CoreCG has released an update to MentalCore, its mental ray rendering toolkit for Maya. The plugin is intended to plug holes in Maya’s vanilla shading, lighting and rendering pipeline. This update includes a bunch of new features such as Light Select render passes, diagnostic render passes and a architectural light.
MentalCore 1.5 is available for Maya 2011 and above on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It costs $199 for a node-locked licence, or $249 for a floating licence, including five render licences.
Autodesk has launched 123D Creature, the latest in its family of consumer iPad apps. The tool enables users to sculpt and pose 3D characters using a basic skeletal system, paint the models and export them for 3D printing.
Luxion releases KeyShot 4, the next generation of Luxion’s groundbreaking rendering and animation solution.
RHINO LIVE integrates the Arion technology right into McNeel's Rhinoceros 3D 5.0. With it you can benefit from the power of physically-based, unbiased and GPU accelerated rendering from within your native Rhinoceros 3D environment. Beside the key features of the physically-based renderer, native Rhinoceros 3D plug-in, displacement, instancing and photo-realistic materials the integration tears down the obstacles which can occurs using another renderer and allows to work naturally and comfortably inside Rhinoceros 3D. Because RHINO LIVE is based on the Arion technology it takes advantages of all the compatible (CPU+GPU) hardware inside your computer. Besides the main key features which you get using the Arion technology, RHINO LIVE integrates a new interactive display window called IAD (Interactive Arion Display).
Nvidia has released a nice little video showing off some of the new APEX Turbulence features of its PhysX physics system, using footage from the free-to-play mech shooter Hawken.