Just came out.
Ray
nice! thanks for the heads up ; )
And it offers joint based character animation and morph targets … 
So now it can be used to build/modify/animate NPCs and the like!
Lightmaps … wherefore art thou, lightmaps? 
I guess you ment “where are ye lightmaps?”
“Wherefore” means why and not where as commonly thought. “thou” is singular, the correct plural is ye or plain you. This of course has an effect on the verb comming before it, as “art” is the archaic 2nd person singular form of “to be”.
This is great news for the Unity community - Cheetah has become the one and only low-cost workable solution for rigged animation. Integrates very well with Unity, both via it’s native JAS and FBX export.
Instead of waiting (interminably) for full Blender animation support, or coughing up thousands for Maya, the budget-conscious developer can put characters in motion today. Here’s my first ever animated character in Unity, modelled in Blender, rigged/animated (very simply) in Cheetah: http://mesabizarro.com/mesa1.html
Fun!
(btw, freyr’s correct: Romeo is asking WHY are you Juliet, not where are you, hence a rose by any other name, etc…)
agreed! though i think willem is right - as far as cheap modeller-unity support goes the only major feature missing now is a lighmapping solution. blender now has 2 uv set support, i’m curious if this is (yet another) collada issue or does OTEE just need to release an update that supports it?
nevertheless this is HUGE.
i’ll be buying it next week - i can’t wait ; )
This explanation isn’t making my lighting stick to my walls.
The demo video looks pretty cool. Pitty no lightmapping, texture baking or AO at all… 
Not trying to steal the thread, but I wouldn’t write off Blender just yet:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=837736#post837736
personally i’m not writing off blender at all, if fact i still plan to use it for everything but animation (if this FBX exporter goes through then it’ll probably be blender all the way - i’m just way to comfortable with it by now). having any cheap option though, no less a possible choice between two (!), is awesome news.
thanks for the link BTW ; )
Hi,
I’m happy to see that the Cheetah3D 4.0 release already made it into the Unity forum.
Just some notes about Cheetah3D 4.0 animation features which are special and very handy if you work with Unity. I mainly added them for a smooth Unity workflow.
-Cheetah3D supports FBX takes (animation clips). So you can make all your run, walk, jump, etc. animation cycles directly in Cheetah3D and save them into one single file. There is no need to create various files for every single animation clip or to split up a spaghetti animation. I think Motion Builder is the only other 3D app which also supports that FBX feature.
-Cheetah3D supports FBX morph targets (shapes). So if Unity will support that feature in the future you can easily create facial animations in Cheetah3D.
-You can use Cheetah3Ds native .jas files in Unity directly as before of course. Since the .jas → .fbx conversion is performed like a command line tool it is much faster than other apps which have to start up the UI first or who run the conversion via a slow script.
-Due to Unitys support of .jas files you can always easily modify your animation cycles without loosing any information or without any need for manual file conversion.
That’s it. I hope you like it. Now I can’t await to play the first Cheetah3D/Unity jump and run game.
Bye,
Martin
P.S. Concerning the wish for lightmap backing. That is already on my todo list. I actually already have 80% of the necessary code implemented. Like a Global Illumination renderer or a second set of UV coords (not accessible yet via UI but already available internally). I know that texture backing is the last big thing missing in Cheetah3D to make it a perfect game developers companion. Luckily texture backing is one of the easier features to implement. 
Wow. Thanks for the link, Kahuna - that is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I’m glad to have any option today, and Martin’s done a great job w/ Cheetah, but Blender is and will be my preferred tool. Knowing that Nicholas and OTEE are committed to full Blender support for animations makes my day. There are plenty of Very Smart People in the blenderverse (Ideasman, LetterRip, or Ton Himself?) who could make this happen, and while it would obviously be a boon to us Unity users, I think it’s really what Blender needs as well for widespread commercial adoption. Blender has very good tools for character animation (OK, it ain’t Motion Builder) but right now it’s a dead end - you can’t get that data out, so you can’t integrate w/ any professional workflows. OTEE paying for development of the exporter and releasing it without copyright is a win for everybody.
