Pandromeda Inc. has announced the release of MojoWorld 3 Standard and Professional versions, upgrades to the company’s world-building tools that add over 60 new features and performance enhancements. MojoWorld, which Pandromeda notes was used during the production of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” allows artists to build spherical planets with a wealth of detail and then export their work to a rendering tool.
New additions in this upgrade include PhotoBillboards, which enable the addition of 2D images as 3D objects, with the picture’s transparency used to create a cut-out effect; an assortment of plant models from 3DPlanets.com; the ability to add rivers and lakes that follow natural rules; terrain import and export; interactive lights that can be placed anywhere and pointed in any direction, or even locked onto objects and rotated around them; SmartGuides that place objects within the bounds of the Ground Lines and Object Alignment Guides; new tools for transforming objects; and more.
The Professional edition of MojoWorld also includes a pair of plug-ins, MojoTree and MojoMove, that can populate an area with customizable forests and insert animated oceans, clouds, star fields, satellites and other atmospheric effects. In addition, the Professional offers MojoGraph, a node-based shader programming interface that allows artists to create a wide variety of animated textures, as well as the ability to render changes to the world in real-time. Standard users can purchase MojoTree and MojoMove separately for US$69 and $99, respectively.
MojoWorld Standard is $199 and the Professional version is $479. Cross-upgrades from the former to the latter are $299 while upgrades from MojoWorld 2.0 are $149 for the Standard edition and $199 for the Professional edition. Demos of either version are not available yet, but the Pandromeda Web site notes that they’re coming soon. System requirements for MojoWorld Standard and Professional are Mac OS X (no minimum version number listed), a G4 processor, 256MB RAM, 350MB hard drive space and a 32MB video card.