E-on software, the leading developer of solutions for the creation, animation, rendering and integration of natural 3D environments, announced the immediately availability of Vue 11.5 xStream and Infinity. Vue xStream and Infinity are used for creating and rendering realistic natural environments in 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D and Softimage.  Both solutions offered by E-on Software combines a multitude of cutting edge features which can be easily integrated into existing production pipelines. The difference between those two versions is the integration into the existing pipelines. While Vue Infinite operates as a standalone application, Vue xStream can be integrated inside 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, LightWave and Cinema4D. The new feature set included inside Vue 11.5 was developed according the most recent production feedback from e-on software's users. The necessary interaction of E-on Software with their users allowed creating many feature and interface optimizations, leading to a better, faster and more streamlined workflow. Between the new features belongs EcoCollision already introduced with Vue 11.

Terragen™ 2 is a powerful solution for rendering and animating realistic natural environments. With the help of Terragen you can create entire worlds from your imagination, or import real world terrain datasets and use Terragen 2 to create the most realistic visualisations possible. You can control everything, weather, landscape, rivers, lakes and oceans, suns, moons and stars. You have complete control over the shader networks used for terrains, textures, micro polygon displacements, clouds and object distributions. Terragen is not in general a 3D program to render anything, the developers focused more than a decade to specialising in algorithms that simulate skies, outdoor lighting, terrain textures, and to render extremely large and detailed terrains. Between the most impressive features of Terragen 2 belongs the possibility of render millions of plants and other objects using instancing (billions of virtual polygons are handled with ease) and 3D painting of colours and masks that can control almost anything in the scene.

Allegorithmic has released Substance Designer 3.5, a sizeable free upgrade to the games texturing tool, adding a new live link with Photoshop, improved 3D preview and a new troubleshooting system.

The software provides a non-destructive, node-based system for authoring lightweight procedural textures, or ‘substances’. Substances are supported in 3ds Max, Maya and Unity.

Version 3.5 introduces new features to improve your texturing workflow: resource monitoring, import and live link with PSD files, tessellation and multi-material support in the 3D View, a profiler, (way) better performances and a new high poly - low poly mesh tangent space normal map baker.

After the merging of Luxology and The Foundry, the team at Luxology has launched MODO 701. It is the latest entry into its 3D software, featuring significant enhancements to core functionality in the modelling, sculpting, animation, effects and rendering workflows.

New users to modo can buy the current version of modo 601 at the current price of US$1,195.00 and then get a free 701 upgrade at launch. Existing users will follow the same upgrade process as previous versions US$495.  When you buy a MODO 701 Individual License, you can use it on both the PC and Mac as we license the software to you, not your computer.