E-on Software announced the releasing and the immediately availability of Plant Factory, their revolutionary new technology for creating and rendering high-quality 3D plants. Plant Factory was designed and offers solutions custom-tailored to fulfil the needs of the CG, SFX, Architecture and Gaming industry. The technology available in Plant Factory represents the culmination of e-on software's decades of expertise in the field of digital nature and delivers unsurpassed realism and performance. Using Plant Factory users can create any kind of vegetation, from simple grass to super elaborate hero trees by painting it, assembling simple building blocks, or completely graphing all plant properties. Generating procedural geometry and materials of unlimited detail and animating all plant aspects using precise wind and breeze algorithms. One of the key features of The Plant Factory is its ability to dynamically set global plant characteristics such as plant age, health, and seasonality. These characteristics can drive any node or set of nodes in the TPF graph to add more complete plant definition and realism.
Software
The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.67. This release contains many different mesh modelling tools. Cycles render performance was also improved on Windows and on GPU's. The motion tracker can now automate placement and choice of markers more with new tools. Smoke rendering quality has been improved to reduce blockiness.
Terragen is a powerful solution and photorealistic 3D environment design and rendering software, providing powerful and flexible tools for professional artists to bring to life the worlds and realistic natural environments of their imagination. Terragen is used widely in a broad spectrum of industries including VFX studios and game development. Terragen 3 was developed with the direct feedback from VFX vendors and studios using Terragen in major film and TV projects. Using Terragen the user have the full control over the shader networks used for terrains, textures, micro-polygon displacements, clouds and object distributions. You can reorganise the planetary shading pipeline to suit your goals. Terragen 3 Professional includes many new features and performance enhancements to meet the needs of deadline-driven projects. A Linux render node will also be available with Terragen 3 Professional, making integration with existing Linux render farms possible for the first time.
ZBrush 4R6 continues to improve and enhance ZBrush functionality by giving artists access to a rich toolset of new features designed to excite their creativity and boost productivity.
Central to Release 6 is ZRemesher: an evolution of ZBrush's automatic retopology tool. It analyzes the curves in a mesh to produce a very natural polygon flow. Yet it also achieves these better results in significantly less time. Of course, when an artist wants more control ZRemesher provides features such as local density management and curve flow orientation. Furthermore, a new and innovative feature of ZRemesher is its ability to perform local retopology to a specific part of the mesh while keeping all border vertex points welded to the rest of the model.
E-on software has released LumenRT GeoDesign, an add-on to connect its real-time visualisation tool LumenRT to ESRI’s procedural city-generation software, CityEngine.
Seamlessly integrated into ESRI CityEngine (the leading solution for City Planning and Urban Design), LumenRT GeoDesign adds rich natural elements including wind-blown plants and trees, moving vehicles, animated people, lights, water, and skies directly to CityEngine scenes. Then, with a single command, the entire scene is transformed into an immersive, interactive LiveCube™ allowing clients, customers, contractors, and colleagues to explore designs in vivid photorealistic 3D.