New instancing features:

Highly efficient and automated building construction toolkit, featuring:

Powerful fractal plant tool set. Plants can be modeled procedurally using a hierarchical construction. The hierarchy consists of component objects such as root, trunk, branch and leaf generators. Each component provides a versatile set of growth control parameters. The user can selecte either memory efficient curve/particle representation, or an exporting friendly approach which uses SDS geometry with leaf duplication. Growth parameters of plants can be animated, including the age. It is easy to make interesting animations where trees deform in the wind or branches bend down when leaves get bigger etc.

In version 6, the user can define intelligent drag and drop behavior rules for geometric objects, which are stored to disk files. When the user loads an object by dropping it into a view window, the object is first translated to the mouse position. After that, the object can find the closest surface and move/align itself automatically. Plants can find the ground level and doors the closest wall. For example, adding furniture into a room can be done at a record-breaking speed by configuring the furniture library carefully with this kind of 'auto snapping' features.

The snapping functionality is also available for all objects at any time via the Snap tool, which snaps the selected objects into the surrounding surfaces. The options, which control snapping are the same as in drag and drop loading.

Dragging and dropping files from explorer into the view window transforms the pivot point of the dropped geometric object into the current mouse position.

Thumbnail image based interface for loading and saving geometric objects. Icons can be loaded by double clicking or dragging and dropping them into the view window. The former loads the object with the position the object had when it was saved and the latter translates the loaded object into the current mouse position.

Triset object now supports pointwise attributes (i.e. vertex channels), and UV editor now supports editing of triset face UVs. Triset is clearly the fastest and most memory efficient way to represent complex polygon objects, such as imported polygon models. These improvements help to utilize such models.

Triset smooth tool improved. In face mode, normals are smoothed only inside the selected face region (smoothed area can be surrounded by a sharp edge). Smoothing now uses geometric normals, not existing normals, which can be incorrect after some point editing actions.

ToSDS tool improved. Planar faced objects such as analytic cube, pyramid and cut pyramid are converted using an optimal face set. Conversion assigns the same object spaces as the original objects had. The Interpolate Boundary option is always set to prevent shrinking of open surface edges. The conversion now keeps the name, color and uv texture of the source object.

The Soft Selection feature added. The Selection painter tool has a new gradient option for defining soft selections. When enabled, the associated curve defines selection weight distribution along the radius of the circular brush. Another way to define soft selections is to first make a hard selection e.g. using the lasso selector and then applying the new Soften tool.

Auto Focus (or object drag-drop to a view) with the Shift key pressed focuses on selected handles.

A new Center Pivot tool sets the pivot to the center of the object with a single mouse click. Center point search by dragging, which was available in earlier versions, gets easily biased by variable point densities of included objects. This tools uses the center of the bounding box which is always valid.

Quicker object creation: modeling tools of version 6 create a default object (centered and sized by the active view window) when user accepts the tool without mouse clicks. Accepting a tool while the object is unfinished does not cancel but creates a default object which includes input from the user.

Version 6 has tools for parametric object modeling. Standard objects such as kitchen cabinets, doors and windows can be made scalable. The same system allows easy management of object groups such as rows of kitchen cabinets.

Edit handle system improvements:

Realsoft 3D version 6 has an option for displaying important numeric details of the applied tools into the view windows. The information is shown by the mouse pointer where the user's focus is, which makes the feature very practical and comfortable to use. It combines nicely with grid snapping: grid handles accuracy issues, and thanks to the displayed numbers, the user does not have to count any grid lines.

Version 6 has a new object which measures the surface area and volume of its sub objects. The measured objects can include any kind of geometry and boolean operations. Both 'Fused' and component wise measuring are available. Fused measuring counts overlapping volumes only once and ignores surfaces traveling inside solid volumes. The computation is automatic and interactive: the user can see the result on view windows while editing the target of the computation.

A new tool for rounding the control polygon of a NURBS curve at selected points along a circle arc. The tool allows an easy work flow, where the user first draws a rough shape and later defines exact corner roundings.

A new option 'Hit Invisible' available for geometry objects. The option eliminates objects from ray hit tests in collision detection, surface projection based modeling tools such as the paste tool, 3d painting etc. Ray trace invisible objects are now correctly processed in all modeling tool actions, which was sometimes problematic in previous program versions.

