I don't know why for sure but I got an email from Caligari today and they have just released trueSpace 7.6 for FREE!  Thats right... anyone can go download it!

To download trueSpace7.6, visit the link below:
http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx

This is a BIG deal... trueSpace does all kinds of stuff that only the really high end 3D apps do and it used to cost several hundred dollars (like $600 +)!!! I know Microsoft purchased Caligari a few months ago to aid in the development of online 3D stuff for Virtual Earth... this app will help ANYONE who is looking to do 3D models, etc for an XNA game.

Damn, I shelled out $400 last year for trueSpace...

 

Regarding MS - is that true they bought them ?

Yep... there wasn't any big announcements about it... just a forum post from Roman (the President) a while ago... but here is there mailing address:

Caligari Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond
WA 98052.

 

Oh and here is a tech article about if... they bought them back in February:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/microsoft-buys-caligari-to-pimp-up-virtual-earth/

Wow, I`m speechless.

 

Today, I also received this email, but I thought it`s just one of their common marketing tactics where you get used to SW, create lots of meshes with it and after 3 months you won`t be able to do anything, but buy it.

 

Could I install it at work for commercial purposes ? What does their license say ?

Cool, I'll download that :)

I am pretty sure you can use it for any purpose, commercial or personal... here is Roman's post from the forums over there:

----------------------------------------------

Today is an important day in the 23 year history of trueSpace. We are releasing a major upgrade to our flagship product with trueSpace7.6, bringing significant improvements in modeling, animation, rendering and workflows, plus new direct export to Virtual Earth. Most of these you might already expect if you’ve been following my regular Captain’s Blog. What you may not expect is that we are making trueSpace7.6 available to everyone at no charge, in a giant step forward to bring high-end 3D authoring tools to all who want them!

trueSpace7.6 is far more than a SketchUp-style 3D architectural modeling tool. Instead, it provides a complete 3D authoring environment for any type of 3D content creation, whether that’s images, animations, objects for games, or content or worlds for online interactive shared spaces.

trueSpace7.6's modeling tools feature a variety of surface representations including full polygonal editing, subdivision surface modeling, NURBS, metaballs, and implicit surfaces. Those are supported by400+ modeling tools like real-time Boolean operations with full construction history so you can move subtracted parts of your design at any time during your work, or even change a subtraction to an intersection.

trueSpace 7.6 also provides advanced surfacing tools like layered materials, texture maps, normal maps, procedural materials, UVE projections, real-time DX9 pixel shaders that include shaders to simulate subsurface scattering, reflection, refraction, smoke, fire, water, anisotropicshader, metallic paint, glass – and those are just the real-time shaders!

The animation capabilities are even more impressive.trueSpace7.6 supports key-frame and motion capture animation on fully hierarchical objects. Key-frame animations can be seamlessly blended with procedural animations and physical simulations, all of which can fully interact with each other. This means you can have a walking character animated by key-frames getting hit by a procedurally animated car and fly away in response to the collision thanks to physical simulation.

In trueSpace7.6 you can also create fully articulated characters and interact with them using full body IK with editable direct manipulation widgets for joints (including physical stiffness), and apply physics or animated morphs for facial expressions.

If you want to create a photorealistic images or a video, then the built-in Lightworks high quality offline renderer will give you spectacular rendering results including soft shadows, raytracing, global illumination in form of hybrid radiosity, image based lighting, caustics, tone mapping, HDRI, anisotropic reflectance,multi-pass rendering to Photoshop layers, motion blur, depth of field, lens flares etc.

trueSpace’s award-winning direct manipulation interface with its easy-to-use 2D controls and 3D widgets has always been highly praised by users and press alike.For version 7.6 we have streamlined many workflows in extensive collaboration with our Beta testers. The UI is context-based and fully configurable, including toolbars, panels, widgets, layouts and projects. With universal drag-and-drop you can simply drop your model from the 3D workspace directly into an e-mail, written document, etc, and vice versa, clicking on the object in an e-mail will automatically open it in trueSpace.

There are also a series of advanced editors. In addition to the 3D workspace and modeling editors, there are a universal 2D node link editor, a script editor,a non-linear animation editor, a material editor, a UV editor, and more. Plug-ins are now accessible from the real-time 3D workspace and we expect to release truly amazing plug-ins for trueSpace7.6 in the near future, as well as stimulate 3rd party creation of independent products both free and commercial thanks to the availability of an SDK.

Finally, trueSpace7.6 is the only 3D authoring tool on the market which will allow you do all of the above in real-time shared 3D collaborative spaces where members of the design or animation team can maintain real-time interaction from anywhere in the world.

