Architosh Staff ([email protected])

30 Mar 2001

Mac3D News: Project Messiah comes to Mac OS X!

Architosh reader Tim Penney has informed us of the little known 3D modeling/rendering/animation software called Project Messiah. Project Messiah is currently at version 1.5 and will be ported to Macintosh OS X.

Three Messiah Products for OS X

Although there is currently no shipping product for the Mac, the newer versions of Messiah will be coming to Mac OS X. Those products are: Messiah: animation 3.0, Messiah: render, and Messiah: studio.

Messiah: animation 3.0

This product will feature a customizable interface, integrated particle systems, scripting controls, non-linear motion editor and support for leading 3D software such as Maya, Softimage, 3D StudioMax and LightWave.

Messiah: render

Full raytracing and global illumination, TrueBump technology, fully multi-threaded (for pre-emptive or concurrent thread support in multiprocessor machines and again, support for Maya, LightWave and the others mentioned above.

Messiah: studio combines the two products above and features complete texturing tools.

The Future of Messiah on Mac OS X

According to a press release, the award-winning Messiah software celebrated its first year birthday by announcing that Mac OS X ports would be coming soon for their new product line, enabling more professional Macintosh animators and special-effects artist to push the limits on their Macs with Messiah.

pmG, the creators of Messiah had this to say:

"By porting to the Mac, we will be tapping into a market of graphics professionals that have been waiting for an application such as ours. In countries such as Japan, which have highly developed Mac-based 3D markets, people have been chomping at the bit to get their hands on messiah for the Mac."� -- Fori Owurowa

"Our users range from hobbyists to Hollywood's most demanding visual effects studios. By making our products available for installation on high-level OS X workstations, we will be providing another level of flexibility, power and choice for our customers." -- Fori Owurowa

According to the press release the developers at pmG working on the Mac OS X port are pretty excited about Apple's new operating system. They cite OS X's Unix foundation, support for threaded multiprocessing and OpenGL support as just some of the great reasons for working with Messiah on OS X.

"We've been die-hard Windows NT developers for a long time," Owurowa says. "This makes the best statement to us about what our hopes are for OS X and the platform's future. Finally, there may be a worthy challenger to Windows NT and Windows 2000." -- Fori Owurowa

Looking at some Messiah projects

There are a number of excellent examples of Messiah's power as a 3D tool. You can read about Messiah in the making of X-Men (the movie) and Mechwarrior 4 (the game) as well as other articles. Go to their theater section.

And there are a number of superb little animation teasers, including an incredibly funny Barry White animation, entitled, Pete's Song. So check out Messiah! This is another great application for the Mac 3D pro.