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What is 3dom ?

Quick description

3dom (3D Object Modeler) is a modeler distributed under the GPL.

3dom was designed to be renderer independant (ie you should be able to model scenes for POV-Ray, Renderman, VRML, MGF, <<insert your favorite renderer here>>).

3dom is a solid modeler. It can compute the intersection, the union and the difference of two objects. However, it can't model 2d primitives (triangles, planes) : the object has to occupy some volume.

The 3dom project was initiated by the computer graphics research group of the KULeuven. 3dom can use the RenderPark program to launch Global Illumination calculations (physically based rendering). Since the project is GPL, everybody can contibute to the development of 3dom.

Features

There is also a detailed list of features.

• A Solid only modeler. Life is filled with solids.
• An abstracted Color and Chromaticy idea that uses different models (RGB, CIE, you-name-it) concurrently to represent the same color and allow for perfect adaption to any Global Illumination format out there.
• An abstracted Material definition idea, that seperates material properties in :
  • surface properties, which can be modelled with different models concurrently (MGF Surface model, RGB, OpenGL, ...)
  • body properties (not yet well developed)
• Primitives: box, cone, cylinder, etc...
• Grouping objects in a hierarchy of aggregates using one of following principles:
  • a Compound that is merely a combination of multiple non overlapping objects
  • a CSG object that is either the union, intersection or difference of various overlapping (or non-overlapping) objects. CSG's are visualised through an accurately tessalated Boundary Representation of the object, using fast CSG calculations. These are also used to export to BREP based output formats (MGF notably).
• Basic objects can be put in a collection and instanced multiple times (by pointer) in other Basics or in the world
• Libraries providing all these things (objects, colors, etc...)
• A very swift GUI (using Qt library) that allows accurate manipulation of objects using snap-points and grids. Translating, rotating and scaling can be done accurately and in a very intuitive way.
• A plugin interface to user-loadable code using shared libraries. The user-loadable is native C++ source code. Later on a plugin interface to interpreted languages can also be provided (as C++ plugin).
• Saving and reading in a native file format
• Exporting to MGF, POV (experimental), RIB (experimental).
• An infinite undo/redo and repeat stack to encourage experimentation.
• A 2D editor to create surfaces of revolution
• RenderPark integration: a Renderpark window embedded and operated as a regular 3dom (OpenGL) canvas.
• Free Software, GPL'ed