We are taking the unprecedented step of making these tools available to everyone for free in order to stimulate content creation for the present and future online 3D environments, and so that any artist out there with a dream can fulfill their vision without finding themselves trapped by budget limitations. This is particularly true if their vision includes emerging 3D online worlds, where free and unrestricted communities of web artists can collaborate on 3D projects and even establish new kinds of communities the likes of which the world has never seen before, way beyond simple chats in isolated 3D rooms or 3D islands.

Above all, trueSpace7.6 will empower you to create anything you dream up, whether you want to make illustrations for National Geographic, design products for Rolls-Royce, create buildings for Virtual Earth, make advertising or training videos, architectural walkthroughs, innovative video games, or animated films.All of these possibilities are now open to you simply by downloading trueSpace7.6 and learning what its powerful 3D authoring tools can do for you!

To download trueSpace7.6, visit the link below: http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx

Also, to aid in your learning process we have made all of our video courses, previously $79 each, available at no charge, and you can download those courses from the link above.

At a time when other companies are removing their low cost products to make it even tougher to get started in 3D, it gives us great pleasure to enable all artists regardless of age or income to create 3D in whatever field they dream of. We hope you enjoy your copy of trueSpace7.6.

Roman Ormandy
Founder
Caligari Corp

--------------------------------

There are also some videos traning aids that are free now too!  Great day indeed!!!

VladR1024:

Wow, I`m speechless.

 

Today, I also received this email, but I thought it`s just one of their common marketing tactics where you get used to SW, create lots of meshes with it and after 3 months you won`t be able to do anything, but buy it.

 

Could I install it at work for commercial purposes ? What does their license say ?

Yes, I would also like to know if it can be used for commercial development. I'm looking for a free 3D modeler for commercial purposes (one that is preferably not Blender).

Hi all,

tS7.6 features a new X format export, direct from the workspace side (the part with all the new skeleton and animation code, the new modeling tools, etc). This should work very well indeed with XNA - even using the old X format export I was able to take a very cool spaceship from one of our users and get it onto my 360 and fly it around, which was fun! The new X format export should work even better, making this a great companion tool for XNA. It has 400+ modeling tools, improvements to our UV editing for your texture work, and is the complete application that used to retail for $595, so you should be able to create anything you can imagine. Now you can make great 3D content to make your XNA creation into something unique rather than using stock content.

The license doesn't limit you from using it commercially btw.

HTH!
   Tom

 

Tom Grimes
Caligari Corporation
http://www.caligari.com/
http://www.tmgcgart.com/

Any chance of a XNA content pipeline importer any time soon? Do you have an SDK that we can use to make such an importer.

 

Tom,

tS7.6 features a new X format export, direct from the workspace side

I downloaded tS7.6, and tried to export a Cube that I had put a Direct3D material on. However, the Direct3D shader reference and parameters were not exported, only a plain diffuse texture reference.

I did a plain "save as..." from the save menu -- is there some other way that I can get a better DirectX export that includes shader effects?

Tom Grimes:

tS7.6 features a new X format export, direct from the workspace side (the part with all the new skeleton and animation code, the new modeling tools, etc). This should work very well indeed with XNA - even using the old X format export I was able to take a very cool spaceship from one of our users and get it onto my 360 and fly it around, which was fun! The new X format export should work even better, making this a great companion tool for XNA. It has 400+ modeling tools, improvements to our UV editing for your texture work, and is the complete application that used to retail for $595, so you should be able to create anything you can imagine. Now you can make great 3D content to make your XNA creation into something unique rather than using stock content.

 

While it may export X files, am I correct in assuming that it does not import X files?    

Best,

Byron

That's awesome!

I used trueSpace a long time ago (v2 / 3) and it was great then, so I look forward to using it again (when I get home from work tonight!)

Byron Nelson:

While it may export X files, am I correct in assuming that it does not import X files?    

Best,

Byron

According to the specs on the web site, it does import X files. I don't know how complete that support is, but it is definitely supported.

 

Wow!  That is amazing.  I didn't realize that Microsoft bought Caligari.  I purchased tS 4.2 and 5.1.  I was actually on the beta team of tS7.  I have no artistic abilities, but out of all of the modelers this is the one I have had the best luck with.  I'm extremely excited about this being free!

Will this continue to be free or is it more of a promotion?

Along with The ZMan, I'd be interested in knowing if a content pipeline is being made for .COB or .SCN files?

Again, this is excellent news!

