Products - Features

MATERIAL EDITOR

Mad F/X™ supports unlimited rendering passes for materials. Objects are re-rendered for each material pass to create some stunning visual effects. Think of it like painting a deck with a base paint, then applying several coats of primer, and varnish to get the desired effect. In addition to adding layers or passes for things like projected textures or environmental mapping.

 

 
    • Wrap editor
      • Up to 16 wraps supported per material
      • Software generated types (spherical, cubic, cylindrical, flat, default user imported UV coordinated)
      • Dynamic hardware projected wrap types (vertex normal vector, vertex position vector, vertex reflection vector, vertex refraction vector)
      • Manually control wrap position and orientation by altering the wrap matrix
      • Position and rotation can be wrapped independently relative to the scene, base-frame, parent, itself, camera or camera-object vector
      • Manually adjust UV scale, offset and wrap matrix
      • Auto-wrapping for software generated warp types (this feature re-wraps the object every time the object is scaled or deformed in anyway, this basically acts as a dynamic wrap)
      • Choose from different tile types (once or tile)
      • Wraps can be edited directly on the object easily with a click and slide of the mouse
      • Adaptive scaling (Available in version 1.1)

     

 
    • Rendering passes

      Mad F/X™ supports unlimited rendering passes for each material. Each rendering pass supports up to 8 stages (depending on hardware capability). Each rendering pass controls the shade, light and fill modes, source and destination alpha blending modes, diffuse, specular, emissive and ambient colors.

    • Texture stages

      Using various color and alpha blending options, each stage is blended with the prior stage or rendering pass. The stage is basically a pixel shader segment. Each stage or shader segment is combined and undergoes a test to see if it can fit into one final material. If there is not enough hardware instructions left, the shader combiner will disable that shader stage. For example, a shader segments stage can be a cubic EMBM bump stage, where you can select a texture file to be used as a bump map and a cubic texture file to be used as environmental map. Currently, stages include:

      • Plain stage (no textures, just a blending stage)
      • Texture stage
      • EMBM stage (Environmental mapped bump mapping)
      • DP3 stage (Dot product 3 bump mapping)
      • Cartoon stage
      • and more to come... (Available in version 1.x)

       

    • Textures

      The same texture interface is used for all texture related options like particle textures, sprite textures, material textures, foreground and background textures. We support over 40 different image formats including the most popular (JPG, JTF, PSD, BMP, GIF, TGA, PCX, TIF, PNG, and PPM). Popular video formats are also supported (MPEG, MPG, MPV, MPA, MPE, MP2, AVI, MOV, QT). Users can enable texture compression and mip-mapping as well as enable calculated or existing texture alpha.

    • Library (load, save and re-use predefined or custom materials)

 
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CAMERA TOOLS

With a wide array of camera tools, navigating the scene or setting up a snapshot or animation is a breeze. All camera tools have different sensitivity when using the right mouse button over the left to give the user more precision. There are three types of cameras (orthogonic, perspective and free) Each have slightly different behavior. Camera tools include:

  • Move
  • Dolly the camera, target or both
  • Pan
  • Orbit around the target
  • Free rotate
  • Rotate origin or rotator
  • Tilt
  • Look
  • Zoom
  • Look then Zoom
  • Region Zoom
  • Adjust near and far clipping planes
  • Adjust field-of-view

SCENE SETTINGS

Mad F/X™ supports many scene settings to give limitless ways to spruce up a 3D world. Background shaders, foreground shaders for effects such as rain, snow or even overlays to simulate frames or film. Scene settings include:

  • Backgrounds
    • Color
    • Fog
    • Image
    • Skybox
  • Foregrounds
    • None
    • Texture
    • Color Blend
  • Scene lights
    • Ambient light
    • Camera light
  • Multi-color unit grid

CREATION TOOLS

Create new objects easily with a click and drag approach similar to that of 3DSMax. All primitives, cameras, lights, particles, lens flares and sprites are very customizable for extreme flexibility.

