ART of Illusion

Reviewer	Harald Goetz
Review date	September 2006
Software	Art of Illusion
Developer	http://aoi.sourceforge.net/
Price	Opensource

I'm reviewing the Polymesh Plugin of Art of Illusion (AOI) from a beginners point of view. So what the heck is Art of Illusion you might ask?

Art of Illusion (AOI) is a full modeling, animation, rendering, Java based open source solution developed by Peter Eastman. Details and features can be found here: http://www.housepixels.com/aoitiki/tiki-index.php?page=Features\

I bet the fact that I said java caught your attention. I can imagine some of you choke here since the presumption is that Java is simply to slow for real work. In many cases java is too slow for a major application but have a look at the picture (Ajax from a rendering challenge). I can assure you that this model has around 250.000 faces and can be rendered and worked with on a midrange machine like mine (AMD 3200/ 1 Gig Ram / Radeon 9600 Pro). JOGL is mandatory for files like that.

But now to the part that is in focus here at subdivisonmodeling.com – the PolyMeshEditor (PME). PME is developed by François Guillet mainly because some users of AOI liked to model in Wings3D and export those models to AOI for rendering. The main advantage of PME over pure boxmodeling apps is that meshes can be open and closed – so beside boxmodeling, edge modeling is already possible (edge extrusion and such). PME mesh description corresponds to the half edge mesh structure.

After pressing the PME button in AOI ´s main window you built a cube in your view – with a doubleclick on the PME icon you can choose a start object (Cube, cylinder, single face or custom). With a doubleclick on the object or a right click -> edit in the object panel a new window opens. This is the PolymeshEditor version (1.45b2 is reviewed here).

Camera Shot

You don´t see many toolbuttons – but don´t be misleaded by that - it´s a mighty modeling plugin. The clean interface is it´s main advantage. With it´s new manipulator for scaling, translation and rotation it´s getting even faster. Selection tools like edge loop and edge ring are a must. Additionaly you have also a mighty „find similar“ select option with a tolerance you can choose for edges and faces can also choose orientation and size – I haven´t seen that in other applications so far. Beside the basic tools like extrude (single and region), cut and bevel you will find thicken mesh, sew, brigde (called „join“ ) draw face, and a knife tool. Edges can be extracted into curves for further use in AOI. And of course a mirror modeler that enables you to model just a quarter beside only a half. Enough tools to do some serious work.

You can choose between 4 view or 1 view – you can see the whole scene, just that particular model or the model with skeleton inside (hehe – later....) . Choose between viewing the cage also as well as projecting it on the smoothed surface. You can see a transparent or a textured view and little helper like grid and snap and background images are also available. Reading in the news of another modeling app., I found out that the company plans to introduce bones into their modeler – good idea – I´m glad I found them already implemented into AOI and because of that already in PME! ;-)

On the bright side PME is a living alternative to Wings3D but with some advantages over Wings3d for the future. The developent is pretty active and since its developer has open ears for every suggestion you´ll often find your suggestions from one day to another incoorporated into PME. Two further beneficial points to AOI itself: It´s rendering engine alone is worth to have a indepth look at this application and AOI has got one of the best manuals I ever read (written by Julian Mac Donald).

There are some drawbacks. There is no automatic or manual unwrapping and no RIP (Reference Image Planes) beside a single background image. For most organic modelers maybe no problem – but for me as a beginner and beeing a „recreator“ instead of „creator“ those RIP are on my personal wishlist.