURBS)
- Circle
- Cog
- Flower
- Helix
- Line
- n-Edge
- Rect
- Star
- Text (through any installed True Type Font)
Creator Objects
- Boolean operations
- A union B
- A substract B
- A intersect B
- A outside B
- A inside B
- Chain (create chains with just a few mouse clicks)
- Extrude (great for 3D-Fonts)
- Isosurface (Metaball)
- Lathe
- Polyplane
- Sweep
- Symmetry
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 WebKit Javascript engine
- JIT compiler for ultra fast script execution
- Generate your own objects
- Write custom file loaders and exporters
- Write your own tools
- Automate repetitive tasks
Animation Tools
- Key frame animation
- Joint based character animation
- Auto-Keying
- Fly through animations along splines
- Almost every object, tag or material property can be animated!
- Animation of mesh vertices and spline control-points
- Powerful time line
- F-Curve editor
- Key editor
- Various key interpolation types
- Linear
- Smooth
- Bezier spline
- Flat
- Forward kinematics (FK)
- Inverse kinematics (IK)
- Spline IK
- Heat weighting
- Vertex weight painting
- Constraints (Angle, Point, Position, etc.)
- Poses
- Take Manager
- OpenGL animation preview
Dynamics
- Uses industry proven Bullet physics engine
- Riggid body dynamics
- Support for various collision shapes
- Box
- Convex (sphere, capsule, cylinder,…)
- Convex hull
- Concave
- Soft body dynamics
- Rope dynamics
- Very fast simulations
- Supports editable particle systems
- Forces interact with dynamics
- Anchors to connect soft bodies with rigid bodies
- Interactive preview of physical simulation
- Dynamics backing for complex scenens
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
- ABF UV Unwrapping
- 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
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
Renderer
- Fully integrated ray-tracer
- Multi-threaded to support up to 18 CPU cores
- Powerful node based material system
- Many procedural textures and materials
- 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 and refractions
- Ray traced depth of field
- Ray traced shadows
- Roloured shadows
- Exact soft shadows via area light
- Ray traced refraction (with fresnel term)
- Ray traced reflection
- Panorama projection
File Formats
- 3D import:
- .3ds
- .dae
- .dxf (quite limited yet)
- .fbx
- .obj
- .sia
- .stl (binary and ASCII)
- .jas (binary and ASCII)
- 3D export:
- .3ds
- .dae
- .dxf
- .fbx
- .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
- Movie export:
- all QuickTime supported codecs
- Other:
- Copy & paste paths from EazyDraw to Cheetah3D
- Copy & paste paths from Intaglio to Cheetah3D
Localisations
System Requirements
- macOS 10.15.7 or newer
- Apple Silicon (M1, M2, ...) or Intel processor
- GPU form Apple, Intel or AMD