I checked my email this morning and found a nice little nugget of goodness deep within: a message from Caligari informing me that the newest version of TrueSpace has now been made available for free!
You can use this link to register at Caligari.com, after which you'll be able to download the program, the manual, and some quick start videos. Make sure you've got your downloadin' gloves on; in total you'll be grabbing about 313Mb of stuff.
There are a good collection of free video courses available here as well.
I've not even used version 7.6 yet, but from what I have read so far, it seems to be a huge upgrade from 5, which is what I currently use for everything.
I finally had a chance to play around with version 7.6 this morning, and though it is very different from 5, it's also much more powerful. The editor features a realtime rendering engine that can do shadows, reflections, and a lot of other neat effects as you work in the editor... which opens up some great opportunities for fine tuning scenes to look just right before doing a final rendering. I've not been able to get the included offline rendering engine to load up in TS7 yet, but when I get home from work later today I'll play around with it some more and see if I can get it to work.
You'll probably need a pretty decent computer to run everything in real-time, but I've been running the program on the laptop we have here at work, and it seems to run reasonably on that, so most near-modern desktops should be fine.
All in all, this is very exciting for fans of TrueSpace, newcomers looking for a powerful, free 3D package, or anyone who's just yearning for a new design experience. If I wore hats, my hat would be off to Caligari for making such a wonderful tool, and then making it free. Hopefully this is the start of something big (and good) for the company.
7 Comments
Amazing deal. The realtime rendering is a great feature. LightWave 3D has a plugin called FPrime that works similarly. It’s an amazing time saver for lighting and texturing. But how can Caligari give this away? Are they really banking on sales of their (very nice-looking) V-Ray renderer? Are their limitations to resolution, or input/output, or time, or scene size, or point/poly count, or frame rate, or any other arbitrary limits?
So far as I can tell, this is the complete package. Aside from the lack of an offline renderer (one is supposedly built into the engine, which I’ve yet to investigate on my home computer), I believe it’s unlimited.
I assumed the same, Xot – that they must be banking on sales of their Vray rendered… either that, or they are going out of business. But from reading the developer blog they have set up where this was first announced, it doesn’t seem like that is the case. At least, I hope not!
Hopefully I can figure out this renderer thing now… I’m afraid you might be right about their reliance on renderer sales, but I’ll hold out hope until I can give it a really in-depth look-thru. At the very least, its a very powerful modeling package, and its free, so I can’t argue with that. :)
I think I stick to blender, its work flow is much faster and there are many great rendering engines for it, free. Plus is now has GLSL so normal maps can be seen in realtime.
FYI … it comes with two built-in renderers. In order to use them, after you boot up the program at the top you will see a menu-bar which says 4View Default Floating trueSpace6 … select trueSpace6. That will allow you to use the built-in renderers. Do not click on the render buttons at the bottom of the screen, instead click the render button for the window (the first icon among the 10 icons at the top right hand of the active window). You may switch between renderers by clicking TS6Files-preferences in the upper-right of the application.
I prefer the VirtuaLights built-in renderer to the Lightworks renderer. After you select it, right click on the icon mentioned above and set all your render options.
Frankly, I like the trueSpace6 layout much better than the 7.6 anyway. Might want to grab it while you can … no telling whether future versions will include a built-in renderer, and like I said the new 7.6 layout is about as unintuitive to use as possible, whereas the TS6 interface is as easy as MSPaint.
Yeah, I figured that out after a bit of tinkering, dave. Once you switch to TS6 mode, it acts pretty much just the same as older versions, except you can switch back to TS7 for a live preview (which admittedly looks pretty darn good with all the effects turned on).
I prefer TS6 as well (I still use 5 to model, since it’s easier still), but it’s nice that the entire set of tools is now free. I’ll be tinkering more with TS7 as time allows, and I’ll have to try out that VirtuaLights thing.
Thanks for the info! :)
Thanks a lot Davea0511, that information saved me looking for seperate renderers and the latter. I have been a big fan of Truespace since version 3 and am grateful to Microsoft who now own Truespace for allowing it to be free to the masses. This program can do so much its brilliant. I’d advise anyone interested but a bit scared to play around with the primitives and use the select face and sweep, lathe tools etc and soon youll be able to build (literally) on what you have learnt.
Microsoft suspended all development and support of trueSpace as of the 21st of May, 2009. No future plans are known for trueSpace and the Caligari web site is likely to be closed within five months of the above date. Any existing trueSpace owner, or curious member of the public, is urged to download all the latest patches, the free installer copy, all course tutorials, and all other material they might need before the site is finally closed.
An independent forum at — http://www.tscommunity.co.cc/forum/index.php — has been formed to continue the trueSpace community once the Caligari site closes.
Future development plans are in discussion amongst community members for a replacement or other options.
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