Original author(s) Development status Active Available in English | Developer(s) Spinor | |
Initial release February 2000; 17 years ago (2000-02) | ||
Shark 3D is a 3D software and engine developed by Spinor for creating and running interactive virtual 3D worlds. It is used for video games, films, animated series, broadcasting graphics, and 3D industry applications.
Contents
Shark 3D is mainly used for developing video games (similar to a Game engine), producing films and TV series, creating broadcast graphics, and developing 3D applications.
Workflow
Animations are created by "playing" a scene as in video games within a simulated virtual world. This is different to software like Autodesk 3ds Max or Autodesk Maya where you create animations mainly by hand-animating all individual movements.
By recording different characters and objects in different tracks, the animator can create a full scene in multiple iterations. For example, the animator can first play one virtual actor, and then play another while replaying the first one. Recording is physics based, so that a character or vehicle controlled live can physically interact with previously recorded characters and objects.
Features
Shark 3D contains:
The core of Shark 3D is an authoring editor supporting templates and prefabs to reuse entities. Templates and prefabs can be nested to any level and edited live. This allows building up complex scenes or objects with integrated behaviors (e.g. NPCs or complex camera systems based on simple building blocks in a flexible way).
Shark 3D is available for multiple target platforms like Windows and Linux based PC applications, mobile devices and consoles.
The software focuses entirely on real-time. For example, all soft lighting and shadowing in the Shark 3D renderer is completely real-time. This is in contrast to other software packages like Autodesk Maya which are mainly non-realtime or various game engines like game engines as for example the Unity engine or Unreal Engine which use a mixture of realtime and precalculated lighting.
The software is highly modular and can be customized or extended on all layers.
Clients
Companies using Shark 3D include Funcom, Ravensburger Digital, Marc Weigert, Siemens, ARD/ZDF/Pro 7/Disney Junior. In 2012 it was the second-most used real-time 3D engine in Europe after Unity.
Awards
Awards given to products based on Shark 3D: