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form·Z is an award winning general purpose solid and surface modeler with an extensive set of 2D/3D form manipulating and sculpting capabilities, many of which are unique. It is an effective design tool for architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, animators and illustrators, industrial and interior designers, and all design fields that deal with the articulation of 3D spaces and forms. form·Z is highly responsive to the needs of mature designers and, at the same time, novices can use it with ease.

Highly interactive graphic interface with associated multiple windows, tear off tool palettes, virtually unlimited and selectively applied Undo/Redo operations, customizable key shortcuts for all the operations, simultaneously available prepick and postpick modes, and integrated 2D/3D operations allow you to work in either 2D or directly in 3D space.

A full set of primitives can be generated through graphic or numeric input. Also dynamically generated 3D solids and 2D shapes include rectangles, n-sided polygons, patterned polygons, circles, ellipses, arcs, free hand line drawings, a variety of splines, and double ("wall") lines. These can be extruded in a direction perpendicular to their plane, or to a point.

Spherical objects, that include the complete set of Platonic solids, soccer balls, and lathed and geodesic spheres, can be generated both interactively and through numeric input, and can also be scaled and stretched. A special type of spherical objects, metaballs, can also be generated and blended to form highly organic shapes.

Derivative objects that can be generated from other objects include 2D shapes, 3D extrusions, walls, parallel objects, projection objects, unfolded objects, revolved objects, helixes, screws and bolts, stairs, sweeps, skins, and lofts.

form•Z

Introduction

General purpose 3D solids and surface modeler

form•Z, the 3D form synthesizer, is above all a 3D modeling program, even though it also includes drafting, rendering and animation. Additional photorealistic rendering is offered by form•Z RenderZone Plus.

It is a general purpose modeler that designers from a variety of different fields can use to create and visualize 3D forms. A few samples of what users from distinctly different fields are doing are shown above.

It combines solids and surface modeling. It also combines faceted (boundary) representations with parametric spline representations, NURBS, patches, and metaballs. This unique mixture of modeling personalities allows you to create any form, existing or imaginary, while working in a single package.

It is a design oriented program that, not only allows you to visualize existing forms, but also to create new ones, which remain soft and tentative while they are generated. form•Z is above all a 3D form synthesizer.

form•Z RenderZone Plus

RenderZone allows you to create photorealistic renderings based on the LightWorks® rendering engine. It offers three levels of rendering: simple, z-buffer, and raytrace. A user can start developing the image of a 3D model at the simple level and gradually turn on features and render it at the most photorealistic level.

RenderZone also includes the ability to produce images based on global illumination techniques, which create renderings with the most realism, as the illumination of a scene takes into account the accurate distribution of light in the environment. In RenderZone, global illumination includes final gather, ambient occlusion, and radiosity techniques, which can be applied separately or can be combined.

One or more lights can be used, which can be ambient, distant (sun), cone, point, projector, area, custom, line, environment, and atmospheric lights. Lights may appear to glow in images, simulating the reflection of lights off dust particles in the air. Environment and atmospheric lights are advanced lights, which are especially optimized for global illumination. Other light types produce soft (mapped) or hard (raytraced) shadows.

Cubic and spherical environment mapping, bumps, backgrounds that include alpha channel support, depth effects, and post processing effects can be applied. Blur is an example of a post processing effect that simulates focusing your camera to a particular area of your modeling scene. Sky backgrounds that are procedurally generated come close to real skies that you may have captured with your camera.

State of the art shaders are used to render surfaces and other effects. A Material is defined by up to four layers of shaders, which produce color, reflections, transparency, and bump effects. Patterns in shaders can be pre-captured images or can be produced by a procedure.
Transparencies, reflections, and refractions can be applied at the z-buffer and raytrace levels. The reflections and refractions are always correctly raytraced, even when they are produced by the z-buffer rendering. This is achieved by applying a mixed rendering method, where surfaces with no reflections are rendered using z-buffer and the rendering effects of reflective surfaces are produced using raytracing.

Raytraced renderings can be accelerated by the use of multiple processors.

Also available is a sketch rendering mode that produces non photorealistic images, which appear as if they were drawn by manual rendering techniques, such as oil painting, water color, or pencil hatches.

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