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.
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Basefount Technology has released an update for Miarmy, its crowd-simulation system for maya. Miarmy is a brand new set of Maya plugins for crowd simulation, behavioral animation, creature physical simulation and rendering. The main new feature in Miarmy 1.5 is an update to the Mesh Drive system introduced in version 1.2. Mesh Drive 2.0 enables users to send a Maya file directly to the renderfarm for batch rendering via a “procedural primitive method” that removes the need to calculate a geometry cache.
GroundWiz from Gugila was updated to version 1.850 which is compatible now with 3ds Max 2013 & 3ds Max Design 2013. GroudWiz is a plugin with which help you can easily make nature scenes. The plugin consists from three major parts; GroundWiz Procedural Terrain Map– which is a procedural map for 3ds Max. With the help of the map you can control and generate realistic terrain textures on which you can apply GroundWiz Planter. The planter controls millions of objects in 3DsMax which represents vegetation, rocks and other elements in nature. The last part is GroundWiz Variation Map which allows you to quickly add colorvariation to materials.
cebas Visual Technology Inc. announced the release of its legendary volumeBreaker, ScalpelMAX, stairMAX and maxVR.qt plug-ins for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2013.
3ds Max 2013 for volumeBreaker™, ScalpelMAX™, stairMAX™ and maxVR.qt™ are all free to download and can be acquired by registered users via cebas Autoupdate or purchase the products directly from the cebas Store.
Golaem announces Golaem Crowd 1.5, the latest update to its crowd simulation software for Autodesk Maya. New version brings one new feature. Now it allows you to see your crowd sims directly inside the Maya render window.
In the past users would have to export the characters’ baked geometry, which wasted significant time and storage space. Golaem Crowd now exports a much smaller particle cache, reconstructing the geometry at render time.
The system works with the native Maya versions of mental ray, V-Ray and RenderMan.
French award-winning VFX studio Mikros Image also used new Geometry Instancing technique to fill a stadium in the last Nissan Juke commercial.
For more details visit: Golaem