Terragen™ 2 is a powerful solution for rendering and animating realistic natural environments. With the help of Terragen you can create entire worlds from your imagination, or import real world terrain datasets and use Terragen 2 to create the most realistic visualisations possible. You can control everything, weather, landscape, rivers, lakes and oceans, suns, moons and stars. You have complete control over the shader networks used for terrains, textures, micro polygon displacements, clouds and object distributions. Terragen is not in general a 3D program to render anything, the developers focused more than a decade to specialising in algorithms that simulate skies, outdoor lighting, terrain textures, and to render extremely large and detailed terrains. Between the most impressive features of Terragen 2 belongs the possibility of render millions of plants and other objects using instancing (billions of virtual polygons are handled with ease) and 3D painting of colours and masks that can control almost anything in the scene.

Robert McNeel & Associates, a leading software development company, announced the release of Neon 1.0, interactive viewport plug-in for Rhino® 5. The plug-in was developed in collaboration with the ray tracing professionals at Imagination’s Caustic Professional division and is accelerated with Imagination Technologies’ Caustic Series2 ray-tracing and will be showcased at Develop 3D LIVE 2013. Neon 1.0 plug-in brings as the first a fully-featured ray-tracing viewport to the Rhino modelling platform allowing designers to add a responsive preview window to their workflow. Neon’s photorealistic representations take on a nearly instantaneous reaction time when used in tandem with one of Imagination’s Caustic Series2 R2100 or R2500 ray-tracing acceleration boards. The plug-in is based on Imagination’s PowerVR Brazil SDK ray-traced rendering toolkit and is purely CPU based without the previous requirements of powerful, GPU hardware.

The Maxwell Render team is announced the Spanish HDRI render competition in conjunction with MAGROUND. As Maxwell Render is a product of the Spanish company, Next Limit Technologies, we would like to showcase the architectural/cultural diversity of Valencia through these hi-res backplates and HDR domes as well as through your creative interpretation of Spain.

Rules are simple. You must render your scene with Maxwell Render and you must use one of the 4 provided backplates/HDRs of Valencia, Spain.

NVIDIA announced the first ever GeForce eSports World of Tanks Open Tournament, where combatants will compete to win NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 600-series graphics cards and a shot at a $100,000 total prize pool awarded at a spectacular grand finals event. Player registration is open since March 28th for two weeks.

World of Tanks is a team-based, massively multiplayer online game dedicated to armored warfare in the mid-20th century. With more than 55 million registered users worldwide,2 World of Tanks is a fast-paced PC shooter game with in-depth weaponry, economics and robust eSports tools such as spectator mode and replay file support. In January, the gameset a new Guinness World Record for the most players online simultaneously when the Russian MMO server reached 190,541 players.