Not only can you download the software for free (and the manual and support videos which is cool) ... but you can ALSO download a LOT of video course for free.  These range from things from trueSpace 5 up to trueSpace 7.  I was always too cheap to purchase these in the past but I really wanted to as I figured they would really help.  I'm downloading these now ... there is a truck load of content here.  This is incredible -- thanks Microsoft and Caligari for providing this excellent tool and so much support material for free.  I am truly amazed.

Does any body know the proper .X export settings for XNA?  I am getting the model exported fine but the diffuse textures isn't showing up correctly...

 

Unfortunately, I don't.  I've been able to successfully export the Pharoh's model, but if I try to export the Bentley or the HotRod all of the children meshes get moved to the local origin.  It seemed gameSpace had a better .x export available.  Back in the 5.x days there were also .x tsx plugin (looks like they call them packages now?) that someone made that did a decent job of exporting .x files.  I'm going to continue to play with different exporting tricks to see if something sticks, but hopefully someone with more knowledge will post a great way to accomplish this.

very cool, i'll have to check this out

Sorry for the delay in getting back here, been a busy time post release :) I'll try and catch up on some questions

1. X Import
We do have that, it is on Model side only for now, and is an older version than the workspace side X format exporter. In general, OBJ is currently the best format for importing into tS from other applications. Community development is already working on FBX and other formats too, so I expect the range of formats available in the workspace to grow quite rapidly over the next few months.

2. X Export
Some quick tips from my initial tests. DX9 shaders won't export with all their code for the fancy effects possible in the tS7.6 real-time environment, we don't write those out at the moment. Using "plain" shaders with textures etc will work. Will look into how the diffuse, specular, etc channels export.

When you export, the origin is treated as the center of the object in X format - so the axis location and orientation in tS in the model does not affect the X file itself, only the position and orientation of the object in world space will affect that. I'll get more workflow written up soon, working on that these days, with the plan of moving up to testing bones. The new X format is better than gS btw, more stable, works direct from the workspace (massively better modeling, UV Editing, bones etc in there), and includes bones (the new good ones in tS!) which the old gS exporter did not.

BTW since my XNA skills are not hot, does anyone have any sample code that does the following:
a) Reads an X format model where sub-groups of the model are animated, and then allows switching on and off playback of those animations?
b) Reads a character animated with bones in the X format and plays back the animations stored in the model?

Those are the tests I want to work up to, and I haven't yet gone searching the boards and support for examples that cover those, but thought I'd ask while I'm here in case anyone has something easy to hand :)

3. Commercial Use
Yes, you can use what you create in trueSpace7.6 commercially, including your XNA games on XBLA when that becomes available.

4. Limited Time
No, this isn't a limited time promo offer. Of course why not rush in and grab your copy now, no reason to wait :) But it's not just running for a few weeks before returning to being $595 etc. The version you install also has nothing timed in it, so should a purchase-only version arrive in the future (not saying it will, or won't, just being hypothetical) then your copy of tS7.6 will remain fully functional, so its not one of those "use it for 3 months then you wont be able to make anything more with it" things.

5. Pipeline
It's easy to save from tS and then load the content into your XNA project. However an SDK is on the way (expected sometime within the next 30 days) so some "one press from tS edits your XNA project to auto include items" is conceivable.

Thanks!
   Tom

I just downloaded trueSpace7.6 and I cannot figure out the x file export.  I load a sample model from the installation, export it, then load it in the XNA tutorial and I get nothing.  What could I be missing?

Thanks in advance,

Michael

*edit* Just a camera position problem.  Possibly the origin is different in TrueSpace vs. XNA Framework.

Michael Dambach:

I just downloaded trueSpace7.6 and I cannot figure out the x file export.  I load a sample model from the installation, export it, then load it in the XNA tutorial and I get nothing.  What could I be missing?

Hello Michael, in fact, when you're in TrueSpace, you have to select the object you wanna export in .x, then click "file", "save as", and select .x
TrueSpace will only export the objects you selected. If you just click "save as" without selecting your object, he won't show in the .x file.
When you import it in xna, however, you might not see it, because it shows very far away, with a very small scale.

I downloaded truespace 7.6 but when I opened it the layout is very different to the layout on the tutorial videos.
At first I thought it was just the normal layout but there is no menu e.g file, edit, etc. and I am not entirly sure in how to close it down. When I searched the program files I found a file called default_layout but when I double click on that an error message appears reading - bad data format.
Is this normal or not? 
Thanks a lot
Josh95

Holy steep learning curve batman.  OMG thats hard!