Here comes a short summary followed by a more detailed specification of all new functions and expansions to the new version of CyberMotion 3D-Designer 11.0 program. Use the help manual, chapter "What's new in version 11.0", for a quick and easy guide to all changed and new topics. The elimination of minor errors and repairs are not mentioned here. For demo pictures and animations demonstrating the new capabilities visit the gallery.

Please Note: CyberMotion 3D-Designer v. 11.0 will read all the files of older versions, but projects saved in version 11.0 cannot be used in previous versions.

New features in version 11.0:

Viewports

  • The freely movable and possibly overlapping viewport windows have been replaced by a new viewport management which arranges all viewports automatically, so that they fit best into the main work area. Each viewport provides now his own menu bars for "View"- and "Display"-settings. About 11 different viewport settings can be automatically arranged by selecting one of the "View - Viewport Arrangement"-entries in the menu bar. If you resize a viewport then all adjacent viewports will be resized accordingly. Instead of the Minimize/Restore button in the viewport caption bar you can also press now the F11 function key to maximize or restore a viewport window again.
  • Objects provided with uv-mapped bitmap textures are drawn now with textures in the viewport windows. Use the menu entry "Display - Texture (uv-Maps)" to activate this display mode. In viewports only the basic material layer (if applied) and the upmost uv-texture is applied, including color masking or alpha mapping.
  • Operate the "V" key to center the viewport immediately above the current selection.
  • Camera movement in the camera viewport - Press both mouse keys, left and right, to move the camera on a circular curve around a selection, even if another movement direction is adjusted for the camera movement in the camera menu.

Object Selection

  • Object Selection - The Select Objects dialog has been integrated now into the working area of the main window. All functions (and more) previously available in the Select Objects dialog are now accessible via the popup selection called up by a right mouse click in a viewport or in the new object selection area.
  • Selection Logic - The shortcuts for selecting objects have been standardized, that is, the mouse and key combinations to select individual or several objects at a time are the same now for the viewports and the object selection windows. So, a left mouse click marks an object (plus <Ctrl> key for selecting additional objects) and a left mouse click plus <Shift> key unmarks the object or the whole hierarchy again.
    • The same logic applies for multiple selections by dragging a frame around several objects (viewport and object selection window). Holding the <Ctrl> key pressed while dragging the frame will add the objects under the frame to the currently marked object group, using the <Shift> key instead will remove objects from the marked object group.
    • Switching Objects On and Off - A left mouse click together with the <Shift> key first unmarks an object. But if the object (group) is already unmarked then with the same shortcut the object will be switched off. To switch objects on again it needs only another simple mouse click. If you drag a frame to select several objects at a time, first all objects already switched on are marked for working. In the second run, if all objects under the frame are already marked, those objects still switched of are switched on again. Just try it, it is easier to do it than it reads.
    • Group Selection - For clarity it is advisable to group objects belonging together under a Group object. This can be done now automatically using the "Group Selection" function from the popup selection. Choosing this function will group all currently marked objects in a hierarchy under a newly generated Group object.
    • Additional Shortcuts - With a double click onto the object icon in front of the object names in the main object selection window you can call up the corresponding object dialog. For instance, clicking on the light icon in front of a light object's name will call up the light dialog. In addition the corresponding object will be preselected in the dialogs light selection list. You can click also on the icons of background objects (background dialog opens), standard object icons (properties dialog) or on material icons behind the object's names (material dialog opens).

