Thread: Art Of Illusion

Available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix, the open source Art of Illusion falls between Blender and Anim8tor in complexity. Surprisingly, it is written in Java, and is available free of charge under the General Public License. There is extensive documen¬tation available on the Web site, that can also be downloaded, but unfortunately this is not in a straightforward PDF format, but as a large j umble of HTML files. This makes it difficult to search through, and also diffi¬cult to find your way around, until you find the contents page and realise that it is the main navigation point. Also available are good step-by-step tutori¬als, which can also be downloaded. These are again collections of HTML files, but highlight the key areas quite successfully: basic model¬ling, working with meshes, Boolean opera¬tions, procedural textures, and so forth.

This software enables the usual mesh¬based modelling, with cube, sphere and cylin¬der primitives. Not an impressive list for such otherwise sophisticated software, but it also includes useful editing techniques, spline¬based meshes and Boolean functionality; no NURBS, however. Another interesting model¬ling technique that is provided is that of the skin. Here, you define a series of curves or other shapes - rather like a skeletal structure - and the software creates a triangle map skin that fits around these.

Interestingly, the software opens up a second window when you want to go in and edit a model at the vertex and triangle level. When you start the program, it opens up a standard set of four modelling windows. These can be set easily as views from the right, left, front, and so on, and when you want to switch to a single view for closer work, there is a simple hotkey that toggles between the two views. This seems even easier than the MAX icon method, even to this nearly two decade 3D Studio veteran. Some thought seems to have gone into the general usability of this product.



Art of Illusion supports the usual texture maps, including reflection, transparency and bump mapping. It also uses procedural mapping, including 3D procedures, in which objects are affected perpendicularly to the surface. In the simplest terms, this can be considered to provide more sophisticated techniques along the lines of bump mapping - but much more powerful.

It also supports advanced lighting tech¬niques: ray tracing and global ill'umination. Strictly speaking, global illumination is usually considered to be a generic term for all such methods such as ray tracing and radios¬ity, but in this context, the authors are refer¬ing to a technique similar to radiosity. Unfortunately, you can only import files from Wavefront - so you will need Anim8tor to convert your 3D Studio files in order to import them, just as we have done with the illustrations used here.

We have included here three typical exam¬ples worthy of attention, across the range of functionality, but there are other free tools available on the internet, and it is worth searching to see what else might suit your purposes - OpenFX, for example, is certainly worth a look