  • Primitives
    • Spheres
    • Cubes
    • Cylinders
    • Cones
    • Torus
    • 3D Text
    • Super Toroids
    • Super Ellipsoids
    • Circles
    • Squares
  • Cameras
    • Free
    • Target (Available in version 1.1)
  • Lights
    • Point
    • Directional
  • Particles
    • Field
  • Sprites
  • Lens flares

 

VIEWPORT AND RENDERING OPTIONS

In the top left corner of each viewport you can right click to view an extensive menu of rendering, viewport and camera options. This is where you can control some of the more interesting capabilities of your 3D accelerator card.

  • Rendering options
    • Fill mode
    • Lighting
    • Shade mode
  • Materials (enable, disable or use default material for all rendering)
  • Color channels (enable individual color channels)
  • Dithering
  • Viewport layouts (choose from 16 preset viewport layouts, and setup camera's for each view)
  • Fullscreen options (choose a preset fullscreen resolution and depth and jump to fullscreen mode at any time) (Available in version 1.1)
  • Camera selection (set current camera to any of the 6 standard orthogonal views, our rotator based perspective camera, or any "User" object, light or camera)

DEVICES

Mad F/X™ also supports other means of 3D navigation. More devices will be added in upcoming intermediate releases.

SpaceMouse series and other 3Dconnexions products

Microsoft DirectInput Joysticks (Available in version 1.2)

ANIMATION ENGINE

Our animation engine has best of both worlds. A key-frame based system for interpolating keyed data like position and rotation. We also have a simulation system for time stepping which is used for simulated behaviour like the path of particles. Both "SIM" and "KEY" systems are time based and can run simultaneously or be manipulated individually.

Many tools are available to edit individual positional and rotational animation control points. Choose from sharp or smooth edges or edit control point handles manually. Many options are also available to control the behavior of animation paths.

 

RENDERING AND OUTPUT TOOLS

Mad F/X™ supports real-time 3D output (Direct3D) as a rendering device. Because of the speed at which the Direct3D HAL can render a frame on today's video accelerators, large animations can be outputted thousands of times faster than true raytraced animations. Output a 640x480, 1 minute (1800 frame@30f/s) complex animation at near real-time speeds (dependant on what compression, hard-drive and CPU speeds being used), in roughly less than 10 minutes!

Besides our smoothly designed video output interface, we have a cool tool we call the FX Filter Stack. Choose from a large selection of post rendering effects (oilify, posterize and solarize etc...) which apply a customizable filter to each image rendered before outputting it to file. An unlimited amount of FX Filters can be applied to the stack and each is applied in order.

Mad F/X™ also supports a down-sampling feature. Images can be rendered up to 1600x1600 in memory and down-sampled to your regular output dimensions using a high-quality smoothing algorithm that removes all the "jaggies". This is basically a form of antialiasing.

2D IMAGE/VIDEO OUTPUT SUPPORT

Supported image/video output formats include:

  • Image formats - JPG, JTF, BMP, GIF, TGA, PCX, TIF and PSD
  • Video formats - AVI (any compression format available on your system, e.g. DivX)

OBJECT TOOLS

All standard object manipulation tools are supported. Objects can be moved or rotated relative to the scene, camera, itself, its parent or along a specific axis for maximum control.

  • Standard tools
    • Select
    • Move
    • Rotate
    • Delete
    • Scale
    • Uni-scale
    • Clone
    • Multi-clone
    • Stare (makes an object continuously stare at a point or object origin)
    • Don't stare
    • Look (makes an object look at a point or object once)
    • Center origin
  • Object deformation tools (Available in version 1.2)
    • Twist
    • Pull
    • Skew
    • Taper
    • Bulge
    • Bend
    • Stretch
    • Smooth

3D IMPORT/EXPORT SUPPORT

Mad F/X™ currently supports a very robust 3DStudio4 (.3DS/.PRJ) and Direct3D (.X) importer.

  • 3D import formats supported (Available in version 1.1)
    • Cinema 4D (.C4D)
    • Caligari Objects (.COB)
    • Autocad DXF (.DXF & .DXB)
    • LightWave objects and LightWave layered objects (.LWO)
    • LightWave scene (.LWS)
    • Alias|Wavefront objects (.OBJ)
    • Caligari Scene (.SCN)

     

  • 3D export formats supported (Available in version 1.2)

    • Viewpoint (.MTS or .MTX or .MTZ or .HTML)
    • Shockwave (.W3D)
    • WildTangent (.WASD)
    • VRML 2.0 (.WRL