Manage Point- and Facet Selections

  • Freeze Selections - Point- or facet selections of an object can be saved now via the "Freeze Selection" function of the popup selection. After assigning a name to the selection it will be listed in the object selection window under its corresponding object. Up to 31 individual selections can be allocated to an object. Then, when working in point or facet work mode, with a simple click on the selection name in the object selection window the corresponding frozen selection will be restored again. Again the usual selection logic is applied, i.e., if you hold the <Ctrl> key pressed simultaneously when clicking on a selection name, then all points of the selection will be marked in addition to the points that have been previously marked in the viewports. Holding the <Shift> key pressed will unmark all points and facets of the frozen selection from the points and facets already marked in the viewport window.
    • If you want to overwrite an existing selection with a new selection you can use the function "Replace Point/Facet Selection" of the popup selection. All selections of the currently marked reference object are listed and you can choose the selection you want to replace.
    • NURBS - Patch Selection - Different from previous versions you can select now individual patches of NURBS objects. You can't select individual points or facets of the surface since with resolution change they will change also, but - in facet work mode - you can select whole patches lying between 4 control points. These selections can also be frozen, for instance, to allocate different materials to them.
    • Frozen selections are useful to quickly restore previously made selections for a faster work flow when modelling an object. You can also use frozen selections to preserve a point selection for a later allocation to bones. The points allocated to bones are not saved in frozen selections but in a separate area together with the bones. This means if you allocate a frozen selection to a bone and later change the frozen selection this will not change the point selection allocated to the bones. But with frozen selections it is very easy to allocate updated selections to bones. You just need to go into the bones work mode and select the corresponding bone and change to "Allocate Skin Points" work mode. Then a simple click on the frozen selection's name will allocate the new point list to the bone. The main advantage: Frozen point selections are processed and extended automatically, for example, when refining an area of a skin object with a triangulation function. If the triangulated surface is part of a frozen selection then this frozen selection will be extended automatically with the newly generated points, so that you can reallocate this extended selection easily to the corresponding bone instead of having to allocate the new points manually.
  • Allocating Individual Materials to Facet Selections - Frozen facet selections can be textured with individual materials. In the material editor you can decide if you want to allocate one or more mixable materials - each with its own texture axes - to the object or to a frozen facet selection.
  • Note: Selections will preserve their materials even in an boolean operation. If, for instance, you use a cylinder "B" in a boolean operation to cut out a hole in a cube "A", then usually the inner walls of the cylindric hole adopts the material of the cube "A". But, if you would have frozen the sidewalls of the cylinder to a face selection and allocated an individual material to it, then after the boolean operation the frozen selection together with its materials will have been transferred to the cube. In the result you will have cut a colored hole into the cube.

Deleting Objects, Point- or Facet Selections or Materials

  • There is an easy and simple logic now in deleting different types of objects or selections. To delete marked points or facets you do not need to change in the "Edit Objects" work mode anymore. In every work mode it is sufficient now to press the "Delete" key of your keyboard.
    - If a frozen selection is marked in the object selection window then first this frozen selection will be deleted from the selection list (points and facets of the selection remain marked), if you press the "Delete" key a second time then the marked points and facets will be removed from the object and finally, if you press the "Delete" key a third time, the whole object will be deleted.
    - You can also remove materials from objects by pressing the "Delete key", if you have previously marked the material with a mouse click on the material's icon in the object selection window.

Material

  • New Material Management - The material management of the new version has completely changed. In previous versions materials were always part of the objects data structure. To reuse a material for several objects you could reference to the material of other objects or load the same material from the material library into the object, but you couldn't change the material for all objects at a time just by changing the material itself. With the new version the whole concept is different. All materials are managed separately from the objects and are allocated with a material reference to objects or frozen facet selections. This makes it very easy to change the appearance of all objects using a particular material at the same time, just by changing this particular material. In the material editor you can switch now between the thumbnail lists of the material library and the thumbnail list of all materials used and loaded into the current project.
    • Every time you allocate a material to an object an individual texture axes system is created for the corresponding object, which you can move, scale or rotate using the already known functions for texture manipulation.
    • Referencing to the materials (and texture axes system) of another object is still possible. This way separate overlapping objects can still have the appearance as if they were made of a piece. Or you can use this function to copy a complete material list of several mixed materials from one object to another.
    • All materials allocated to an object or selection will be listed as miniature thumbnail icons behind the objects name in the object selection window. In the material editor you can click onto these icons to select the corresponding material for editing. If an object's material icon is selected, you can use the "Delete" key on your keyboard to remove the material from the object again. But attention - If no object's material icon is marked then the currently selected material in the project's thumbnail window will be deleted and with it all material references from objects to it.

Bitmap Textures - Management

  • With older versions of CyberMotion up to 12 different bitmaps - all with their own axes systems - could be integrated into one single material. From now on only one bitmap plus corresponding effect maps (bumpmap, reflection map, transparency map and alpha map) can be managed in a single material. All maps of this material will be aligned using a single texture axes system created for that material when allocating it to an object or selection. (Texture axes belong always to the object or selection the material is allocated to, so that each material can be aligned separately on different objects).
  • Bitmap textures and volumetric procedural textures are now separated from each other in their own materials. You can't combine anymore a procedural texture and a bitmap in one single material. Instead, if you create a new material, you have to decide first if you want to create a procedural texture or a bitmap material.

