With DX9 pixel shaders and good lighting, trueSpace7 surfacing is moving from offline to online. High resolution meshes can be converted to low resolution with automatically generated normal maps at the touch of a button and without any loss of visual detail. Complex procedural materials can be created from simple shaders either by scripting or simply by dragging, dropping & linking in the new Link Editor.

Normal maps on low-res Models - Rhino contains only 229 polygons

Complex material in Link Editor

Library of HLSL (DX9) materials may serve as a foundation for your own materials. Here are some examples that are included with the installation:

                                 Metal Cartoon        Gooch        Thinpaint           Anisotropic         Crosshatch                                   

Materials can be multi-layered and animated with a real-time preview right inside the material editor. Even better, using incremental image rendering, you can simply move the re-sizable materials directly on scene objects with near real-time feedback.

In addition to Material Editor, Link Editor is a very powerful tool for material editing. You can combine DX9 and LW shaders into shader trees.

This means that not only can you change the values of a particular material but you can change the structure of a material, in effect creating new materials simply from the combination of existing ones.

The UV Editor allows for texture assignment to any group of polygons, easy navigation in UV shape, direct painting of color, bumps or transparencies plus one click export/import from Photoshop.

Object with two textures

Physics based unwrapper stretches the polygons mesh onto a plane just like a pelt.

Cut slice

Real time modeler display

Procedural Landscape by Michael Arrington