Art of Illusion
- By Matt Stephens
- May 21, 2006
Just in case anyone thought Java was still slow for things like graphics processing, this GPL’d program should change their minds.
Art of Illusion is a 3D modeling package which handles ray tracing and rendering of CGI images or movies. It also has advanced features such as procedural textures, multithreaded rendering,inverse kinematics for skeletal animation, and so on.
It’s free to download, so the best way to learn what this impressive program is capable of is simply to take it for a spin. But for "quick fix junkies", the art gallery is also quite an eye-opener.
A powerful feature is that it uses the increasingly popular Beanshell to let you create scripted objects that co-exist (and interact) with Art of Illusion’s own Java classes.
One of the things I really like about this program is that it doesn’t simply make use of Java, it makes use of Java’s cross-platform capabilities – so it should "just work" anyplace where there’s a 1.4-compliant JVM.