Mixing Materials

  • Now you can assign multiple materials of any type to an object or to a frozen selection and mix them together using a simple blending function. Up to 16 different materials (plus effect maps) can now be allocated to an object or to one of the 31 possible frozen facet selections of an object, summarizing up to 512 possible materials managed in a single object. If, for example, you want to place several different bitmap labels on an object you just have to create the corresponding number of bitmap materials and allocate them one after the other to the object.
    As with previous versions the first material assigned to an object builds the basic material layer. All following materials will cover the previous material layer. To adjust the blending with underlying materials you can click onto a material icon of an object's material list. If an icon is marked a blending slider will be activated which is located beneath the object selection window of the material editor. Use the slider for a continuous blending from the selected material to the material layers lying under it. Switch to "Object" or "Camera, complete scene" preview mode to see the mixed materials on the currently selected object in the preview window. If only a primitive preview object is selected (therefore without material list) only the material currently selected in the material browser will be visible in the preview window.

uv-Mapping

  • uv-Mapping offers a very common and easy to operate method to map a picture onto an object. Creating a uv-map for an object is done by projecting and rendering the grid structure of an object directly into a bitmap, which can be used as a template where you can paint in the details of a bitmap texture. For instance, if you create a uv-map for a cylindrical object with a cylindrical projection mode, then a bitmap is rendered in which you find the side walls of the cylinder neatly unrolled to a stripe and the caps of the cylinder separated in a top- and bottom view above and beneath the stripe. Simultaneously, when generating the uv-map, a pair of "uv"-coordinates pointing into the uv-map is assigned to each point of each facet of the object. These picture coordinates are always saved as relative coordinates between 0 and 1, so that they are independent of the picture resolution (which means you can resize the picture of the uv-map any time, the uv-coordinates will still fit to the dimensions of the picture).
  • After the uv-map has been generated and saved as an ordinary bitmap from the render window menu, you can load it into common image editors and paint in the details or copy pictures into the bitmap.
  • Another example: With uv-Mapping you can texture all 6 sides of a cube simultaneously applying only a single bitmap. You just need to render a uv-map for the cube with cube projection. The final bitmap will show the grid structure of the cube neatly unfolded to the 6 side views. Now you can easily copy your pictures into the uv-map and use it as a texture map for a new bitmap material.
  • You can generate uv-coordinates for the whole object and also additional uv-coordinates for each frozen facet selection that provides it's own materials.
  • To be able to generate uv-coordinates for an object or selection, you should first allocate a bitmap material to it with uv-Mapping set as projection mode. To generate uv-coordinates you need at least a texture axes system that can be used for the projection direction. For instance, if you apply cylindrical projection then the grid structure of an object will be "unrolled" about the y-texture axis. Such a texture axes system is always generated for an object when you allocate a new material to it. Nevertheless, If no material has been allocated to the object, you still can render a uv-map. In this case the body axes system of the object will be used for calculating the uv-coordinates.
  • uv-mapped textures will deform with their objects in an animation. This feature is emphasized in most animation programs, but nothing special in CyberMotion, since even the procedural volumetric textures will deform properly with the object's deformation in an animation. But, in contrast to other texture types, once you have provided an object with a uv-map you can even deform it in modelling mode - since the object points will preserve their uv-coordinates the uv-map will always follow all scaling or deformation operations.
  • NURBS - Adequate uv-coordinates for NURBS-patches are generated automatically on creation of the NURBS-object. You can render and save uv-maps for NURBS-patches straight away in the Move, Scale or Rotate Texture menus.
  • You can't apply uv-maps on analytical objects yet (they don't posses individual points or facets when rendered).
  • Objects provided with uv-mapped bitmap textures are drawn now with textures in the viewport windows. Use the menu entry "Display - Texture (uv-Maps)" to activate this display mode. In viewports only the basic material layer (if applied) and the upmost uv-texture is applied, including color masking or alpha mapping.

