TrueSpace 6.5: Caligari adds nonlinear animation.

TrueSpace has been around for a number of years. Caligari has remained in the market by offering a nicely featured package that provides basic modeling, texturing, and animation at an affordable price. Version 6.5 adds to the feature set with improved modeling, painting, and animation tools.

The software still features Caligari's unique interface. The title bar of the main window is at the bottom, and the main perspective window is surrounded by a number of graphic glyphs and icons. The icons have multiplied over the years, and it takes a while to get used to where everything is located.

Modeling has been improved to include selective subdivision surfaces, allowing you to subdivide parts of a model to add detail only where it's needed. In addition to polygonal and subdivision surfaces, trueSpace also supports NURBS modeling. The software has a full complement of tools, including sweeps, rails, lofts, skinning, and cross-sections.

Since my last review (Version 5), Caligari has added projections and trim curves. Projections allow you to "glue" a curve to a NURBS surface. This curve can then be extruded to create branching objects, such as an arm or a leg on a character. Trims use a projected curve to "trim" out a NURBS surface and create user-defined holes in the surface. TrueSpace also provides a nice stitching tool that blends two surfaces together. I really liked the NURBS tools, and the product's features approach those of any high-end package.

Texturing these surfaces has been made a lot easier through the new UV editor, which gives you precise control when applying a texture to a polygon or group of polygons. The unwrap tool projects the surface of a mesh onto a plane, providing another way to position and manipulate textures.

Caligari has had a 3D paint module for quite a while, but it has been upgraded in this version. You can now paint on textured surfaces using arbitrary bitmaps as a brush. Version 6.5 has also added object paint to its repertoire, which allows you to paint actual geometry over the surface of another object. Objects can be oriented to the scene or to the normals of the object being painted.

The big new animation feature is a nonlinear editor, which allows you to manage animation as a series of clips. The module integrates well with the Scene Editor, allowing for traditional keyframing and nonlinear animation within one window. Clips can contain animation for a ...