Cheetah 3D Stuff

Particle City

Particle City is a scripted particle system for Cheetah 3D 5.5 (or later, presumably) which builds a "city" out of building "particles". It's more of a demonstration of how powerful and flexible C3D's particle system is than a useful tool, since the same thing can be achieved in C3D without using particles.

Grid Spacing shows the size of (non-street) cells in the grid.
Width / Depth determine the size of the city generated.
Block Size groups the grid cells into blocks n x n grid cells.
Street Width determines the spacing between blocks.
Floor Height is the (quantized) amount by which buildings are randomly displaced (downwards) to reduce their height.
Max Floor Reduction is the maximum number of floors by which a building's height may be reduced.
Density is the proportion of grid cells that will be occupied by a building.

Click here to download the script (which needs to be installed in ~/Library/Application Support/Cheetah3D/scripts/Particle) and an example document.

Pose Utilities

Pose Utilities.js (click here to download) is a tool script for Cheetah 3D (tested with 5.3b3). You can think of it as a companion to tg_jp's excellent Mirror Copy.js.

Pose Utilities provides several much-needed functions for animators working with Cheetah 3D.

This sample walk cycle was created from two poses and the flip function. (The clenched fists were done by clenching one fist, copying the pose at elbow level, then pasting it flipped onto the opposite elbow.)

Version 2: just added some "clipboard" functionality. This works across frames so long as the tool remains active for the entire time. Be careful, C3D is very flaky about updating state and recording keyframes—to be sure you've recorded stuff to the timeline explicitly click on the bone (or whatever) and then hit record.

Version 3: has extensive comments in the code to help anyone needing to further customize the script or just understand it.

Version 4: adds a new "flip" command, and renames several other commands to be less ambiguous

Zero Rotations: resets the rotations of all bones in the hierarchy to zero (very useful if you've lost your rest pose).
Swap Right and Left: copies right-side pose to left and vice versa (but skips stuff that's neither right nor left, such as props.)
Copy Right-to-Left: copies the right-side pose to the left.
Copy Left-to-Right: copies the left-side pose to the right.
Flip: flips the entire hierarchy (mirrors it through the ZY plane) regardless of name. (Very useful for animating tails or snakes, for example.)
Copy Pose: copies pose to tool's "clipboard".
Paste Pose: pastes pose from tool's "clipboard" (data is name-based, so if you have two skeletons with the same naming convention, you should be able to copy pose data from one to another).
Paste Pose Flipped: as above, but data are flipped from opposite side (so you can copy the pose of a left arm, select the right arm, and paste flipped.

Tutorials

Tutorials get their own page: Tutorials.

C3D Buddy v0.3

Update 10/6/09: Updated for Snow Leopard compatibility, and verified to still work with C3D 5.x beta.

Update 4/26/09: I've released a new version. It handles multiple selections now which makes it a lot more convenient for cleaning up bad renders, etc. Enjoy!

This is a simple utility for managing your rendered image cache. It shows you thumbnails of everything in the directory, and allows you to open, reveal, or trash the items via the toolbar or the obvious keystrokes (return to open and delete to move to trash).

Download C3D Render Buddy (3MB)

Materials 101

Watch Tutorial

10 Lighting Setups

Here's a quick collection of lighting setups, including four "product shots" that you might find useful if you're new to Cheetah 3D.

Download the Lighting Setups (419kB)

25 Free Textures

Some people have complained about a lack of "out of the box" textures for Cheetah 3d, so I thought I'd put together a set of 25 textures based on a set of texture photos I've made available for free elsewhere.

You should feel free to use these textures as you see fit, but please don't redistribute the textures on their own without my permission. In other words—feel free to render images with these textures, but do not distribute the textures themselves (either as textures or as part of another product) without my permission.

Download the textures v1.1 (7.24MB)

If you have the old texture archive, you can just download the JAS files.

Download the new presets v1.1 (863kB)

Tweaking the Presets

I ended up tweaking both the text model and the material presets for normal and image-based lighting (IBL). The former use specular highlights while the latter are almost entirely reflection-based.

This shows the specular gold test rendered with the new geometry.

This shows the IBL gold test rendered with the new geometry.

Improved Glass and Nicer Test Model

I've updated the main archive to the latest JAS files, and included version information in the test model. Glass has been improved significantly.

This shows the new glass for standard lighting.

This shows the new glass for image-based lighting.

Products

In Development

Useful