Cheetah3d 6 manual in PDF Chapters

SOF

Member
Hi,

I'm a total newbi to 3D graphics, and at 80, the learning curve is a tad steep, but, as compensation for the inane questions that I will fling your way, I have taken the PDF manual derived from the Help file for v 6 and revamped it into chapters for easy printing. I initially submit the User Interface Chapter and the Tags Chapter for your approval. If you think that I am treading on Copyright Toes, then please ignore them. if however you find them of some use, I can upload the rest of the Manual Chapters.

Addendum: I tried to upload the tag chapter 4.5MB and the Interface chapter 2.4MB - both rejected as too large!! I will try with the Animation, 1 MB, still too large, and the Intro. 547KB, still too large!!!

At least I tried.
 
Thanks for your advise, I don't use Dropbox, but use pCloud. I've uploaded everything to the Cloud, and will try again, server to server:

Still too large!! Hey Ho
Hi and Welcome!
Not sure what's the difference with your Pdf-version except Cheetah3d rev. No, but here you can find another PDF: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/index.php?threads/8327/#post-69402

Cheers
Frank
Hi and Welcome!
Not sure what's the difference with your Pdf-version except Cheetah3d rev. No, but here you can find another PDF: https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/index.php?threads/8327/#post-69402

Cheers
Frank
I started with the PDF version you give, but various sections seemed to bleed onto other pages and I have reordered everything as per the help menu in Cheetah and generally formatted everything. It was for my own use and I decided to do the conversion with PDFelement Pro 6 (much better than Adobe), chapter by chapter, so that I could print each chapter out and bind. Anyway no harm done.
 
Hi SOF!,

It is nice that you tried to help the community with a conversion.

There is an issue with Acrobat parsing the HTML directory links onto one page. So it sorts all the links out of order when the columns jump to the next page back and forth. I tried everything I could think of to get all the front page links to be on one page, but I never could get it to work correctly. It could probably be done by editing the HTML code, but I never took the time to do that.

The first version that I converted, I manually re-arranged all the pages back in their proper order (at least for the English and German localizations). It took some time to rearrange them though, so I never did it for any of the ones after v5. I think I stated if anyone had a problem with it, that I'd take the time to rearrange the other versions, but nobody ever complained. So I just left them as they were. All the clicked links still direct to the correct sections, so I think most people on tablets didn't have a problem with it. But I can see where it would cause an issue when printing. This help pdf has a lot of images, so that's one of the reasons the files come out larger. There's only so much that the bitmaps can be compressed without loosing too much quality.

Cheers,

Simon
 
@SOF
Maybe it's not my place to make a comment about your age. I admire your courage and people like you really give me hope that I myself will be in a few decades still will be able to accept and even learn new things. People like you are my personal heroes.

The reason for this are my own grandparents and especially my mother. Somewhere near 75 she stopped being able to cope with new concepts and modern gadgets (she always had her problems there). She said: I'm too old for that instead of doing what she would have liked. And more and more she wanted the whole world being again like the 50ties.

It's not that she couldn't have learned anymore (her memory really was better at 80 than at 65 because she had started to train it). And to be honest, she got a bit mean with age, using her walking stick happily against anybody that crossed her the wrong way. Not because she was a crazy, slightly demented old woman, but because she knew how to play that role and would be seen as such from her clueless victims. She exactly knew what she did and never really harmed anybody (she could have hit much harder). After I had seen her once doing this, I tried to talk her out of it, but later on she told me sometimes of her victorious battles with an evil grin that would have been the pride of Christopher Lee. Asked for her reasons, she simple told me: 'You know, I always had wanted doing that!'

So, please excuse me for making your age a theme, but I really admire those who don't stop learning just because they are not supposed to anymore from a society that got too many things wrong anyway.
 
Hasdrubel,

I opened the door, so to speak, re my age, so who am I to object to those who wish to walk through:D.
I not a practitioner in the wondrous world of CGI and am retired.
I spent my working life of 44 years as a Senior Patent Examiner in what is now the Intellectual Property Office. Having graduated in Engineering from London University and then at Surrey for my further degrees, I was put into examining would-be inventions in the fields of 'Wave Energy Position Finding', (Radar, Ladar) or H4D and then 'Pictorial Communication' (Television, Computer Graphics) or H4F (this incidentally, brought me into contact with 3D graphics and video data compression algorithms, at the tender age of 26, ie 54 years ago).
I am a dabbler and a dipper, in all the wonders of CGI. and have no remunerative reason for learning a new or the latest trends in a once familiar field; however, just like your mother, I strive to keep up to date, as I consider that denying the exercise of the mind, is to ensure its withering, be it actual or metaphysical.
 
