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.
Neon plug-in is free of charge for all Rhino® 5 customers and immediately available for download.
“Neon is at the forefront for our on-going efforts to bring the most advanced ray tracing techniques to Rhino,” said Bob McNeel, president of McNeel & Associates. “Our customers’ feedback has been extremely positive when it comes to Neon. Rhino users should expect to see some interesting advancements come from our Neon technology soon.”
Key features of the Neon plug-in include:
- Full support for Rhino 5 rendering tools: Neon supports all Rhino 5 rendering features - including the sun, skylight, ground plane, standard materials, environments and most procedural textures
- Neon is a fully working viewport mode: You can edit your model just like any other mode and Neon keeps up; it supports in-command previews (like BlendSrf), real time dragging and many other commands
- Support for Brazil 2.0 Advanced Rendering: Neon supports many Brazil settings if Brazil 2.0 Service Release 2 (or later) is installed on your computer; this includes most Brazil materials, Global illumination, GI environments, advanced lighting including soft shadows, most Luma server settings, Depth of Field – and much more
More information at: McNeel