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A brief version history

 v0.9.3 (2008-10-12)
  • Fast, physically accurate global illumination renderer:
    • All images were rendered with EQUINOX-3D:


    Before (direct light only)

    Sky-guitar
    Now (direct + indirect light)

    Sky-guitar




    Sponza atrium

    3D model by Marko Dabrovic


    • Intuitive user interface. No arcane parameters to tweak. In fact, there's only one extra parameter:


    • Unrestricted shader support: any new or existing ray-tracer shader will automatically work for indirect light as well!

    • More accurate Ward's anisotropic shader with importance-sampling.

    • Reflected and transmitted caustics:

    • Programmatically verified against multiple reference data, including the official Cornell box and Smits & Jensen's reference scenes.

    • Nearly zero memory overhead.

    • More accurate transparent objects with physically accurate volumetric absorption (Beer-Lambert law).

    • The interactive, multi-threaded ray-tracer is much more stable and faster on multi-core CPUs (its speed scales better with the number of cores).

    • The ray-tracer uses automatically optimized KD-trees, which is MUCH FASTER, and no more voxel grid resolution "tweaking" necessary!

    • All texture blending modes work.

  • Manipulators (3D widgets for transforms)!

  • Better-looking user interface, including global-illumination rendered 3D icons, thanks to a new shader "Contstant with shadow":

  • Box-primitive generates default UVs (apply UV texture mapping):


  • Hierarchies: the order of children under a parent and the order of root Nodes within the Scene may finally be changed:
  • Animation key-frame can be added separately for Model translate and rotate.

  • Transform-compensation now works for Node / Branch disconnect (from hierarchy).

  • Rectangle-select works for Nodes and Objects on 3D views.

  • In multi-select mode (Shift key), rectangle-select now starts from the previous selection (as opposed to an 'empty' selection). This is much more useful.

  • "Freeze rotations and scaling" tool.

  • Duplicate with repeat has interactive construction history:


  • Duplicate and Duplicate with repeat preserves Node custom data.

  • Cardinal Spline "tension" is now adjustable.

  • Tooltip delay is adjustable.

v0.9.2 (2007-12-16)
  • Improved renderer:
    • Fast and physically accurate area lights, using adaptive stratified sampling:


    • Specular highlights are correct when viewed through reflections and refractions.

    • Faster ray-tracing.


  • Basic key-frame animation editing works now and supports undo/redo.

  • Animation infrastructure improvements.

  • Undo/redo works for normal Spline CV deleting (add CV, delete CV etc.).

  • Undo/redo works for "Merge Geometries".

  • Undo/redo standardized (moved to "Edit" menu and to Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y).

  • "File->New scene" resets view modes and cameras.

  • Revolve tool works correctly for all revolution axes and it visualizes the revolution axis.

  • Duplicate tool can clone Animations as well.

  • COLLADA 1.4.1 import (animation, skinning, polylists, common-profile materials). (in addition to 1.3 import/export).

  • COLLADA 1.4.1 export (animation, common-profile materials).

  • More user-interface improvements:
    • Posted menus and menu items highlight on mouse-over and
    • You can let go of the mouse button while browsing through menus
    • Better-behaving text-fields
    • Better looking buttons, list, menus scrollbars etc. and faster UI updates
    • Better material editor.
    • Schematics window defaults to a nicer view.
    • More reliable keyboard handling for transient modes (e.g. hold down a key to...).
v0.9.1 (2007-04-08)
  • The interactive ray-tracer is Multi-threaded!
    - Automatically detects the number of CPUs/cores and runs in parallel.
    - Nearly twice as fast on dual-core CPUs.
    - Improved user interface responsiveness during rendering (the UI has its own thread).
    - It "plays nicely" with progressive-refinement.

  • Improved water simulation plugin:


  • Improved terrain generator:


  • Better-looking and faster user interface:


  • Package for Intel-based Macs.

  • The Mac version automatically starts X11 (as of v0.9.1-2).

