CGArena: N-Sided QUIDAM 2.0 Review

26.03.2008
N-Sided QUIDAM 2.0 Review

Welcome. So, you are an animator. Then, definitely you have learned some type of character modeling, skinning, and texturing of the characters. If yes, how much time you have spent in learning these things. What did you say – more than a year? It seems that you also think that these things can’t be learned in shorter time. Have you heard of Quidam (pronounced as “Key” – “Dam”)? No? Then definitely you are not very active person in 3d industry and more busy in your own world. My dear friend, the days of spending hours creating characters from scratch, polygon by polygon, in overly complex programs are over! QUIDAM reinvents character modeling to make it natural, productive and to let you sign your own creations. 20 months before this child was born and now with new release that is version 2 this has become very mature. Now this software not only allows you to model characters in short span of time but also allows you to do Real Time 3d Painting, Advanced Character setup and Photo-realistic rendering.

Hang on guys, this is not the conversion between any recruiter and artist but in the coming time it can be. With the release of N-sided Quidam 2.0 anything can be possible because new version is full of innovative tools to dramatically ease the character setup, major optimizations, lots of new textures, poses, props, etc. We reviewed the previous version that is Quidam 1.5 approx. 6 months before so in this review we will discuss only those things which are new in this version. You can read the previous version review here.

Now Quidam is available in 2 versions. Quidam 2 and Quidam 2 Studio. Quidam 2 doesn’t have following features and costs approx USD240. And Quidam 2 Studio costs you USD575.

Precise control of the base mesh which can be exported to other programs for retouching, subdivision, animation.
Function "X Mode", with which you can adjust the Low Poly to resemble its high resolution subdivided counterpart.
Function of calibration for all accessories to the "Low Poly" version of the characters.
Unique tool to accentuate and relax the 3D forms by differential offset.
UV maps export in vectorial format.
COLLADA export.

Real Time 3D Painting - QUIDAM’s 3D PAINT module lets you paint directly on characters as if you were painting on a canvas. This is very interesting feature and works very well. You have noticed this type of feature before in Deep Paint 3D or Maxon Bodypaint 3D. Under this feature properties panel you will get Color, Transparency, Bump, Premade and Custom Brushes, pick color, several projection modes and other drawing tools. You can transfer a background photo on your 3D model (for tattoos, graphics on clothes or face texturing), use symmetry to paint faster on U and V axis, add wrinkles with a couple of brush strokes and you have a quite realistic character ready.

Advanced Character Setup - Those are from 3d field and used any 3d program for character animation those definitely knows about the skinning. Under Quidam you can import an obj model (not supported other formats), place a skeleton like biped in 3ds max character studio and apply the Automatic Skinning. For some areas in the model you have to fix the weights and after painting weights your model is ready to give any pose.

Rendering – Quidam added a fast raytrace rendering engine in this new version with 10 shadow presets which help you in giving high quality shadows render. Each preset comes with a preview picture to get your work done as fast as possible. The best improvement in this section is Cartoon Rendering which is very improved from the last version and output is quite good. Quidam also offers scanline engine for fast renders. Nothing more changed in this section.

Quidam 2 has some more new features like import optimizations, new textures, props, clothes etc. But we still miss the good video or text tutorials. Every Quidam user likes to see some good video tutorials (few already uploaded on the site) which help us in doing our work fast and efficiently. Reading a 148 page manual takes a lot of time and sometimes few things can’t clear in one go. Manual also not contains the “What’s New” section and for the old Quidam users have to search on the N-sided website or find out in the manual by reading everything. Hope N-sided will think in this direction and provide us good training videos absolutely free. For this new verison we continue to stay on our comment “If you are not good in modeling, or you are pre-visualizer, architectural visualizer, or like to churn out various models in limited time then this is must have application for your arsenal” With some new advanced features, now we can also recommend this to advanced animators. We like to keep our rating of 4 stars for this new version too. Download the demo and try it out.

Rating: 4.0