CG news

Radeon ProRender 3.2 for Blender and Maya adds motion blur and warping to render character animation or cloth modelling with realistic blur. Previously, blur was only available when rendering camera motion or moving objects with a solid surface. The update also added the PRP Toon shader, a new node for creating non-photorealistic, cartoon-style renderings, in addition to the existing contour rendering system. Users can now choose

Chaos has introduced initial USD (Universal Scene Description) support for V-Ray 5 for Maya and V-Ray 5 for Houdini, linking the two powerful rendering modules to one of the fastest-growing file formats for visual effects. USD is originally a format developed by Pixar and designed to store the most common types of scene data - geometry, shaders, light sources, rigging, hair and so on. Consequently, artists

Pixar have unveiled the long-awaited RenderMan 24 with RenderMan XPU, a combined CPU and GPU rendering system. In the past, Blender integrated RenderMan - PRMan is a semi-official add-on developed by the Pixar engineering team and released together with RenderMan 20. It is still available on GitHub, but has not been updated for some time and does not support new features of RenderMan or Blender itself.

The Adobe Substance 3D collection of applications has been expanded to include new applications that are accelerated by NVIDIA RTX graphics. These include: - Substance 3D Stager, a new application for building, lighting and rendering photorealistic scenes. It allows artists to position and adjust objects in real-time. Interactive ray tracing, now accelerated on RTX GPUs, helps take the guesswork out of the equation. - Substance 3D

Maxon introduced Redshift 3.0.46, a key feature is a new colour management pipelayer. It supports the latest version of the OpenColorIO open standard (OCIO) and has built-in support for ACES colour coding, which is now becoming commonplace in visual effects pipelines. Implementation of the Redshift integration plug-ins varies: the Maya plug-in uses the OCIO 2-based colour management system introduced in Maya 2022, Cinema 4D users got

The G Scatter plugin is currently in beta testing, it allows you to draw vegetation such as grass in a Blender scene and comes with its own set of built-in 3D plant models. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Matsmw2NqR4 G Scatter gives users the ability to paint scattered objects and customize the results, using control options for properties such as density, scale and rotation. The plugin itself builds on Blender's new

3DF Zephyr 6.0 has a new Volume of Interest system that helps visualize very large datasets interactively, a new modular save structure, a Python console, and support for the Alembic file format. A number of structural changes have been made to make it easier to manage the huge datasets that photogrammetry can generate, especially when scanning the environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJj-MkZ8nOU The new experimental Volume of Interest (VOI)

U-Render 2021.6 for Cinema 4D has a redesigned depth of field system to support bokeh effects. The update also introduced initial support for integrated rendering in the new DirectX Cinema 4D preview window. U-Render promises the user true real-time rendering. The software is more like a game engine than a conventional standalone renderer with good support for basic Cinema 4D features, including MoGraph. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WWwfCKNIwk U-Render supports

CityEngine is a procedural tool for creating 3D city models. The software generates detailed city models based on simple procedural rules, importing data in standard file formats such as OBJ and DXF and exporting to formats such as FBX, Alembic and USD. Although designed for architects and urban planners, the software integrates with the ESRI ArcGIS platform - the software is also designed for entertainment content