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3D-Design with CyberMotion

Wherever we look, we encounter virtual worlds. Whether in Hollywood or daily advertisements, the world that is presented to the viewer will be a mainly artificial creation. At last, you too can create these surreal worlds at home, practice inside or outside architecture, design products or promotional logos and films or build your own virtual worlds using the build in landscape designer and atmospheric background models. All the modules that you need to generate, model and manipulate, animate and represent the three-dimensional world are integral parts of the CyberMotion 3d-software. CyberMotion provides a high quality rendering output using raytracing and up-to-date global illumination algorithms like Ambient Occlusion and Photon Mapping. The possibilities to define object surfaces, light conditions and backgrounds are almost inexhaustible - visual libraries and fast preview windows in the main dialogs invite to experiment and play around with this vast functionality. Complex 3D animations can be set up very easily - you can animate all objects, camera and light settings, backgrounds, fire, water and even clouds and fog in the atmosphere. You can arrange objects in hierarchies to animate jointed models or robots and easily position joints with the help of Inverse Kinematics. And with the up to date Skin and Bones technology even character animation is available with CyberMotion. Call your own heros and monsters into being, CyberMotion gives you all the tools you need to do it.

User Interface

The graphical user interface allows you to design complex 3D scenes while working in multiple windows simultaneously. Just select an object and drag it with your mouse to move, scale, rotate or deform it in the corresponding work modes. Clearly arranged dialogs containing visual libraries make it easy to load prefabricated files and to modify them to your own needs. Big preview windows in the main dialogs provide a quick overview of the scene, so just play around and test everything. With the multiple Undo/Redo-functions almost everything can be undone or redone, respectively.

Program Help and Printable Manual

Along with CyberMotion 3D-Designer comes a rich illustrated context-sensitive help manual with lots of tutorials and examples. Context sensitive help can be obtained at any time pressing the F1-key.  Or just click onto one of the many help-icons to get direct help on a particular set of parameters. In addition, registered users can download a revised printable version of the help file on our download section (PDF document, about 450 pages).

Modeling 3D-Objects

Design your own objects, fast and easy with the built in modelling tools like:

  • Extrusion Editor with B-Spline-curves (a drawing in the editor is provided with a depth - e.g. for logos - with bevels, twisted or as a spiral object...)
  • Sweep Editor (a drawing is turned about a vertical axis to create a symmetrical rotary object such as a glass, torus, cone, cylinder...)
  • Subdivision Surfaces - is a real time process which transforms a low resolution object to a higher resolution model with organic curved shape
  • NURBS (a special type of deformable 3D surfaces and cylinders. By manipulating control points on the surface you can model very easily smooth and organic shapes.)
  • Boolean Operations (e.g. 'Box' minus 'Cylinder' results in a box with a hole)
  • 3D-Text (select any TrueTypeFont to create 3D-Text objects with or without bevels...)
  • Simple or analytical based primitives, such as boxes, spheres, ellipsoids, cylinders and so forth...)
  • 3D-Function Generator
  • Landscape Editor for complex terrain design

After creating an object you still can add further detail by adding or deleting points or faces, dragging out new segments from the objects surface with the mouse (Facet Extrude), deforming or detaching parts of it, and so on. The multiple UNDO-function makes it easy to test all kind of operations, since everything can be undone or repeated again.
Of course you can also import objects in common file formats like OBJ, 3DS, DXF or RAW. CyberMotion exports projects in it's own CMO-format and in OBJ, DirectX, VRML 2.0, 3DS, DXF or RAW-file formats
 

Landscape design

With the integrated landscape designer you can create special terrain objects. The landscape editor provides a preview window with a shaded plan view and many functions and filters (crater, terrace, etc.) for the basic generation and the editing of height fields. By means of special painting tools you can directly "draw" in the preview window to elevate or lower the ground or to smooth eroded slopes, for instance. But elaborate landscape objects are only one side of the coin. By applying special landscape textures the terrain will become its versatile appearance, from barren deserts to snowy mountains. And with help of particle systems you can populate deserted plains with plants in no time at all. Then simply load an atmosphere from the visual background library and start a first animation flight above your own private world.


Atmospheres

The background-dialog is another highlight of the CyberMotion software. With it you can put a simple color range or a picture in the background or rather generate a complex atmosphere with multi layered cloud formations, atmospheric and ground fog, rain or snow, rainbows and stars. All effects can be freely combined or switched off, just as you like. For instance, if you choose to add the starfield to a cloudy atmosphere, it will be automatically filtered by the clouds and the fog. Furthermore almost all parameters can be easily animated - wether moving clouds, flowing fog banks, rain or snowfall or even stars passing by, everything can be realized at the touch of a button.


