- deals with polygons, bezier curves, bezier surfaces and spheres.
- real-time manipulation of bezier surfaces and sphere of unique easiness, with full control over the U and V parameters for shading.
- real-time operations with all the tools, no preview!
- powerful graphic engine supporting wire-frame (uniform and shaded), uniform fill, Gouraud and Phong shading, texture mapping and true transparency, also mixed together (ie. a Gouraud shaded transparent and textured polygon) and a true colour mode (that deals with several light sources and materials) for a fast high quality rendering.
- scene editor is not separated from object editor, thanks to the working speed of TopModel: you can always see what you’re doing!
- a unique easiness of use allowing a full control over operations.
- a powerful navigating tool.
- object points and control points of surfaces always editable, also on the whole scene: you can work on complete objects and with parts on them at the same times!
- classic tools to move, rotate, magnify, copy, delete, group and un-group objects.
- up to 16 paths, each composed by up to 10 bezier-curves used in copy, extrusion or deformation tool.
- copy tool, working via steps (in rotation and in movement) or along a multi-bezier path (with or without rotation).
- powerful and professional sweep tool (with control over altitude, envelope on current plane and envelope on current axis).
- powerful and professional extrusion tool on a multi-bezier path (with control over altitude, envelope and bevelling).
- deformation tool (with control over torsion, envelope on the current plane and altitude).
- magnetic tool with control parameters.
- symmetry tool useful during many drag operations.
- two real-time lattice deformations using:
a bounding-box cube (tri-linear deformation tool: ie. the perspective tool in ArtWork working in 3D);
a bezier-volume (bezier’s volume distortion with a powerful control on objects, allowing also a non-linear internal expansion; similar to the moulding tool in Artwork working in 3D)
- texture mapping (one texture/objects, on a plane, on a cylinder or on a sphere) with or without mask.
- bitmap textures up to 32bpp in all the formats recognised by !ChangeFSI. References of used textures in the saved file.
- sub-divison tool, to split objects in smaller units.
- space out, align and pack objects tool for better control.
- join and split points tool to create nets of objects (and to reduce the number of points).
- possibility to set (and recall) up to 64 named views.
- up to 2048 named groups.
- up to 1024 light sources of any type and colour plus a front light and an ambiental light.
- object-oriented management of materials and colours with industry-standard presets.
- real-time grid visible in axonometric or perspective mode, rotating with viewpoint.
- support for Illusionist, Render Bender II, Fems, Amiga GEO, DXF, 3DStudio, PovRay, Imagine, Sculpt3D, Envisage, VRML and LightWave file formats thought external filters.
- support for camera animations;
- import sprite-files. TopModel will create one polygon for each pixel in the source image.
- support for landscape models from altitude maps.
- import draw-files as paths, (saved paths containing also bezier curves or linearized paths).
- an easy to read and modify ascii file format plus a binary one to speed up load operations.
- sets of external tools to create particular objects (shells, mathematic functions and so on...).
- several library objects internal to the modeller to add whenever you want.
- highly optimized hand-written ARM code for speed!
- 24bpp high quality output: TopModel uses 96 bits per pixel that are translated into a 24bpp dithered output.
- multitask! works on any RISC-OS 3.xx system with at least 2MB RAM (4Mb strongly recommended).
