EQUINOX-3D 0.9.02 review

EQUINOX-3D is a 3D modeler with a very fast, fully integrated ray-tracer

License: Shareware File size: 6612K Developer: Gabor Nagy

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EQUINOX-3D is a 3D modeler with a very fast, fully integrated ray-tracer. It features read/write support for COLLADA, read support for Radiance's .hdr image format, 3DS (3D-studio) file format read support, multi-texturing, custom-programmable texture mapping, bump-mapping with automatic texture-space tangents, the ability to zoom into a region with "fly-to", and more.

It includes a full runtime-class framework and a core design that allows for the addition of anything from a physics engine to a fully integrated renderer from a plugin. EQUINOX-3D project is faster and more memory efficient than many other modelers.

Here are some key features of "EQUINOX 3D":
Super-fast renderer, the first fully integrated interactive ray-tracer in a modeler!
Clean, easy to use user-interface.
Very fast and memory-efficient design. For example: thanks to some design decisions and development techniques, EQUINOX-3D starts up in ~1 second with about 75 plugins loaded(*)
Try that with other modelers!
Way ahead of the curve 3D core design with full runtime-class support: it allows for adding anything from a complete physics engine to an integrated renderer as a plugin!
Plugin-manager: allows you to change, re-compilie and reload plugins without restarting EQUINOX-3D.
Extremely robust internal structures (efficient and natural support for multi-texturing, tangents etc.) and a direct-API (Application Programming Interface) for plugin development.
Multiple Geometries allowed on transform nodes (much fewer nodes needed to group things, resulting in cleaner/more efficient hierarchies)(**).
True texture and material sharing: unlike in most other 3D packages, texture-mapping is stored on the geometries, not with the texture (no need for 'cloning' textured materials and keeping them in sync manually just because you want to map a texture differently on a different object).
Universal, unlimited undo/redo infrastructure
More and more modeling tools... (Context-sensitive Polygon editor, Cleanup tool etc.)
EQUINOX-3D uses , Cg and GLSL for advanced shaders

Requirements:
At least a 500MHz PIII, Athlon or equivalent (you didn't expect the interactive ray-tracer to be usable on an i386, right? :)).
Minimum screen resolution: 1152x864 (1280x1024, 1600x1200 or higher recommended).
OpenGL has to be installed ("libGL.so.1" and "libGLU..so.1" must be accessible).
While EQUINOX-3D will run with Mesa, I STRONGLY recommend hardware 3D-acceleration!
EQUINOX-3D has been mostly tested on nVidia cards (GeForce2, 3 and 4, FX etc.).
If you're running it successfully on other 3D cards, I'd be happy to hear from you.