* A highly enjoyable thread. Being a (comparatively) juvenile ;) and a-whisker-post-pubertarian C3D user :unsure:, I hope that you will enjoy toying with geometric concepts, 3D modelling and the creative trickery of it all.
* I could not imagine a life without curiosity and experimentation. Of course, I am well aware that processes of analysis and synthesis take a bit longer at my Biblical age of 3 score and ten (plus 3), but, then again, I am not in hurry.
* Sadly, I know a few people who may be brain dead since having been expelled from the maternal uterus and just don´t realise it :poop:

* Don't worry about questions. That is the purpose of this forum.
 
* A highly enjoyable thread. Being a (comparatively) juvenile ;) and a-whisker-post-pubertarian C3D user :unsure:, I hope that you will enjoy toying with geometric concepts, 3D modelling and the creative trickery of it all.
* I could not imagine a life without curiosity and experimentation. Of course, I am well aware that processes of analysis and synthesis take a bit longer at my Biblical age of 3 score and ten (plus 3), but, then again, I am not in hurry.
* Sadly, I know a few people who may be brain dead since having been expelled from the maternal uterus and just don´t realise it :poop:

* Don't worry about questions. That is the purpose of this forum.
I don't worry about the questions; it's the answers that I strive to understand:rolleyes:
 
* Well then, don´t worry about the answers, either. This is neither Princeton nor the Sistine Chapel where a basic grasp of relativity or colloquial Latin is required. Anyway, with 80 you are excluded from the College of Cardinals, so you can skip Latin, as well :devilish:

* The principles of 3D modelling are extensively covered on numerous websites of the internet and do not really differ between applications, be it C3D, Y or Z. There are lots of YouTube tutorials on methods which are interchangeable.

* At the first glance, C3D has a (deceptively) simple user interface which seems a bit trivial until you start to fiddle with the bells and whistles cleverly hidden under the bonnet. All you need (and you seem to possess those traits) is curiosity and the courage to experiment. Of course, you need some skills in spatial imagination, but you would have hardly decided on CGI if you had no aptitude in 3D thinking.
 
I don't worry about the questions; it's the answers that I strive to understand:rolleyes:

The important point is, most of it you don't have to understand (that probably will come later on). You just have to know, how to do it, which you can learn through tutorials and texts.

Usually I don't contradict Helmut (most of the time he knows much better than me). And of course he is right when he says that the principles stay the same in all apps. But the available tools and the way they are used are most of the time very different from Cheetah's toolbox. And for somebody who is new to all this, it's a bit difficult when 90 % of the tools somebody used in his tutorial just plain are not available. As soon as you know your way around Cheetah, this is no big problem anymore, but for a beginner it's often impossible to use the right set of tools to recreate what was done in maya, modo or blender with just a few steps.

Cheetah's big advantage, though, is that it's in my opinion the easiest 3d app around because the maker (Martin) really put thought into this. It's much less complicated than, say, 3ds max, but for that misses quite a few tools that sometimes can be a great help (only very often beginners are stuck with all the possibilities in such apps).

So I'd recommend looking at books and videotutorials that are software agnostic and of course to use the tutorials in the forum here.

And you don't have to be afraid of the answers others give, because this forum is one of the few places, where things most of the time explained in a way that you will understand. If neccessary several times in different ways (especially Frank, who is somewhat the Cheetah guru here around) really takes a lot of his time to teach newbies and experts alike if they are stuck somewhere.

Good luck
 
The important point is, most of it you don't have to understand (that probably will come later on). You just have to know, how to do it, which you can learn through tutorials and texts.

Usually I don't contradict Helmut (most of the time he knows much better than me). And of course he is right when he says that the principles stay the same in all apps. But the available tools and the way they are used are most of the time very different from Cheetah's toolbox. And for somebody who is new to all this, it's a bit difficult when 90 % of the tools somebody used in his tutorial just plain are not available. As soon as you know your way around Cheetah, this is no big problem anymore, but for a beginner it's often impossible to use the right set of tools to recreate what was done in maya, modo or blender with just a few steps.

Cheetah's big advantage, though, is that it's in my opinion the easiest 3d app around because the maker (Martin) really put thought into this. It's much less complicated than, say, 3ds max, but for that misses quite a few tools that sometimes can be a great help (only very often beginners are stuck with all the possibilities in such apps).

So I'd recommend looking at books and videotutorials that are software agnostic and of course to use the tutorials in the forum here.

And you don't have to be afraid of the answers others give, because this forum is one of the few places, where things most of the time explained in a way that you will understand. If neccessary several times in different ways (especially Frank, who is somewhat the Cheetah guru here around) really takes a lot of his time to teach newbies and experts alike if they are stuck somewhere.

Good luck


I was joking;). Seriously I agree with everything that has been said here, and I have every training video and online book going.

IMHO you only have to look at Blender in it's 2.79 version, to see a feature wise super star, ham-strung with a terrible GUI. Blender.org realized this and they have gone a long (desperate) way to bring the GUI into the mainstream, with 2.8. IMHO again, Cheetah3D has 90% of Blender's feature set, with a much more user friendly GUI. Dr Wengenmayer should be given a medal for his work.
 
