EQUINOX-3D

Documentation and help

Manual

Manual with clickable table of contents, and quick-reference guide. Both in PDF format:

Greatly improved manual, as of 2016-11-03. It also has a clickable table of contents now!
It doesn't cover every feature of EQUINOX-3D (yet), but it should give you a solid starting point. Feel free to to email me if you have any questions. I'm happy to help!

Troubleshooting
By far the most common "bug" report I get from Linux users (not a problem on the Mac) is that the 3D views in EQUINOX-3D don't look right.
This is because, unfortuantely, many Linux distributions don't install a proper 3D graphics driver by default (for silly political reasons).
They install the buggy and slow software fallback, called "Mesa" instead, and they don't even warn users about this major problem.
Imagine that your mouse could only move left and right, because you had to install a separate driver that the OS didn't even tell you about!
Silly issues like this are a pain for users and software developers, and they are unnecessarily holding back Linux adoption.
Mesa is a last resort for people who don't have a reasonable GPU (which is nobody, nowadays).
As a professional 3D application, EQUINOX-3D needs a proper 3D graphics driver. The one provided by the GPU manufacturer.
So, if the "About" dialog box (Menu->Help->About EQUINOX-3D) says anything with the word "Mesa" under "GPU", please install the proper GPU driver.
You can google "nvidia driver linux", "AMD GPU driver linux" etc., to find the one for your Linux distribution and your GPU.

Notes on saving 3D files

At the moment, you can save objects in '.obj', '.stl' and '.hrc' format and the entire scene in COLLADA 1.4.1. (.dae)
COLLADA preserves everything, including hierarchies and construction history, via custom EQUINOX-3D extensions, so it's the recommended format for saving scenes.
Please note that '.obj' files don't have hierarchy information, so hierarchies need to be collapsed before saving to '.obj'.
".stl" files only have triangles with no material info (they are for 3D printing).
You can also save Splines and Faces as an Eagle CAD script (for those of us who design printed circuit boards, so you can design your logo in EQUINOX-3D and put it on your PCB!),
as an SVG or EPS file, for laser cutting and engraving, or scaleable vector graphics for the Web (EQUINOX-3D has very powerful Spline and Face editing tools, so it's great for this too!).
I used to think that there are "more than enough" 3D file formats out there, and I was trying not to invent another one, but experience with other formats convinced me that I really need to do it to provide the kind of flexibility and performance that fits EQUINOX-3D.
So, a super-powerful ".eqx" file format is in coming!
For performance and file size reasons, it will be a binary format, but it will be fully open with complete (read/write) source code provided!

A note to programmers:
The file I/O subsystem of EQUINOX-3D uses the plugin-interface, so it's very easy to add support for a new 2D or 3D file format.

The Application Programming Interface (API).