iTracer - 3d modeling for iPhone

[macduke]

Price: $3.99
Link.

Basically this is a pretty neat looking 3d modeling app for the iPhone. It allows you to render using different surfacing materials and effects, and you can render them to your iPhone's photo album. You can even make points to construct your own extruded objects and the developer says there will be future major features added, although for a small price. I think I'm going to buy it just because I took Computer Animation II last semester and learned Lightwave. It would be kinda fun to render things on the go. Bet it eats the battery though.

Description:

iTracer is a 3D modeling and rendering application for the iPhone. With it you can build full 3D scenes and render high-quality images from any given view. The rendered images can then be saved to your Photos Library for later use by other applications. The multi-touch interface allows view scaling and panning at any time with simple pinch gestures. Translate, rotate and scale objects with simple touch movements that snap to an adaptative grid. Includes a full material editor with diffuse and specular components, opacity, refraction, reflection and self illumination. Shadows are cast from multiple lights and support transparent objects. Use procedural objects like spheres and boxes for infinite precision and faster rendering. Also supports generic triangle meshes with per-vertex normals. The included modeling interface allows you to create custom 3D meshes using extrusion and revolution surfaces. A full feature 2D curve editor makes it easy to create 2D shapes and fine tune its vertices by moving, adding and deleting vertices as needed. Buy the current version and get all future updates for free. New releases may have update price due to new functionality and optimizations included. Planned features for next releases are: Undo system, improved camera with shortcuts side/front/top views, photo background that reflect/refract through objects and much more. All suggestions and feedback will be considered for updates.

[macduke]

Wow, this is a pretty neat app. Refraction for glass is pretty accurate, and so are reflections. You can also make revolution meshes in addition to extrusion, which is nice for making a vase or chess piece. The controls are pretty easy too. I am quite surprised so far. Its really late and I have class in the morning, but I will try to post a photo of a rendering in the next day or so.

[capnjiggins]

wow, awesome app. I have no prior 3d modeling experience and I'm getting along very well. One question though, is it possible to make a hollow box that is open on the top with this program. I've tried various things, but nothings worked yet. Thanks guys!

[Rojo]

Looks cool. I wish there was a video or something that showed what this app is like in action (if there is one, I couldn't find it). I'll wait until a few more reviews or examples are shown before buying it.

I just realized, this combined with Flipbook -- a whole new world of possibilities!!!

[fpo]

Originally Posted by macduke

...Bet it eats the battery though.

Hey I'm the developer for that app and would like to say something about the battery use. Its super easy on battery as it does not repaint the screen in a loop like a game.

It just repaint as needed so only when you are interacting with an object it will actually be rendering and using more power. It goes totally idle when you are just looking or using any of the other panes.

I will adding some cool features this holiday weekend like photo/texture support and others. Please send it suggestions and I will consider them if not too complex and fits well into app design. Also camera will be updated to fix top view gimbal lock.

Hope its useful to some people,
Fabio

[Nipz]

Love the app. Looks amazing and very well built.

Good work

Ben

[capnjiggins]

Originally Posted by fpo

I will adding some cool features this holiday weekend like photo/texture support and others. Please send it suggestions and I will consider them if not too complex and fits well into app design. Also camera will be updated to fix top view gimbal lock.

Hope its useful to some people,
Fabio

Fabio, I love this app! Texture support sounds amazing. Any tips on creating hollow boxes? So far the most simple solution is to create very long and thin boxes and piece them together, but I find that solution is very limited as far as not being able to make the boxes thin enough. Awesome app

[fpo]

I thought in having an invert normals option so that you could make a box that is inside-out (only see faces through the inside).

Extrusions with holes would be nice but are much more complex to tesselate as the holes change the object topology.

Also in the list of good features to add is some sort of file share with desktop to exchange 3DS/OBJ files and maybe even full scenes.

[TimothyB]

Originally Posted by fpo

I thought in having an invert normals option so that you could make a box that is inside-out (only see faces through the inside).

Extrusions with holes would be nice but are much more complex to tesselate as the holes change the object topology.

Also in the list of good features to add is some sort of file share with desktop to exchange 3DS/OBJ files and maybe even full scenes.