The font curve tool now includes multilingual support. The tool uses a multi-byte / wide character interface.

UVSet edge and point handles and their selection are now visualized on 3D view

A new SunMoon object manages its first child object to simulate the position of the sun or the moon in a given date, time and location. It supports both point and distant lights, as well as any kind of modeled hierarchical sun/moon objects. sunmoon.gif:

Version 6 has an automatic linking feature for object renaming. When the user changes a name of any kind of object (material, user channel etc.), the program automatically detects if any other object is referring to the renamed item. If there are references, the user becomes warned and has an option to automatically change all references to use the new name.

Instancing can now be extended to photorealistic rendering. If the Render as Instance option is set, the render engine does not convert instances to real objects but performs the instancing transformation during ray tracing. This typically slows down rendering by 20%30%, but saves memory. For example, it is now possible to model and render a forest by repeating thousands of instances of a dozen of basic tree shapes.

Backup Ray Tracing is now a permanent option for view windows, not an action like in version 6. It is enabled by default.

View window's Show Backup feature has been improved. The view menu now shows a list of all channels included in the backup buffer, and the user can view any of them simply by picking the respective menu.

Version 6 improves rendering speed significantly on Windows platforms. The average speedup has been about one quarter in 32 bit Windows systems. The native 64 bit version (tested under XP64 Pro) is even faster: it increases rendering speed by 50 %.

Procedural metaball rendering makes it possible to render very large number of metaballs with a perfect quality.

Analytic cube has a new attribute for very efficient render time edge rounding. A comparison of analytic and SDS cubes: rounded analytic cube uses 26 surfaces, whereas SDS cube needs 864 surfaces at the default quality 2. Analytic rounded cube renders 2-3 times faster in a typical scene setup.

File render resolution and camera aspect ratio presets updated to include the modern video formats and some other useful new values.

Subdivision object has a new option 'Minimal Outlines'. If set, the outline rendering density corresponds the control cage. In other words, rendering quality dependent NURBS patch fitting or triangulation of polygonal objects does not show up.

Texture map VSL object now has mipmapping based antialiasing available. MipMapping is the most efficient way to antialiase textures.

A new reflection fading channel available. It optimizes the ray tracing computations, when reflections or refractions are local i.e. fade away within a certain finite distance. The time saving can be up to one quarter of the total rendering time in complex scenes with lots of reflective surfaces.

Noise, Cell Noise, Random and Wave VSL objects have a switch for centering Amplitude symmetrically around Base value.

Noise and Cell Noise now have an internal parameter Density control.

VSL objects now publish useful attributes, which in previous versions were constant during a render cycle, to their sub objects. Such public attributes can be changed and modified by VSL shaders just like any other variables and channel values. This greatly enhances the flexibility of VSL. Some examples:

Faster Ambient Occlusion: Raytrace VSL object has a new option 'Trace Distance'. If set, only the distance to the closest surface is traced. Illumination or other properties are not evaluated. This makes ambient occlusion shaders significantly faster. Furthermore, occlusion rays do not interfere with other shaders, which process or manipulate traced rays. This simplifies shader structure. Tests indicate a typical rendering speedup to be 30 %.

VSL operation object now includes a new function faceforward(n, ray). It computes a vector that is parallel to the first parameter and faces against the second parameter. This simple function replaces 3 lines of VSL code.

A new VSL shader Initialize Ray added. With this shader, custom materials can carry information forward into deeper ray trace recursions. For example, GI rays can be labeled and identified so that various shading actions can treat them selectively. An object can appear different in GI computations and when viewed directly.

A new faster and simpler GI shader is now available. It fixes the glass darkening problem and renders sharper GI illumination from reflections and transparent layers. The new shader supports easy selective GI shading. For example a world sphere can have blue sky texture but red GI illumination.

Version 6 has a new improved procedural wood shader. It includes wood grain bending controls at multiple scale levels, natural color variations, branches with adjustable density, size, color and deformation, among other things.

Several example VSL materials updated. Shaders are faster and include antialiasing controls.

VSL objects of Version 6 have a new Tip feature. The defined string is printed after the object's name in the VSL shader tree. Unlike when using the Rename tool, Comments and instructions defined in the Tip string do not prevent automatic name updating of the VSL object when its parameters or other options affecting the name change.

