The voting has opened for the 2011 Autodesk Masters, Autodesk’s annual gongs for exceptional people working with the worlds of 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage and Mudbox. There are two categories „Autodesk Master“ and from this year also one new category „Junior Master“. Every candidate in Autodesk Master Category has to produce work that reshapes and redefines the boundaries of technology, art, digital entertainment and visualization using Autodesk 3D software. They find new ways of doing things and to see the world through a different lens.
Autodesk released an updated version of the LayoutTools 2012 for Maya. The LayoutTools are in simple very similar to the Layer system which you can find inside Photoshop. It is a toolset that is widely used for basic layout and assembly of objects within a scene (e.g. building game levels, assembling sets, building out architectural spaces, populating environments with objects, etc...). The new LayoutTools provides new features and functionality with the Maya's existing features and a user friendly interface. One of the new features is support for multiple renders when creating icons including the new Viewport 2.0 renderer and redesigned UI.
With the upcoming release of Vue 10, Paula Sanders published a well explained tutorial about the new feature and discuss there the impact of various factors around Vue 10's new Physical Sea Water and Underwater Caustics. Physical water adds absorption and scattering parameters to allow for realistic light absorption in the body of water. Ocean waves now accurately affect incident light to produce realistic underwater caustics. He is comparing the Default Metawater against the Physical Sea Water and discusses the settings and parameters inside each one.