AAA Studio has released FurryBall 3.0, a major update to its GPU-based Maya renderer. FurryBall is the first unique real-time GPU renderer in production quality implemented directly into Maya. You can see your render in real-time hairs, Maya Fluids, with bump-maps, textures, soft shadows, reflections and refractions, ambient occlusion and color bleeding, depth of field and many other features directly in Maya viewport. FurryBall is about 30-300x TIMES faster than CPU renderers on a regular Graphics card. 

cebas Visual Technology Inc. announces the immediate release of its 9th and latest Service Pack for finalRender 3.5 SE as well as for the integrated and standalone finalToon 3.5. Features in Service Pack 9 are mainly bugfixes – but the developer has also changed its licensing model for the 3ds Max-compatible renderer, quadrupling the number of cores each licence supports. The new finalRender license model includes a massive giveaway of 4 times more core power! Now, users can get up to 64 Local Cores/Threads AND up to 64 Core/Threads for Distributed Network Rendering (instead of 16/16 with the old license model). This major upgrade radically increases the return of investment for any existing and future finalRender installation.

Luxion delivers KeyShot 3.2 with enhanced features and speed improvements. A specific focus on updates and improvements to the existing KeyShot toolset is the focus of this release with enhanced speed, a cleaner interface and a handful of fixes to make creating 3D renderings and animations even faster. KeyShot 3.2 now support instant loading of materials, textures and environments decreasing the time it takes to find and apply materials. Material Templates can now be applied after a model has been imported while applying materials to the 3D model on import becomes even faster with the support of part names and wild cards. Additionally, the UNDO capabilities have been greatly increased with a completely re-worked UNDO stack that provides the option to UNDO nearly every command.

Chaos Group has released V-Ray 2.0 for 3ds Max 2013, which includes some new features and improvements. The latest version of V-Ray now supports 3ds Max 2013 and Ornatrix 2.0. There’s also support for motion blur (transformation and deformation) with V-Ray RT and V-Ray RT GPU. In this update we can find an optimised interactive rendering using the NVIDIA CUDA architecture in addition to OpenCL, and a new “Matte for reflection/refraction” option to the VRayWrapperMtl material and the V-Ray object settings.