Sorry for hijacking the topic - Cheetah really is a wonderful tool, one that every Unity user should have in their arsenal. Another thing I really find it useful for is read/writing 3DS or FBX files. Congrats, Martin! I’ll be buying my upgrade today.
I already LOVE Cheetah to death but with lightmaps, seriously, I wouldn’t have to use any other tool to create game worlds. Cheetah and Unity are an amazing combo.
Cool!
In the mean time a couple questions:
What’s the workflow for Blender <=> Cheetah3D like? Are you using .OBJ from Blender then rigging in Cheetah?
I started using C4D strictly to get rigged meshes into Unity, but with version 10 C4D’s support has become less than 100% (and rigging prior to 10 is a pain). How does Cheetah compare? Is it 100% seamless (ie. what you see in Cheetah is what you get in Unity)?
Sure looked that way to me. And yes, I exported *.obj and brought that into Cheetah for rigging. I had some problems w/ flipped normals that weren’t visible or fixable for me in Cheetah; just make sure to Ctrl N the whole mesh in Blender to point all the normals out before exporting.
My initial impression of the new rigging/animating tools in Cheetah is that they are simple but capable - Cheetahs UI overall is very user-friendly, and I found the flow of rigging/animating easy to learn. There are shortcomings relative to the big commercial apps, of course, but no show-stoppers, and the stuff works in Unity just as you’d expect.
Martin, Steve Jobs is waiting for you downstairs in a limo with a sack of cash…and you deserve it.[/quote]
Hi,
Cheetah3d normally don’t changes the winding order of polygons during .obj import. So I guess the normals were already flipped in the .obj file.
You can also flip normals in Cheetah3D with the flip normal tool.
Cheetah3D isn’t Motion Builder yet and it will be probably never be. But I’ve used very similar data structures in Cheetah3D like they are used in FBX or Motion Builde. That guaranteed me a high compatibility when exporting to FBX.
In general it is not my goal to compete with the Pro Animation tools. Cheetah3D should always stay easy to use and that is often difficult to maintain if you add more and more rarely used Pro tools.
Nevertheless v4.0 is just the beginning of the character animations tools in Cheetah3D and I still have many ideas where to improve them.
Bye,
Martin
You’re a real inspiration for the Mac community, Martin.
I’m not sure what caused the flipped normals - the Blend file didn’t show holes when it came into Unity directly, and I couldn’t see any problems in Cheetah, but it showed holes when I imported the Cheetah version into Unity, that were fixed when I did the “recalculate normals outward” cmd in Blender and repeated the process. I overwrote the problem file, so I don’t know if I can reproduce it, but I’ll try, and post on the Cheetah forum. Which, if I were a good beta tester, I’d have done in the first place. 
I agree that Cheetah’s simplicity and ease-of-use are terrific, and yet it’s very functional. I’ll be working on some ambitious (for me) projects with it, and look forward to future improvements.
Hello,
Our company bought a Cheetah license and now I’m experimenting with character export via fbx to Unity. I’m using the alien included in the Cheetah default resources. It seems that in Unity after the export the character is strangely deformed (for ex. the feet are huge). What might be the reason for this? Also the material of the eyes is not coming through. The materials are just standard diffuse etc.r,g,b without textures or anything.
- JR
Hi,
sorry for the problems.
The first problem was caused since in this example scene some joints had the same name. But FBX requires unique object names. Double object names will be ignored and not loaded. So if you want to save to FBX always make sure that the object names are unique. I forgot to check that with that example file.
The second bug (the green eyes) was indeed a bug caused by the subdiv modifier. Deleting the subdiv modifier solves the problem. That bug will be fixed in the next update.
I’ve attached the alien file with unique object names and no subdiv modifier. That one should work with Unity (sorry couldn’t test it by myself but my Unity 1.6.1 doesn’t start anymore )
Bye,
Martin
32585–1191–$alien_walkjas_552.zip (131 KB)