Bitmap Textures - More Extensions

  • If an alpha map is activated for a bitmap material then the alpha values of the map always overwrite the general blending parameter with which the material is mixed with underlying materials.
  • In the new version the alpha map not only controls the blending of the bitmap texture with the underlying material layers, but also the visibility of all additional effect maps belonging to this bitmap material (bumpmap, reflection map, transparency map). Even, if no bitmap texture is switched on you can still use the alpha map of a material definition to blend in the bumpmaps, reflection maps or transparency maps. That's in contrast to the color mask, which only works when a bitmap texture is switched on, but then again, it masks out the applicable area for the bitmap texture and the effect maps.
  • Color masking produces now soft transitions for colors within the specified color tolerance.
  • With reflection maps now the specular reflectivity as well as the specular color is controlled. Therefore, reflection maps will make use now of the color information of a picture, whereas colored bumpmaps, alpha maps and transparency maps will be converted into gray scale images when loading them into the memory, because here only the intensity values are of importance.
  • Now that bitmaps are managed separately form procedural textures, they have their own basic settings for transparency and reflections, which can be overwritten by reflection- and transparency maps.
  • The possible selections to decide wether a bitmap is projected inside or outside of a surface has been extended and replaced by a variety of icons. For instance, if you want to map a bitmap to a cylinder with a hole, now you can choose to map the texture only onto the outer wall of the cylinder, or on the inner wall of the cylinder hole, or even only inside the walls of the hollow cylinder.

Using Bitmaps to Mask and Cut Out Surface Areas

  • If a totally transparent material (color white) without reflection and no refraction (refraction = 1) is applied as the basic material of an object and you add an additional bitmap material, then this bitmap serves as a mask for the object, this is, the object becomes totally invisible at all places where it is not covered by a color of the bitmap material. You may say that you did not expect to see anything, since the basic material is totally transparent. But the important difference is that only a masking operation is applied to the object, no additional recursive search rays have to be traced as for colored refractive transparent objects or reflective surfaces. Instead the surface of the masked areas of an object will be simply ignored as if it were not existent. This effect can be useful in a variety of situations, for instance, you can project people or trees on transparent panels (billboards), or you can even use this masking technique to shape objects. A steel framework could possibly consist from only a simple block where the frame holes are cut out by a surrounding uv-bitmap with an appropriate color masking.

Animating Materials

  • The previous version of CyberMotion supported material animation by a simple interpolation of the parameters but you could not blend from one texture pattern into other texture patterns or from a bitmap material into a procedural texture.
    The new version will abolish these restrictions. From now on you can blend any kind of material into other materials, from glass to wood, from wood to stone or just to slowly fade in a bitmap label on top of the other materials. Furthermore, generating these effects is a very easy process. You just have to allocate all materials to an object you want to include in the animation. Then, on different keypositions, just go into the material editor and switch on those materials that you want to appear on the object's surface at that point in time and on the contrary switch off all remaining materials you don't want to include at that time position. If you render now the animation a smooth transition will be calculated from one set of mixed materials to the set of mixed materials valid for the next key position.
    Example: A wood material is allocated to a sphere object. We want the wood texture to change in 50 steps further on the timeline to a reflective chrome texture. Therefore, in the material editor we allocate an additional chrome material to the sphere object. This chrome texture is not to show up in the beginning, therefore we select the material icon next to the object name of the sphere and just switch it off via the on-off switch located beneath the object selection window, directly in front of the blending slider. Now only the wood texture is painted in this keyframe. We move now forward in time to frameposition 50. In the material editor we switch off now the wood texture and switch on the chrome texture instead. That's all. If you play now the animation you can see how a smooth transition is animated from the wood texture to the reflective chrome texture. You can do the same with any combination of mixed materials. For instance, you can blend a set of 3 mixed materials over into any other combination of mixed materials or just into a single material.
  • Removing Materials from Objects - In the object selection window (in the main window as well as in the material editor's) you can recognize allocated materials by small thumbnails listed in a row behind the name of the corresponding object. To remove a material from an object simply click on the relevant icon and press the "Delete" key of your keyboard.

Converting Projects

  • CyberMotion will automatically read older material data from the object's material definition and convert it to a list of separate materials to which the objects reference to. Problems should arise only if the old material definition holds several bitmaps together with masked reflection- and transparency maps combined in one material (because of the different interpretation of color masking and alpha maps in the new version, see above). In this rare case you have to adjust the material manually.
  • Material animations will not be converted from older projects to the new system because of the totally changed concept in the new animation process.

