A powerful 3D modelling, rendering and animation solution for Apple Mac OS X.

Features:

General

- Written from the ground-up in Cocoa!
- Universal Binary application
- Highly intuitive, thoroughly Macintosh-like user interface
- OpenGL preview
- Quad 3D view
- Customisable UI layout
- Almost all parameters can be animated
- Polygons can have any number of edges (ngons)
- Full set of object, polygon and point selection tools
- Full transformation hierarchy
- Additional features can be assigned to objects using tags
- Intuitive editors for objects, materials and properties
- Up to 16 different materials per mesh
- A Fully integrated, multi-threaded renderer
- Drag and drop materials onto your polygon selections
- Link external 3D files into the scene
- Multi object selection
- Character animation tools
- Snapping
- Customisable hot keys
- Customisable mouse controls
- Customisable toolbar



Scene Objects

- Cameras
- Point Lights
- Area Lights
- Distant Lights
- Spot Lights
- Folders
- Smart Folders
- Joint



Modifier Objects

- Array
- Bulge
- Build
- Displace
- Ring
- Shear
- Spherify
- Subdivide (Catmull-Clark, Stam-Loop, Linear)
- Symmetry
- Taper
- Transform
- Twist
- Warp



Parametric Polygon Objects

- Polygon object (ngon support)
- Cube
- Ball
- Cone
- Disc
- Plane
- Polyhedra ( [truncated] Tetra-, Octa-, Dedeca- and Icosahedra)
- Cylinder
- Torus
- Tube
- Stair
- Relief (height field)



Parametric Spline Objects

- Spline Curve (linear, Bezier curve, Bezier spline, NURBS)
- Circle
- Rect
- Star
- Cog
- Flower
- n-Edge
- Helix
- Text (through any installed True Type Font)



Creator Objects

- Lathe
- Sweep
- Extrude (great for 3D-Fonts)
- Polyplane
- Symmetry
- Chain (create chains with just a few mouse clicks)
- Boolean operations
- A union B
- A substract B
- A intersect B
- A outside B
- A inside B



Tags

- HDRI tag
- Radiosity tag
- Render tag
- Mode tag
- Spline Tracking tag
- Target tag
- UV tag
- Skeleton tag
- Morph tag
- IK Angle Constraint tag
- IK Point Constraint tag



Scripting

- Uses the Javascript language — leverage your existing knowledge of JavaScript to automate Cheetah3D!
- Uses the rock solid SpiderMonkey Javascript engine from the Mozilla project
- generate your own objects
- write custom file loaders and exporters
- write your own tools
- automate repetitive tasks



Animation Tools

- Key Frame Animation
- Auto-Keying
- Fly Through Animations along splines
- Almost every object, tag or material property can be animated!
- Powerful time line
- F-Curve editor
- Key editor
- Various key interpolation types
- Linear
- Smooth
- Bezier spline
- Flat
- Forward kinematics (FK)
- Inverse kinematics (IK)
- Constraints (Angel/Point)
- Pose Manager
- Take Manager
- OpenGL animation preview



Spline Tools

- Create spline
- Insert point
- Soft interpolation
- Hard interpolation
- Equal tangent direction
- Equal tangent length
- Join segments
- Break segment
- Reverse sequence
- Mirror
- Set value
- Quantize
- Burn transform
- Import child



Full Set of Polygon Tools

- Polygon, edge and point mode
- Set and Reset crease
- Create polygon
- Fill hole
- Bridge
- Insert point
- Magnet
- Extrude
- Inner extrude (point/edge/polygon)
- Shell
- Jigsaw
- Scalpel
- Ring cut
- Weld
- Move, Scale and Rotate points, edges and polygons
- Move, Scale and Rotate along normal
- Rotate edge
- Collapse polygon
- Flip normals
- Triangulate polygons
- Array
- Split
- Clone
- Mirror
- Separate
- Crumple
- Set value
- Quantize
- Burn transform
- Import child
- Point slide
- Cover
- Catmull- Clark Subdivide (partial or full mesh; with creases)
- Linear Subdivide (partial or full mesh)



UV Tools

- Powerful UV Editor
- Various selection types
- Move, Scale and Rotate
- Save UV Mesh to PDF
- LSCM UV Unwrapping
- Autoseam
- Different mapping types
- spheric
- cubic
- cylindric
- flat
- frontal



Texture Painting

- Live OpenGL preview of painting
- Brush
- Rubber
- Fill
- Rect
- Circle
- Line
- Various brush types
- Supports solid and texture colours
- Support for pressure sensitive graphic tablets
- Paint displacement and relief maps with live 3D preview



Character Animation

- Live OpenGL preview of skinned meshes
- Joint tool
- Vertex weight painting



Renderer

- Fully integrated ray-tracer
- Multi-threaded to support quad processor Macs
- HDRI backgrounds (probe, cross and panorama format)
- ambient occlusion for fast image based lightning (IBL)
- radiosity for indirect diffuse illumination
- caustics
- adaptive antialiasing up to 128x
- anisotropic EWA texture filtering
- environment mapping
- bump mapping
- fog
- blurred reflections
- ray traced depth of field
- ray traced shadows
- coloured shadows
- exact soft shadows via area
- ray traced refraction (with fresnel term)
- ray traced reflection
- panorama projection
- shaders via plug-ins
- marble shader
- wood shader
- velvet shader
- membrane shader
- etc.



File Formats

- 3D import: .3ds, .dxf (quite limited yet), .fbx, .lwo, .obj, .sia, .stl (binary and ASCII), .jas (binary and ASCII)
- 3D export: .3ds, .3dmf, .dxf, .fbx, .h (C header files), .obj, .mtl, .sia, .stl (binary and ASCII), .jas (binary and ASCII)
- 2D import/export: many common file formats (.jpg, .tiff, .png, .exr etc.), import SVG path data, import PDF path data, export to .hdr, export to .epx, export to the Mac OS X icon file format (.icns)
- Movie export: all QuickTime supported codecs
- Other: Copy & paste paths from EazyDraw to Cheetah3D, Copy & paste paths from Intaglio to Cheetah3D