Materials

Create your own surfaces in the powerful material editor or just load and adjust one out of the materials visual library. The material editor provides basic settings for the object's color, reflection, transparency, optical density, object glow and surface waves as well as an extensive choice of procedural textures. Procedural textures based on mathematical three dimensional structures can simulate simple patterns, for instance a checkerboard or brick structure, but also complex and intricate patterns to generate marble, wood, rock or even multi layered terrain textures. Then, of course, you can apply bitmaps to texture your object or to control particular object properties like reflection or trancparency. With help of height maps you can even control a deformation of an object, thus creating real elevated structures on the surface. Finally you can mix all types of materials, even bitmaps with procedural textures, and animate a smooth blending between different sets of materials.



Raytracing and Global Illumination

CyberMotion provides high dynamic range rendering and a fast raytracing engine to create photorealistic images and animations with real refraction, reflection and shadows. High dynamic range images are coded in a special floating point format that represents a much higher dynamic range than a human eye can recognize or an ordinary display device can reproduce. Each final HDR-rendering now represents all of the illumination coming from the three dimensional scene entering into a virtual camera lense. Now, this illumination data is the basis for some realtime tools with which you can control the exposure and compression of the high dynamic range data to the low dynamic range output of your monitor, or, you can apply some realtime light effects to produce light halos flooding from overbright picture regions over darker picture areas.
In addition to raytracing you can apply up-to-date global illumination shaders like ambient occlusion or photon mapping.  With photon mapping you can also simulate color bleeding, e.g., when a green wall casts greenish reflections on a neighbouring white wall. Even the light refracted and transmitted through transparent objects is traced in the photon mapping process - resulting in so called caustic light reflections, e.g, the light gathered in a focal point after transmission through a glass lense.
Furthermore CyberMotion supports image based lighting (IBL) - photographic panoramas in HDR-format not only provide the picture information used to rendern the background, but also carry the whole light information required to transfer the light atmosphere of the photograph into your virtual scene.
Other special effects can also be incorporated in the rendering, such as motion blur or depth-sharpness. You can save your piece of work then as a picture file (jpg, tga, bmp, png, pcx,tif) or as an AVI- video file.

Light

Apart from standard light sources such as parallel sunlight, point- or spotlights in CyberMotion almost every ordinary object can be converted to a real light source, for instance, to fit area-lights into wall panellings.  You can also use photographic HDR-panoramas that carry additional light information to illuminate the scene. In addition you can make use of the volumetric fire object. With the volumetric fire object almost all kinds of fire can be simulated, beginning with smooth burning candle flames up to vividly burning torches, explosions or a blazing nozzle flow of a jet engine. With additional Light-Mapping you can combine light sources with bitmaps used as light filters. This allows you to simulate the most complex shadows by fast bitmap operations - imagine the horizontal strips of a window screen, complex window frames, coloured shadows of tiffany lamps or windows and so on.

Animation

The integrated animation modul of CyberMotion offers a wide range of possibilities combined with an intuitive interface that will allow even beginners to master their first steps into animation films successfully. For instance, simple animations can be set up with a few mouse actions, moving or rotating objects on different time positions to their destinations, while the program automatically records the keypositions and interpolates the steps between these keyframes. Furthermore, almost all parameters can be animated, for instance the settings for lights, materials or the background, just by moving to the corresponding position in time and changing a parameter. With these simple parameter animations you can bring life to volumetric fires, running water, moving clouds and volumetric fog or add rain and snow to your animations. Then there are the possibilities for hierarchical object animation - child objects inherit movements from their parents and follow these movements automatically, while still retaining their freedom of movement, and therefore can still execute additional movements independent of their parent objects. Take for example a moving robot, that takes all his subordinated arms and joints along with its movement - while at the same time the joints still perform further rotations about their different joints, or gripping tongs open and close again. For the animation of the robot arms Inverse- or Forward Kinematics can be applied, a technique that allows you too pull at the joints of an object hierarchy in the same way, as if you would pull at the arms of a jointed doll. Hierarchical object animation is also the basis for the animation of characters (see below).

Character-Animation

Without skeletal deformation the production of modern animation films and especially the animation of characters would be impossible. The skin and bones technique uses a skeleton which is subordinated to a corresponding skin object enveloping the skeleton. Now, every time you move a bone of the skeleton, the particular part of the skin previously assigned to that bone will be deformed and move with the bone - the character awakes to life. What was usually left to awfully expensive animation studios before, you can do now as well at home with the CyberMotion 3D-Designer.

Particle systems

Particle systems are used in situations, where many objects have to be randomly distributed in the scenery or even moved at the same time. To create them one by one and then to animate each single object would be much to costly. With particle systems you can let CyberMotion create up to thousands of copies of an object and distribute them at random in the scene or animate them automatically by means of physical laws or just let them copy the reference object movements. The pictures on the right show some exmaples for the application of particle systems. At the top you see a set of islands populated with dense vegetation. The plants were dropped onto the terrain with help of a particle system using only a few reference objects for the generation of thousands of copies, each copy slightly rotated and resized by the particle generator so that the vegetation appears richly diversified. The picture in the middel shows exhaustion smoke created by a particle system that constantly emits billboard projections of a smoke image. The bottom picture demonstrates a particle generated swarm of meteors.

 
 

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