TrueSpace 3.2 available for free

A friend has mentioned something that may be of interest to those who want to make their own objects and which I don't think has been mentioned before in this forum.

Caligari TrueSpace 3.2 is currently available for free and the accompanying manual (highly recommended) can be downloaded for $15. The URLs are:
Download site: http://forms.caligari.com/forms/ts3all_free.html
Help site for 3.2, including manual download: http://www.caligari.com/Products/tru...s/default.html

TrueSpace is a very full featured program and the current version is competitive with Maya, 3D Max, etc. Caligari has recently been purchased by Microsoft, so it will be interesting to see what they do with the programs.

The free version is the 1997 release of the program and was "state of the art" at the time, although it is showing it's age. For Alice users, however, the good news is that it will run without overloading the memory and graphics capability of a typical modern machine and also tends to produce objects with minimal polynomial counts, i.e., that don't overload Alice.

The other very nice feature is that the manual is very good, as are the tutorials on the web - and they really cover all aspects of 3D model development in an understandable fashion.

The user interface is very visual - I recommend you do read the manual. Frankly, I prefer Anim8or among the free and shareware options - but I suspect TrueSpace has a much shorter "learning curve" for the first time user.

For Alice, you still have to use Biturn to get to .ase format - with all the limitations that implies (textures, correct normal problems, etc.). I have attached an example of one of the "stock" TrueSpace objects saved in .asc format, converted using Biturn to .ase format and imported to Alice.