A dedicated Comment VSL object is now available.

Else VSL object included

Version 6 includes a new, improved post shading system, which provides controls for the usual components of ray traced shading, as well as controls for Global Illumination. The new shader also fixes some illumination balance errors of the original post shadingsystem.

In version 6, the view window supports automated post effect selection at project loading. When the user loads a file, which contains post effects, the loaded effects are automatically assigned to view windows. This is possible because the effects now include recommendation of use (per box, image, field or frame). The user can simply load a project made by another user to his/her own GUI setup and press the render button without worrying about the render settings or the post effect setup.

Drag and dropping a post effect configuration to a view obeys the new usage recommendation option.

Components of a post effect configuration can be disabled using the popup menu of the active effect gadget.

The Line post effect has a new option, which turns off distance based filtering of the line width. Turning filtering off may be necessary when a more detailed user defined filtering approach is used and built-in filtering would interfere with it.

Depth of field effect now blurs the alpha channel.

X and y keys lock mouse coordinates in curve editing.

Timelines and curve gadgets now have a dynamic scale. New tick marks and decimals appear when the user zooms in. Numbers are carefully printed at suitable intervals so that the scale always remains stable, visually clear and useful.

Support for MPEG and QuickTime animation.

Version 6 can import native RealFlow animations.

Skeleton - target bindings are visualized. The actual surface color is changed to reflect the weight in which the selected bones affect the surface.

A new multi-binding tool set for skeletons: new bind, del bind, select bind, current bind

Inverse Kinematics can now bend skeleton full 360 degrees also in 'b' direction

Key framing camera attributes improved. Editing camera points (such as aim point) no longer results camera morphing but keyframes intuitive Focusing Distance, Translation, View Angle and Aspect Ratio attributes.

File/Save As window introduces a new option: All Frames. Each frame is exported as a separate file, by concatenating the current frame index into the project's file name (myproject001.r3d etc.).

Preferences window has a new option for space orientation. A preferred convention (Y=up axis or Z=up axis) can be selected there.

In v5, many primitives had only point coordinate controls available on the property window. In version 6, all geometric primitives and material map objects have an intuitive and easy to use set of geometric attributes. For example, a cut cone has controls for depth and two independent radius values, a cylinder map a radius and a depth control, etc.

The compass menu is now Vista / OpenGL driver compatible and it can be used in any windows, such as in the select window, where it switches selected objects visible or invisible.

The view control tool set expanded. The tools in this set are implemented as a separate tool buttons, so that they can be placed anywhere in the GUI providing the user with total control over the layout/customization.

New wireframe option Show Names draws the name of the object into the view windows.

The Boolean tool now has an option to switch off wire trimming. It is much more laborious to disable trimming after the operation.

Selective wireframe visibility in shaded/unshaded drawing. For example, the standard wireframe on the object's surface can be used for shaded drawing and another simplified 'symbolic' shape for wireframe drawing.

A new wireframe option 'Draw as bounding box'. When enabled, the actual geometry is hidden and only the bounding box is drawn.

Realsoft 3D Version 6 includes a new, freely distributable RsView scene viewer. The viewer operates in the new easy to use navigation mode. It also supports activation of animated objects: point an object and hit spacebar. Doors can be opened, lights turned on, etc. this way.

The Batchren utility now shows a preview of the project being rendered. The tool has also a new option for reconfiguring rendering servers automatically with a single click.

Autosave is run on the background, to keep the user interface interactive with large and time consuming projects.

ShowImg utility introduces several improvements to better support extremely large images one can render on 64 bit apps. Improvements include scaling via mouse wheel, asynchronous design and progress indicator, which can be used for canceling save and load operations.

Vista compatibility changes include: a new compass menu implementation, OpenGL rendering, new Vista compatible setup, ray tracing on OpenGL, rubber band drawing (drag box, lasso etc.).

A new utility 'tor3d' for batch converting any file format to .r3d file. Usage: tor3d file1.obj file2.obj file3.obj ...

Basic level FBX Import/Export of object geometry added

A new DocBook based documentation system adopted. This introduces many advantages: Platform specific manuals (Windows, Linux, Mac) HTML, PDF and Windows HELP user manuals. Users can print the PDF manual themselves.