— A general plugin type used for all plugins that don't fit one of the other categories. Renderer — Methods used to render a scene, such as a special ray tracer. Translator — Used for importing or exporting a scene to another file format. ModellingTool — For tools that appear on the tools menu. They usually manipulate objects in the scene. Texture — Defines a texture that is applied to an object. Material — Defines a material that is applied to an object. TextureMapping — Describes how a texture is mapped to an object. MaterialMapping — Describes how a material is mapped to an object. ImageFilter — Used for post-processing of a rendered image. Module — Used for user defined 2D and 3D textures. Cloth Simulation A cloth simulator does not come with the basic install package but the capability is available as a plugin. The second edition of Extending Art of Illusion includes the ClothMaker plugin as one of the examples in the book. The author classifies the cloth simulator as "beta" and describes a number of problems with the tool. The ClothMaker plugin makes use of the Distortion class. The user selects an object in the scene to convert to a cloth. The user then selects the command to tell Art of Illusion to generate the cloth simulation. An editor window is provided for the user to select various settings. When the user selects ok the tool spends several minutes generating many frames of the simulation. Once the window closes the user can play simulation using the animation score. Procedural editor There are procedurally controlled options available of textures, materials, movements, lights and even some objects. Procedural editors provide a graphic interface, where you can combine input values, library patterns and mathematical expressions to create the desired output values. Audio Art of Illusion does not have any sound/audio processing capabilities. Audio is not mentioned in the documentation. File formats and interoperability Art of Illusion scene files are saved in their specific format, marked by the extension ".aoi". The core package contains a built-in import function for Wavefront (.obj) and export functions for Wavefront (.obj), Povray 3.5 (.pov) and VRML (.wrl). Additional translators are available as plugins. Language support The user interface of the core software has been translated to 14 languages. Plugins may not have complete sets of translations available. System requirements Art of Illusion 3.2.0 runs on