New Lighting mechanism: For this version we have completely upgraded the lighting feature. You can now individually turn on or off each of the 4 separate lights used within the scene to light your model. These lights include Key light, Side light, Back light and Fill light. The Fill light is especially useful as you can precisely position it using longitude (X), and latitude (Y) to give you the exact lighting environment that you want. You can also alter the color of the Fill light to enrich the object surface or its color appearance. Having control over individual lights allows you use only the lights required to help you get the results you want.

New animation preview in animation window:We have added a new preview function in the Select Animation window, this allows you to better understand how a particular animation will interact and look when applied to a model, without having to actually render the image. Previously you required to select the animation and then render the image to see the results. This can greatly speed up the selection of the ideal animation for your particular purpose.

Now simply by clicking once on any of the animation's displayed in the Select Animation window, the animation is replaced with a low resolution rendering of the animation applied to the model. Double clicking the animation or clicking the OK button will then apply the selected animation to the real model in the Object editing window.

Import 3ds model with default lighting & material settings:We have added new options to allow you to selectively keep the original lighting and material settings for an imported 3ds model Normally when importing 3ds models into Effect3D, we do not import the lighting properties, material properties and we apply a yellowish tone. The reason for this is using the original lighting properties may cause the model to appear too light or too dark, and importing a model with its material properties (often pure white with specula zero) limits the way you are able to adjust the color or glossiness of the model.

For instance, we apply a yellowish tone during import because black and white does not respond to color adjustment, by applying the yellowish tone as the initial color it is easy to change the objects' color via HSV adjustment.

Note: With a black or white model it is not possible to adjust color via HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value).