Cheetah3D 7.4

Cheetah3D is intended for creating 3D models and animations. Like most tools intended for designing 3D objects and animating them, Cheetah3D is definitely not an easy application to use, mostly if you do not have any experience with them. Luckily, there are lots of learning resources, many of them in the form of video tutorials, which may pave your way.

The application’s interface is quite straightforward so finding the desired feature is not a problem. It has common elements with other similar products, such as the Toolbar, the Material Editor, the Properties Box, the Transform Tool and the Object Explorer. Likewise, there is the Canvas, which, in this case, allows three different views: 3D View, UVs and Nodes.

The Tool Bar allows you to draw different geometric primitives, like boxes, balls, capsules, cones, cylinders, disc and tubes. Likewise, you can use it to draw polygon meshes and Bezier curves. Fortunately, all objects can be dragged to a different position as well as rotated and scaled.

In terms of animation, Cheetah3D may be not as powerful as other similar apps. However, it supports basic features that let you achieve quite decent results. In this respect, you can assign paths to your cameras, use skeletal deformations and apply morphing procedures.

As to rendering, this product is quite advanced, supporting antialiasing, depth of field, ambient occlusion, HDRI and soft shadowing, to mention but a few features. Moreover, the rendering process is quite fast, considering the complexities involved. It is a shame, however, that the rendering supervisor crashed at times. It is excellent that your work can be exported in various popular formats, including 3DS, SIA, FBX and OBJ. Thus, you can easily import and further edit them on other 3D tools.

All in all, Cheetah3D may be the ideal tool for beginners. In this respect, although, compared with other tools of its type, the app does not come with such a wide range of features, it compensates this lack with usability. I would have also liked it to come with more templates so that I do not have to start so many things from scratch. Finally, the price is nothing but reasonable, mostly because there are more powerful tools of this kind available at no cost.