Moonlight|3D

This new preview version is available in binary
form for Linux/x86, Linux/x86_64, and Windows. The
focus of this release is on improving support for
Win32. The different transformation and extrude
tools were unified. The light source types
spherical and spot light were added. Tools for
mesh triangulation and Catmull-Clark subdivision
and importers and exporters for Wavefront .OBJ and
Ogre XML mesh formats were added.

Qt Jambi from Trolltech provides the foundation of the new, much improved user interface. Among the many changes and additions are transformation gizmos, which make translating, scaling and rotating objects much simpler, and improvements to the integrating Sunflow renderer (including support for caustics and global illumination). The program is now licensed under the terms of the LGPL.

New features include a batch mode for script execution without a GUI, the ability to import from and export to foreign file formats, integration of the Sunflow renderer, texturing, and GLSL support. The GLSL editor included in Moonlight|3D allows instant preview of the shader in the 3D view. Other new features are support for history truncation, a persistent scene element cache, support for lasso type selection in all selection tools, additional mesh tools, and loading of additional plugins from arbitrary locations.

Like the first release almost 3 months ago, the focus is on
demonstrating the technical base on which the program is built.
Although this release still is not feature-complete enough to be
useful for everyday tasks, it still has a number of noteworthy
additions. The most noticeable ones are the integration of the
Yafray renderer, along with a 32-bit HDR image processing core
and the toolchest, which makes access to often-used tools a lot
easier. Other changes include a new way to package plugins and
some additional tools for editing meshes.

This release is a total rewrite, using Java, SWT, and Python as a base. It is plugin-based and highly configurable, using Python in many places. It provides basic mesh editing functionality, and is mainly intended for developers.