I've been messing with 3D stuff, and compared with full applications like Zbrush and Hexagon, not sure what I could suggest without going beyond what could feasibly be done.

Though, it would be fun, which I think you just mentioned, is sharing files. But not just exporting, but would be cool to view your own 3D models on the iPhone that you made on the PC, complete with UVs and texture. Not sure how the sharing would be done to get that stuff to the iPhone, unless it was some internet online database you upload to.

Also, on textures. If the app creates a basic UV set, and can export a template, it would be fun to open that in a different paint app to texture, then import it back in to apply to the model.

On cutting a hole. What could almost make the app endless for creativity is some sort of live boolean with primitives. Sort of like how Bryce 3D has 3 settings for objects, Neutral, Positive, and Negative. If you group a Negative with a Positive, it cuts from it. Any procedural textures?

[xtiank]

This app looks very interesting, what id really like to see is an implementation of the sketch modelling principles used in Takeo Igarashi's 'Teddy', 'VolumeTeddy' and 'SmoothTeddy'. There are open source versions of these techniques kicking baout, not least 'OpenTeddy' which is on sourceforge.

Takeo even demo's multitouch applications for these extra simple 3d modelling techniques, perfect for the iPhone....

http://openteddy.sourceforge.net/

http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/teddy.htm

[macduke]

Originally Posted by fpo

Hey I'm the developer for that app and would like to say something about the battery use. Its super easy on battery as it does not repaint the screen in a loop like a game.

It just repaint as needed so only when you are interacting with an object it will actually be rendering and using more power. It goes totally idle when you are just looking or using any of the other panes.

I will adding some cool features this holiday weekend like photo/texture support and others. Please send it suggestions and I will consider them if not too complex and fits well into app design. Also camera will be updated to fix top view gimbal lock.

Hope its useful to some people,
Fabio

Thanks for the reply Fabio.

Yes, I've had some pretty good experiences with the battery life so far.

I echo some of the comments suggesting boolean operations, drills, etc.

I think another neat feature would be a client for the mac, where you could do a network render. Sometimes the scenes take a long time to render on medium settings. Especially if you are raytracing through several glass objects.

Here are a couple simple scenes that I made. The first one was a test at a lower resolution, and the second one was a medium quality render that took about 20-25 minutes on the iPhone. For whatever reason I lost my glass look to the vase while going through the process. I just started learning Lightwave last semester, so I'm kind of a noob at 3d art.

I wish there were more controls for lighting as well. The lighting seems to be more of a fill than a spot. Intensity controls would also be nice.

The test and the final:

[Rojo]

Ok, so I still haven't bought this app, but I'm very curious about it. How easy is it for a complete noob to create 3D models? Just looking at the screenshots, and reading some of the description, I'm already seeing tons of terminology that I'm unfamiliar with. Are there instructions, walkthroughs, or any kind of help at all? Or is it easy enough to figure out on your own?

[macduke]

Originally Posted by Rojo

Ok, so I still haven't bought this app, but I'm very curious about it. How easy is it for a complete noob to create 3D models? Just looking at the screenshots, and reading some of the description, I'm already seeing tons of terminology that I'm unfamiliar with. Are there instructions, walkthroughs, or any kind of help at all? Or is it easy enough to figure out on your own?

I haven't really found any documentation yet. You just kinda have to wing it, or ask the guy directly since he responded to this forum post.

Its fairly easy to create some basic objects, but even after taking an upper-level college course I was a bit confused about a few things. If you read some basic tutorials online about 3d graphics then you will probably be ok, but it takes some time to orient yourself and I ran lots of test renders at low settings to figure out how to get the results I wanted. If you aren't much into 3d graphics design, then you probably won't have too much fun. Even if you are, its sort of a novelty since you can't make anything too complicated. Its neat as a "look what my friggin phone can do" app. Plus its kinda fun to render 3d scenes while my girlfriend is trying on dresses at the department store. Time goes by really fast using this, while waiting for something, in my experience. I'm glad I bought it. The future updates also sound neat. It will be easier for you to use once he fixes the camera views so you can look one axis at a time.