Cheetah3D has 90% of Blender's feature set, with a much more user friendly GUI. Dr Wengenmayer should be given a medal for his work.

Probably it's a bit less and some of what's missing is today quite important (like Subsurface-Scattering, Volumetric Lights and so on, things that Martin probably is working on right now. So Cheetah is catching up a little bit.

But the real advantage blender and most other 3d apps have over Cheetah are plugins, some free, some paid. Like fx, octane, vray, bridge to substance or after effects and many other things. Whatever your (professional) needs, it is possible to do it in blender (but not always for free).

That said, I don't like blender at all. The GUI is horrible, yes, but the way you do things in general isn't after my taste. Nor do I like Cycles. It has everything it needs, but most renders look a bit underwhelming to me (some people, though, can create wonderful and real looking pictures).

And yes, Martin should be given an award for creating the most accessible 3d app around.
 
Cheetah has maybe 20% of blender’s feature set. 50% of blender’s feature set is kind of bonkers (e.g. video editing tools) so that’s not so bad, but then Cheetah still only has 40% of the useful stuff.

e.g. Blender has true support for non-linear animation editing and sequencing. This is something that is almost impossible to deal with in Cheerah 3d and horrendously inefficient even if you somehow manage to do it.

At this point I’d say that Cheetah is a really nice modeling tool — better than Silo in most ways which, on its own is a tremendous achievement. Unfortunately, in virtually all other respects Blender 2.8 is superior both in terms of functionality and usability (!). The EeVee renderer is AMAZING, Cycles is now ahead of Falcon, the support for animation is great, the unified shader model is more powerful than Falcon is or is promised to be.

I think Martin should concentrate on the things that makes Cheetah 3D great and unique, and not try to compete with Blender, but I’ve been saying this since around Blender 2.49 when they started addressing their usability issues in earnest.

Edit: blender 2.8 still has some pretty dire rendering bugs with volumetrics. I assume they’ll be fixed, but until they are be warned. (Note that C3D doesn’t have volumetrics yet — they’ve been promised for something like five years.)
 
For myself, this comparison of Cheetah3D and Blender is not fair as they are not intended for the same market.

Being a retired dipper and a dabbler, and therefor not making money out of my toes, I cannot make out a case to my beloved (my wife, not my two Bichons), for buying an up-market PC. I make do with a late 2009 27"iMac.

Cheetah3D runs fine on it, the rendering is fast and it works for my purpose.

Dr Wengenmayer and friends wrote it specifically for the Mac.

Blender on the other hand is open source with a huge pool of multi-talented developers, versed in all platforms, a brilliant 'Jack of all Trades'. It however needs a high end PC, specifically with a high end Graphics card.

Apple long ago, gave up on Graphics in its modular computers and concentrated on the look of their 'All in Ones', going after the general, iPhone centric masses, rather than the specialist.

Blender is slow and very buggy on my old iMac and is a none starter.

When Apple design software specifically for OSX and its computers, it is usually the best and cheepest in its class (I am thinking of Final Cut Pro 10.4.4), but its hardware and software is just not up to the mainsteam (PC) world.

Thank goodness for Dr Wengenmayer.
 
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* For anybody curious and ignorant (like me):
:unsure: Bichon can be:
1 a breed of dogs, related to poodles
2 a French pastry, bichon au citron
3 a Mesolithic homo sapiens, probably killed by a bear in the Swiss Jura some 13k years ago
 
No doubt, had the middle stone age gents #3, had the fearless Bichons #1, to protect them, they would not have been exterminated and would still be banging the stones together; that is, unless Bichons #1, had been diverted with a plate of #2, then 'to hell with our human/dog bonding instincts! We're hungry'.
To the relief (I hope) of all, I am the happy pack leader of two curly dogs, not two hairy groin scratching, humanoids, nor a duo of Froggy Pastries.
 
:mad: What pity. I have grown rather fond of eccentric members of the landed gentry, sharing Norman castles with two poodly skeletons plus lemons (and spam, as the resident choir of Vikings under the baton of Canute the Great insists).
 
:mad: What pity. I have grown rather fond of eccentric members of the landed gentry, sharing Norman castles with two poodly skeletons plus lemons (and spam, as the resident choir of Vikings under the baton of Canute the Great insists).
Keep taking the medication:D

As for your implication that I am an 'eccentric member of the landed gentry, sharing a Norman castle with two poodly skeletons plus lemons (and spam)'; I will have you know that although my dear wife has noble Coats of Arms on both her Father's and Mother's side, my escutcheon, merely depicts two legs walking over a field verde, strewn with cow pats, one leg being encased in a wellington boot, t'other boot being entrapped in a passed cow pat with the resultant bare leg inexorably descending into the next cow pat. The Latin Moto is "Semper in Excrementum".

Which sums up my life aptly.
 
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