Caustic Professional, part of Imagination Technologies, introduced a new plug-in called Caustic Visualizer™. Developed for Autodesk® Maya®, Caustic Visualizer brings a real-time interactive viewport that is fully ray-traced inside Maya environment. This plug-in revolutionizes the performance and functionality of the interactive visual look development process by making ray-traced photorealistic rendering, from the start, an integral part of the content creation work flow. Caustic Visualizer is built on PowerVR OpenRL platform which is highly CPU optimized, this basically means that Caustic Visualizer can deliver an interactive photorealistic viewport experience on a CPU-only desktop that was previously only possible in competitive solutions based on expensive quad-GPU hardware configurations. This gives artists a new way of interaction with content created inside Maya, using an interactive, fully ray-traced viewport with shadows, reflections and global illumination.

Caustic Professional claims that no matter what operating system or hardware configuration an artist uses, these plug-ins will provide a consistent, high quality, easy to use interface and workflow. The plug-in is available for Maya 2013 customers as a free download via the company's open beta program.

 

Gavin Greenwalt, senior artist at Straightface Studios, says: “Interactive ray-tracing will do for rendering, what ZBrush did for modelling. I've tested and tried just about every preview tool that's been released; Caustic Visualizer for Maya is the first solution that I can actually use in production. It is so rapid I can leave the ray-traced view open all the time now, which has revolutionized my workflow. I can't imagine going back to trial and error now.”

Key features:

• High-Quality Visual Feedback: Caustic Visualizer for Maya provides an interactive, fully ray traced viewport complete with soft shadows and diffuse reflections, enabling artists to view their scenes with an unprecedented degree of visual fidelity.
• Versatile Material Set-Ups: the plug-in supports Maya's Hypershade render nodes and mental ray® shader nodes.
• Geometry Independence: Caustic Visualizer supports a full range of standard scene geometry types, including polygons, NURBS and subdivision surfaces.
• Lighting Flexibility: The plug-in is compatible with Maya's Point, Spot, Directional and Area Light types, providing complete flexibility when creating lighting set-ups.

 

More information at: Caustic Professional

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