Black Hole Graphics Software

solidThinking Icon solidThinking 2.3
The Advanced 3D Environmlent for NEXTSTEP (modeling, animation, rendering)

solidThinking is the advanced 3D environment that lets you work intuitively to create complex scenes as quickly as possible.

Completely integrated with RenderMan, solidThinking provides unrestricted access to RenderMan's powerful rendering parameters as well as every other phase of the design process.

MOST INTUITIVE, GREATEST PRODUCTIVITY
The user interface of solidThinking is a carefully designed environment where you work in luxurious comfort. To this end every operation has been crafted so that the number of commands you must execute is reduced to the absolute minimum. The iconified interface and intuitive drag©n©drop technique make the program easy to learn, so that you can be immediately productive.

MODELING WITH YOUR THOUGHT
solidThinking gives you all the tools you need: extensive libraries of 2D and 3D primitives, curves and surfaces of Bezier and BSpline types, precise and interactive surface points editing, and a rich variety of actions: lathe, extrude along a path, replicate, refine of profiles and surfaces, fill path, skin, reflect, and many many others.

THE IMPACT OF REALITY
A fundamental part of any 3D application is the description of the surface appearance of objects. With solidThinking you can easily assign any existing attribute, from wood to metal, from plastic to glass, from water to fire, to any object you choose. Our parametric shaders let you extend the rich library of attributes into infinite variants. And when you "invent" an attribute you can verify its impact interactively. 2D textures can be used to create an unlimited number of color patterns, transparency, reflectivity, and surface deformation models. And just like in a photographic set, you can control the lighting of the scene and instantly modify any light parameter: position, type, target, intensity, coneangle, and many others. Discover how easy you can obtain the particular effect you are looking for. Discover the difference between imitating and reproducing reality.

BRING YOUR DESIGN TO LIFE
Add movement to your design and create dramatic presentations. The animation module of solidThinking can be added to the modeling module successively. It adds life to your design through keyframing or automatic interpolation (linear and bicubic) of events with a minimum of manipulation. You can animate objects, shaders, cameras, and lights. By modifying the position, size, shape, material, bump, light intensity, and any other parameter in your scene you can obtain almost any motion effect.

RENDERMAN, UNSURPASSED RENDERING QUALITY
solidThinking uses state-of-the-art rendering technology. Thanks to the complete integration with RenderMan, Pixar©s award-winning scene description language, solidThinking assures unsurpassable photorealism, while conserving time, disk space, and memory. Power, quality, and reliability makes RenderMan the computer graphics industry standard.

Features List
USER INTERFACE
·Views
Perspective, x, y, and z parallel projection.

·Camera
Dolly, depth of field, field of view, focal length, roll, track, auto track, rectangular zoom, cursor zoom.

·Camera Options
Interactive editing with real time visualization. Clipping, numerical input of camera coordinates, show/hide camera, on/of display update, on/off show points, adjustable resolution, data display, true colors or selection/deselection colors visualization.

·Lights
Unlimited number of light sources.
Lighting types: ambient, distant, point, point falloff, spot, spot falloff, projector.

·Lighting Variables
Color, intensity, position, target, cone angle, delta cone, beam distribution, automatic generation of shadows with control of detail, sampling, overfiltering, visualization of the scene from the light position.

·Objects hierachy browser
Select/deselect, toggle, delete, group/ungroup, show/hide objects and groups of objects.

MODELING
Bezier and B-spline profiles, Bezier and B-spline surfaces primitives, NURBS and trim curves.

·2D Primitives
Bezier and B-spline curves, arc, circle, poligon, square.

·3D Primitives
Plane, disc, cylinder, sphere, cube, cone, paraboloid, toroid, hyperboloid, axis.

·Actions
Deform, rotate, scale and transform, (free, constraint, and by numerical steps). Snap to grid, snap to point.

Makepoly, path extract, extrude, fill path, join of profiles and surfaces, lathe, pathcast, refine of profiles and surfaces, replicate (translate, scale, rotate), reflect, skin, sweep, tessellate.

3D text based on PostScript fonts with NURBS and trim curves.

Boolean: Intersection, difference, union.

ANIMATION
Keyframe animation with antialiasing.

·Objects
Position, scale, rotation, dimension, color, trasparency, point structure.

·Shaders
All the parameters can be animated.

·Camera
Depth of field, dolly, roll, target.

·Lights
Intensity, color, position, target, coneangle, deltacone, Beam distribution.

·Keyframes
Copy and paste of keyframes. Linear or cubic interpolation.

RENDERING
Wireframe, Flat shading, Gouraud shading, photorealistic. Completely integrated with RenderMan. Interactive shading. Unlimited resolution.

·Options
Rendering of the key view. Crop area. Antialiasing, shading rate, pixel size, alpha channel, background colour, shadows, reflections, Z-buffer, dump statistics, split, shadow bias, compositing, sampling rate, filters, depth of field, gamma exposure, color quantizer, memory usage, rendering progress, network rendering.

·Mapping
2D textures: color, transparency, reflectivity, deformation.

·Shaders
Parametric shaders for the calculation of the surface attributes. Noise for the rendering of woods, marbles, etc.

TOOLS
Icon based libraries: attributes and objects.

·Color palette
RGB, CMYB, HSL, PANTONE.

·Import
Binary and ascii RIB, DXF, Wavefront, TDDD, 3D Studio, optional modules.

·Export
Binary and ascii RIB, TIF, TIFF, LZW, JPEG, Color EPS, BW EPS, optional modules.

API
Application Programming Interface: documentation for developers and users that want to create their own objects and actions. Code samples are included.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
·PC Intel 486 or higher
16 MB RAM or higher
200 MB hard disk

or Hewlett Packard Pa-Risc
32 MB RAM or higher
500 MB hard disk

or SUN Microsystems SPARC
32 MB RAM or higher
500 MB hard disk

·NEXTSTEP 3.2 or higher