CG news

Corona Renderer 7 has received CoronaPhysicalMTL, a new "PBR-based material" designed to increase compatibility with other visualisation tools such as Substance 3D Collection and Quixel Mixer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyVGb5PnCb4 It includes clear coat parameters to recreate car paint and gloss parameters to recreate the surface properties of a tarnish, and comes with 35 new presets for common real-world materials. Inherited physical material is still available for backwards compatibility

Redshift, a powerful GPU-accelerated renderer designed to meet the specific requirements of modern high-performance rendering, is transitioning to a subscription-based distribution model beginning August 31, 2021. Subscriptions, which will only be available through Maxon's proprietary licensing system, will be "comparable" to current annual maintenance fees. Maxon also discontinued support for the existing Cinema 4D/ Redshift subscription package on the same date. There have been questions about

The release of 3DCoat 2021 from Pilgway brings a change in the pricing structure of 3DCoat, introducing new, cheaper options. The first of these is 3DCoatTextura, a new stripped down version of the software designed to texture models created in other DCC applications and available at a more affordable price. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uy7Hcrfq94&t=1s 3DCoatTextura and 3DCoat are available via a rental system in which users who rent the

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