Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio program for creating high quality, photorealistic still images and animations (either in .mov format or as a sequence of still frames which can be joined together using other software to make movie files). Images are produced by rendering scene files.

These scene files need to contain some 3-D objects, at least one light so that the objects can be seen and at least one camera, the view from which provides the image.

Complex scenes may contain many hundreds of objects and several lights. Files built for animation may have several cameras between which the view is cut to make for an interesting animation sequence.

3-D objects come in 4 basic flavours: Primitives, triangle meshes, spline meshes, and tubes, all of which are described in detail later in this manual.

Art of Illusion has highly flexible, but easy to use, editors for textures (surface properties such as colour, bumpiness, shininess, transparency etc.) and materials (inner properties for simulating glass, smoke etc.)

Animation of objects within the scene is achieved with a keyframing system including support for skeletons using forward and inverse kinematic animation. Textures can also be animated.

Rendering of the scene file is achieved with a fast raster engine or a high quality raytracer capable of producing photorealistic images. Motion blur, depth of field, Global Illumination and caustic effects are supported.

In addition, Art of Illusion includes a scripting feature allowing the creation of new types of objects and tools amongst virtually unlimited other possibilities via the Beanshell scripting language.

Requirements:

· Java 1.4 or later

What’s New in This Release:

· Added procedural lights.
· Directional lights can cast soft shadows.
· The raytracer has an option to use less memory.
· Added commands to lock objects.
· A viewport can be bound to a light source.
· Added “Extract Selected Faces” command to the triangle mesh editor.
· Lots of improvements to theme handling architecture.
· Improved OBJ file import.
· There are now translations for Afrikaans, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, and Vietnamese.
· Various user interface improvements.
· Lots of bug fixes.