More Details in Landscape Textures

  • For procedural textures as well as for the landscape texture layers the normal distortion controlling the bumpiness of a surface can be rendered now with more details. This effect is controlled via an iteration slider which adds more details of different frequencies with each additional iteration step. The quality of landscape textures can increase considerably, especially when zooming in on a surface. But don't forget, normal distortion only changes the normal vector standing on a surface, not the shape of the object itself, so light incidence is still important to achieve the best results from this effect.
  • Additive Normal Distortion - For landscape texture layers the normal distortion can be applied now additive (optional), so that texture layers do not smooth the normal distortion of underlying layers but rather add additional detail.
  • Shiny Snow-Layer - If you switch on this button for a landscape texture layer, then this layer will be rendered with additional shininess, especially useful for snowy texture layers.
  • Material Preview - An additional primitive object suited for landscape textures has been added to the primitives list for the preview window.
  • Transparency - When tracing transparent objects, previous versions of CyberMotion always calculated immediately the exit point of solid objects without searching for surfaces within the solid object. To make other objects visible within transparent objects you had to activate the "Render All Facets" object property first. With it the interpretation of an object changed from a solid to a hollow object with correct tracing of overlapping surfaces within the transparent object. In the new version you do not need to make this differentiation any more. All transparent objects will be properly traced now.

Import and Export of Foreign Formats

  • Particularly the 3DS import has been revised and improved. Because of the support of multiple selections and uv-mapping now fully textured 3DS files in much higher quality can be imported. Since this format is so widely-used for file exchanging you have access now to the most non-commercial as well as commercial 3D-libraries in the world.
  • uv-mapping is exported now also correctly to 3DS, VRML and DirectX-files.

Object Properties

  • The Object Properties dialog has been extended. Properties formerly located in the Material dialog, which do not describe directly a material but rather a particular object property, were transferred to the Object Properties dialog. These are mainly render properties like <interpolation angle>, <no shadow>, <render all facets> and so on. A new icon to call up the dialog has been inserted in the main button bar next to the material icon. For a faster change from object to object an additional object selection window has been integrated in the Object Properties dialog. The object properties are sorted on 3 different pages - the render page with all parameters previously placed in the material dialog, then the kinematic page with the kinematic parameters and finally the VRML page with the parameters concerning the VRML-export.

Particle Systems

  • The random position offsets for particle generation can now optionally be interpreted as radii, so that particle clouds form an elliptical or spherical shape.
  • To be able to position particles on an uneven ground you can use now the "Drop to Ground"-function. With it, all particles generated from a particle reference object will be dropped onto the surface of objects for which the object property "Particle Ground" has been switched on. You can even specify a slope and a height range, so that particles will be placed only in specific regions on the ground object. This function is especially useful for distributing plant particles like grass bushes or simple trees on a terrain.
  • Rendering of great amounts of particles has been accelerated up to 500%, depending of the complexity of the created particle objects.

and...

  • Data Recovery - Interrupted working session (for instance by a black out or a system crash) will be recognized on next start of CyberMotion and can be recovered from the temporary undo files created during the previous session. This way you can even recover partly rendered animations via the "Show last animation" function of the render window. If the animation file can be restored simply save it and render the remaining part of the animation using the start- and end frame parameters.
  • Path Curve Interpolation - The option to switch on or off the curve interpolation of movement paths has been removed from the animation dialog. Instead a slider has been implemented in the "Move Object" working menu. This way you can adjust the amount of curve interpolation directly while working on objects, without having to change every time to the animation dialog.
  • Shadow feeler - Using random shadow feelers results in very noisy pictures, therefore CyberMotion used a shadow matrix to scan a light circle in previous versions. For a small penumbra this was quite satisfying but for greater transitions from deep shadow to the unshaded area a clearly discernable shadow pattern was calculated. Now a combination of both systems is applied, which results in much less noise without the disturbing shadow pattern.
    • Area Lights - A maximum of 500 (formerly 200) shadow feelers is picked from an area light. Furthermore, now you can also reduce the number of shadow feelers picked from an area light.
  • Boolean Operations - Much faster then in previous versions.
  • Compact file format - The restructured file format saves 10% to 70% memory on hard disk in dependence on the number of objects used in the project.