  • Undo/redo (finally :) ) works for deleting PolyGroups, Polygons and holes in Faces.

  • Improved animation view: highlights animation curves for selected objects, you can frame to selected curves etc.

  • "Separate points" tool (unwelds selected mesh vertices)

  • Cleanup tool correctly transfers skin-deformation info to the resulting Mesh.

  • "Unmerge points" option in cleanup tool (unwelds mesh vertices that have different texture coordinates, normals etc.)

  • HDR cubemaps can be mipmapped

  • "Direct" cubemap texture-mapping for Cg (in addition to reflection and refraction cubemaps)

  • Duplicate with repeat can duplicate along a surface (of a Mesh):

  • Mouse scroll-wheel controls the camera and works in the file finder.

  • Fixed sequence-rendering, Face export and Spline editing bugs.

  • PolyGroup dialog box can automatically follow selection change.

  • PolyGroup dialog box shows vertex attributes.

  • "Save main window" moved from the Debug menu to the Window menu.

v0.9.0 (2006-04-15)
  • The long-awaited Mac OS-X version is available!
    (see download page)

  • Greatly improved Cg renderer:

    • The built-in code-generator is capable of automatically generating billions(!) of highly optimized shader variations, based on the user-interface settings (number of textures, normal maps etc.).
      All without you having to program Cg shaders!

    • More texture blending modes

    • Normal maps can be mimpapped

    • Unlimited number of lights with (hardware-accelerated) shadows *

    • Fast HDR (high dynamic range) rendering *

    • HDR texture support *

    • Reflection and refraction cubemap support:


  • Direct support for tangent-space and object-space normal maps.
  • Improved material editor.
  • "I" key sets the interest point to point on surface under mouse pointer. Very handy!
  • Undo works for reorienting IK joints and moving effectors
  • IK effectors can be animated
  • Construction history saved for Revolve, Extrude and Skin tools in COLLADA.
  • Construction history cloned when duplicating objects.
  • All Spline and Spline segment attributes are saved in COLLADA.
  • (Spline)Faces are saved/restored from COLLADA files.
  • Face holes can be deleted.
  • Improved file-selection boxes with options and double-click (finally) working
* Requires an NVidia FX6600 or better graphics card


v0.8.9 (2005-12-25)
  • Greatly improved schematic view:
    You can collapse and expand branches, choose from 3 different connector types and use a horizontal or a vertical layout:


    Also, plugin programmers can design their own 3D icons for custom node types:

  • "Spherical" texture-mapping added! It automatically finds the minimum enclosing sphere of the geometry:
  • "Angle-map" and "Mirror-sphere" texture-mappers added to allow for HDR enviroment-mapping and lighting virtual objects with natural light.
    The former lets you use these images directly in EQUINOX-3D (by mapping it on an inside-out sphere).
    The latter allows you to take a photograph of a reflective sphere and directly use the image as an environment or lightmap in EQUINOX-3D! You can also convert it to a cube-map etc. by simply setting the camera optics in EQX to "cube-map".
    EQUINOX-3D solves the complex quartic equation to "inverse-reflect" rays off the virtual mirror-ball (you can specify the actual ball radius and viewing distance), resulting in accurate environment maps.

    For example, this image was created by using a high dynamic range environment map, from a christmas tree ornament.

  • Included "icm" (image compositor) command-line tool can combine multiple exposure photographs into an HDR image. It accepts 8 and 16-bit (per channel) images (e.g. you can use RAW digital camera images after converting them with "dcraw -4 -v -w -m -b 1.00 -r 1.00 -l 1.00").

  • The ray-tracer got about 10% faster when using area lights.

  • Support for 16-bit TIFF and PNG images.

  • "Extrude" and "Extrude along spline" lay out the UV coordinates, so if you UV-map a texture, it will have a nice automatic texture-mapping.

  • "Shift CVs" tool in the Spline attributes dialog box.

  • Spline invert correctly re-assigns the per-segment data.


© 1992-2008 By Gabor Nagy