Shaper Mac

Shaper is a 3D modeling, texturing and animation package developed by Inverse Software. It includes support for the Torque engine.

Version 1.13 was recently released. It can be downloaded here.

Unfortunately I have not had much time recently to devote to core Shaper work. I did manage to complete a basic animation tutorial though and fix some bugs. The majority of the work since the last version has gone into the Mac version...



Ever since Shaper came into existence the plan has always been to eventually create a Mac version (a Linux version as well but that is a long way off). All the big technical decisions have been made with this in mind. It has been really satisfying to see these decisions pay off.

The Qt tool kit is used which, in theory, makes switching between desktops a matter of a simple recompile. This has worked out well. The only Qt related problems came up in places I had hard coded pixel lengths. In retrospect I should have avoided this as much as possible and relied on Qt more. Qt can take care of the little differences between Windows and Mac.

A script, namely Lua, based interface has been provided for writing Shaper extensions. Any script based extensions written on WIndows will "just work" on Mac. All the importers and exporters have been written in Lua. That being said Lua does have some limitations. I am adding support for native extensions the first of which will be an FBX importer and exporter.

FInally the DevIL library has been used for image loading. This is an open source library meaning I can compile it for Mac.

There are still a few bugs to work through. Expecting to have something available in the next couple of months.