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Note this before I start: Nearly all (About 99.99999%) of my modelling experiance, until this point, has been with mechanisto. Thus, I will be comparing Cheetah3D to that.
Firstly, I became excited with the program. The ability to subdivide the faces of a cube and drag them around is something not present in Mechanisto. However, because of camera angles, it was most of the time impossible to drag ("Transform", in this case) the faces exactly where I wanted them. In fact, it absolutely IS impossible (as far as I know) to drag them straight up, or straight to the left, because the camera angle needed does not exist. You can either select the faces or have the right angle to drag them, but not both. I don't blame the programmers much for this, as it's impossible to fit a 3-dimensional space into 2-dimensions.
Of course, you can also imput all the values by hand. However, Cheetah's approach to this is far more annoying then Mechanisto's. Mechanisto has a nice, pretty list of all the transformations you've done on the object, in complete order. You can go back and edit any one of them any time you please. However, ing Cheetah you must use a pull-down menu option for every transform that you do, the "Select Value" option. Even after doing that, you can't go back and change the transformation later.
Also, Cheetah just doesn't have one of my favorite features of Mechanisto: The ability to make shaders. Mechanisto has allowed me to never even have to learn how to use Photoshop (effectively, I mean), and when I do need something that Mechanisto can't make (A bump map, or a specific decal), I can just make a quick visit to Appleworks or GraphicConverter and make a simple bump or Alpha map to suit my needs. I say Alpha map, because I can apply it to one of Mechanisto's shaders to get the decal I want without drawing it. Ah... It's so nice.
Cheetah seems to me to have about the same rendering speed as Mechanisto, though I admit I haven't done anything really complicated enough to really test it. Basically, the chief reason why I'm not going to buy it is the first one I gave: The cool click-and-drag face transformations quickly turn out to be not as cool as I imagined. Without that, the only advantage I see it has over Mechanisto is that it's carbon-based, so I don't have to start up the os 9 enviroment... but that's not much.
One last thing I never figured out how to do (outside of making something recognizable): Apparently, someone managed to play around with a cube, get something really cool looking, with several holes in it. I never figured out how to make any holes in anything. At least, I think I didn't...
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have you tried a different view to drag faces? top, front, left, ...
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I would give it more of a shot than that.
Just so you know, most programs I've used don't have a list of every transformation that's been done that can be changed.
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Originally posted by Arion: **have you tried a different view to drag faces? top, front, left, ...
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From the top, it doesn't work, because though you can select the faces, you can't drag them anywhere. From the left, right, front, and back, you can't select the faces to drag them. My best idea was to have no x on the camera, but have a little y and some Z. That way, though it won't stick straight up, it will at least only move forward or back a little bit.
Originally posted by sparky **I would give it more of a shot than that.
Well, maybe I should have titled this "First Impressions." I'll fiddle around with it some more, off and on, and thus try a couple more shots, as per your suggestion..
As for the lists, I guess that's just another thing I'll miss whenever I switch from Mechanisto... It's a feature I really like.