tS3.1 Features

NEW!!! KEYFRAME EDITOR.

The keyframe editor has been completely rewritten to meet the needs of the growing population using trueSpace for animation purposes. This new tool features:

- - A new MFC-based interface with toolbars and online help
- - Graphic display of the entire scene hierarchy, with expandable nodes for all objects/group objects
- - Graphic access to objects'animatable properties
- - Extended set of Keyframe manipulation functions: Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Repeat, Reverse, Stretch, Move,...
- - Multi-resolution time line with random access to keyframe
- - Graphic manipulation of scene objects

NEW!!! VERTEX ANIMATION
The following tools can now produce an animation of the object: Point editing, Sweep, Tip, Lathe, Macro, Sculptor. Result of all of them is a vertex level animation of one type, so the animation created by the Sculptor can be changed in Point-editing. However Sweep tools and Sculptor destroy key-frames of those vertices that are in the scope of their changes. When one of these tools is entered (and vertex animation is allowed - see below), and selected object has animated deformation on it, this is translated into vertex animation instead of just throwing out. So deform animation can be tuned on vertex level. Although no reverse step is possible. In Pedit parameter panel (RMB click on Pedit icons) contains a new check box "Anim". When checked, all above tools create key-frames on vertex level. To animate vertices just change the active frame and manipulate with tool controls.

NEW!!! DIRECTX 5 SUPPORT
has been implemented in this release. tS3.1 will be shipped with DirectX 5 official redistribution from Microsoft. Beyond this upgrade to version 5, there are two major changes:

1) rendering with "sprites" If a scene contains objects which take more time to render, the renderer switches to "sprite" mode. If an object is selected, the renderer draws all non-selected object to background and only the selected object is refreshed (the same as in WireFrame). The "switching" time depends on the 3D card. The faster the blitting operation of 3D card, the smaller the switching time.

2) caching of textures If a scene contains a lot of textures and the video memory is full, textures are cached to system memory. Cache memory is cleared if a new D3D window is created and video memory is low, or if window is resized.

Other changes:
- - The rate of rendering objects is slightly increased (especially when complicated objects are drawn.)
- - If it is possible, the background bitmap is stored to video memory.
- - Some changes have been made regarding the clipping of objects.

NEW!!! AREA RENDERING

is now available. The corresponding button is part of the Rendering group, along Render Object, Render To File, ... Just click and drag to select a rectangular area on the screen, and it renders immediately. No need to wait for an entire scene to render just to check one small detail !!

NEW!!! ANIMATION PREVIEW

was added (render popup) - the animation is executed and the preview is stored according to the type of active view (wireframe/3DR/D3D). The File preview.avi is generated in the working directory (support for playing of the avi files inside of trueSpace should be added in the next version) The Preview Settings panel contains controls for:
- Changing the name of the resulting preview AVI file.
- Selecting if all frames are rendered, or only a limited subset.
- Setting the step of the animation.
- Turning the grid ON or OFF.

IMPORTANT:
Preview only works correctly in Wireframe and D3D. 3DR does not support direct access to the rendered "surface", and can cause some problems such as placing overlapped windows in the preview animation.

NEW!!! CUBIC TEXTURE MAPPING
now allows to have a complete texture to be mapped on every face of the cube (select UV projection in material library popup)

NEW!!! WELD AND ERASE
added to Point-edit. Allows welding/deleting of selected vertices - useful to keep the polygon count of models low...

NEW!!! ARCHIVING OF SCENES
Added support for archiving of ts3 scenes. A new field was added to Scene sub-menu: "Archive". This creates a file listing all of the supporting files (textures, bump maps, environment maps) needed for this scene. It also stores all used materials files and the scene itself into a separate directory named by scene name. This is useful when transfering the scene to different machine...

OTHER CHANGES, FIXES, UPDATES, IMPROVEMENTS:

PHOTOSHOP Plugins are updated to version 3.0

Support for grid added to Spline drawing tool

Support for ESCaping during physics simulations was added (the actual time of simulation is recorded so that during the recording it is no longer necessary to set simulation time prior to actual simulation).

A bunch of fixes/improvements for the recorder:

- - Replay of tutorials is more descriptive now (try to run it)
- - The activated tool is highlited by cursor
- - The playback now waits for a while when a new tool is selected so that the user has a chance to see what is going to happen.
- - Wait time for replay of tutorials can be set from the interface
- - Movement and closing of small views is fully supported (editor of tutorials should be completed in the next version)
- - The recorder works properly with magnetic tool; even the face selection is shown during the playback...

Fix for 640x480 mode; the title bar is little smaller so that the help menu is available

Fixes for 3D sound
- - the location is saved as 0,0,0 because we keep the transformation prior to sound node
- - the loop parameter is stored properly
- - supportfor sound inVRML 2.0
- - only emitter audio objects are saved into trueSpace scn file (this prevents audio system to initialize itself when loading a scene)

Destroy hierarchy no longer kills cameras and lights glued into the hierarchical object.

An attempt to select an object via Project window when the Spline polygon tool is active no longer crashes tS.

International characters saved into VRML 1.0 files properly

Improved loading of texture files
- - if the texture was located manually ts3 no longer asks for this file
- - added ability to cancel the requests for manual locate of the missing files
- - missing texture files appears only once in the list of missing files