Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs. Highlights include subdivision surface based modelling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials..

If you are allready familiar with 3D modelling, you will propably not need to follow this tuturial step by step. You might leaf through it to get some idea of the programs capabilities, but please go and just try it out yourself. For you newbies: I'll get you going making your own 3D graphics in just a few minutes.

Art of Illusion (AoI) is a program for creating high quality, photorealistic (or non-photorealistic) still images and animations (either in .mov format or as a sequence of still frames which can be joined together using other software to make movie files). Images are produced by rendering scene files. These scene files need to contain some 3-D objects, at least one light (or some form of global illumination) so that the objects can be seen and at least one camera, the view from which provides the image. Complex scenes may contain many hundreds of objects and several lights. Files built for animation may have several cameras between which the view is cut to make for an interesting animation sequence.

3-D objects come in 4 basic flavours: Primitives, spline meshes, triangle meshes and tubes, all of which are described in detail later in this manual. Art of Illusion has highly flexible, but easy to use, editors for textures (surface properties such as colour, bumpiness, shininess, transparency etc.) and materials (inner properties for simulating glass, smoke etc.).

Animation of objects within the scene is achieved with a keyframing system including support for skeletons using forward and inverse kinematic animation. Textures can also be animated.

Rendering of the scene file is achieved with a fast raster engine or a high quality raytracer capable of producing photorealistic images. Motion blur, depth of field, Global Illumination and caustic effects are supported.

In addition, Art of Illusion includes a scripting feature allowing the creation of new types of objects and tools amongst virtually unlimited other possibilities via the Beanshell scripting language.

Plugins and scripts are also available that allow additional objects and tools - see the Scripts and Plugin Manager for details of how to find and install these. This manual only details the basic AoI program - please refer to developers documentation for their own scripts and plugins.

Requires:
* Java Runtime Environment

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this 3d graphic software.