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See how Chaos Cloud render in 3ds Max, Maya and more ...

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Chaos Group has unveiled its One-Click Cloud Rendering Service Chaos Cloud. It's new cloud rendering service designed to help artists and designers visualize anything they want, from anywhere. With one click, users can now tap into the unlimited power of the cloud to render immediately, hit deadlines and finish faster than ever before. Check out the video showing Chaos Cloud render in 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino with no hardware to configure and no virtual machines to set up.






Chaos Cloud is available now and accessible via a button within V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino, Cinema 4D, Revit, Modo, Houdini [beta] and SketchUp (Next and 3.6 editions). Learn more and register to get free Credit here!
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Disney buys 21st Century Fox with $71.3 billion deal

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The Walt Disney company officially took over the reins of the bulk of 21st Century Fox’s feature film production businesses and television creative units, ending a two-year saga that included a bidding war between Disney and Comcast for the company headed up by Robert Murdoch.

The closing of the historic acquisition was announced in a press release from Disney confirming that the $71.3 billion deal which now grants it ownership of Fox’s film and TV assets -- including Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox 2000 Pictures, Fox Family and Fox Animation; Fox’s TV’s creative units, Twentieth Century Fox Television, FX Productions and Fox21, FX Networks, National Geographic Partners, Fox Networks Group International and Star India, as well as Fox’s 30 percent stake in Hulu -- is complete.

“This is an extraordinary and historic moment for us -- one that will create significant long-term value for our company and our shareholders,” Disney chairman and CEO Robert A. Iger said in a statement. “Combining Disney’s and 21st Century Fox’s wealth of creative content and proven talent creates the preeminent global entertainment company, well positioned to lead in an incredibly dynamic and transformative era.”

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The Rookies 2019 call for entries is open

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ADELAIDE -- Sponsored by Autodesk, The Rookies has announced the call for entries to their global competition, the Rookie Awards 2019, which is open to amateur creatives in visual effects, animation, games, virtual reality, motion graphics and 3D visualization.

The final submission deadline is May 31st, 2019. The Rookie Awards offers artists a “stamp of approval” as they start their transition from amateur to professional, enabling them to have their work seen, graded, and commented on by industry heavyweights. Entrants will compete to win studio internships, educational scholarships and prizes.


Since 2009, The Rookies have helped place more than 100 artists in jobs across Asia, Canada, Europe, Oceania and the US. These artists have gone on to work on films (such as Wonder Woman, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Mummy, Iron Man, Captain America and The Avengers) and AAA level games (such as Hellblade, Far Cry and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor). “Autodesk is proud to sponsor The Rookies again this year,” said Diana Colella, VP, Media & Entertainment Business Strategy & Marketing, Autodesk. “I’m continuously amazed and inspired by the passion, imagination, and incredible talent of aspiring artists, and look forward to seeing how this next generation raises the bar even higher.”

“In conjunction with our 9th Awards, we are launching a completely new community platform which has been in planning and development for over a year now,” noted Andrew McDonald, co-founder, The Rookies. “Entrants and judges are going to experience an application like no other, and with this competitive edge will allow us to grow for years to come. The Rookies co-founder Alwyn Hunt added, “We are really proud of our judging panel this year, which has a strong female voice with more than 50 incredibly talented and trailblazing women in their fields.”

The official categories for 2019 are: 3D Animation, Concept Design & Illustration, Visual Effects, Game Design & Development, Immersive Media, 3D Motion Graphics, Product Visualization and Architectural Visualization. Film of the Year (Visual Effects, 2D Animation and 3D Animation), and Game of the Year (Console and PC, Immersive Media and Mobile).

Important Dates: March 7, 2019: Open for Submissions; May 31, 2019: Submissions Closed; June 30, 2019: Finalists Announced; July 16, 2019: Winners Announced.

The Rookies is supported by some of the world’s smartest companies: Autodesk, Shutterstock, Unity, Epic Games, Allegorithic, Foundry, Blackmagic Design, Chaos Group, Yellowdog, SideFX, Pixologic and Wacom.

The following production studios are offering a range of fully paid internships and training programs to category winners: Weta Digital, Animal Logic, Polygon Pictures, Axis Animation, Electric Theatre Collective, CVD Studios, RodeoFX, NetherRealm, Monolith, Ninja Theory, BVN, Sarofsky. throughout Asian, Canada, Europe, Oceania, and the USA. For more please check https://www.therookies.co/

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The Heretic - The CGI film showing power of Unity

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At GDC 2019, Unity has unveiled another breathtaking demo which showing the power of Unity Engine: The Heretic. The film was created by Unity’s award-winning Demo team, who is creators of Adam and Book of the Dead. It’s a real-time cinematic running at 30 fps at 1440p on a consumer-class desktop PC.




Unity said The Heretic uses a broad range of Unity’s graphics features, including every possible aspect of the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). In 2019, it is possible to achieve close to cinematic visuals in real-time with the help of Unity’s built-in area lights, high-quality shadows, volumetrics, reflections, advanced materials and more. HDRP is now a fully featured, production-ready working environment.

The cinematic look of The Heretic demo was achieved with the latest version of Unity’s post-processing features: motion blur, bloom, depth of field, film grain, color grading, and Panini projection. In Unity 2019.1, they have been upgraded to be more physically correct and are now deeply integrated with HDRP.

The Visual Effect Graph is used throughout the project for various effects, in order to achieve increased volumetric ambience and to augment existing code-driven VFX.



The Heretic is lit entirely by real-time lights. This meant super fast iteration for the artists, while maintaining a high quality bar and performance. The Demo team is working on a probe-based lighting solution to solve use cases currently not covered. A first iteration of the new system solution was applied in the Megacity demo and is being extended for the full version of The Heretic.



One of the biggest artistic and technical challenges is creating photorealistic, animated humans. The Heretic is Unity’s first attempt to tackle this, and is scoped very conservatively with the primary purpose to establish a pipeline and a bar of quality.

The Demo team’s pipeline combines 3D and 4D scanning in order to obtain both a high-quality set of textures and poses, and believable, realistic movement. It is based on the services of commercially available vendors: Infinite Realities for the high-quality scanning, Russian 3D Scanner for highly accurate data pre-processing, and Snappers for facial rigging.

The 4D scanned data, which preserves the realism of the actor’s performance, is supplemented by bringing back the micro surface details, wrinkles, pores, etc., obtained through the 3D scanning. This approach gives better results than using any of the two techniques individually. The pipeline for the reconstruction of the digital human was completed by attaching the eyelashes, eyebrows, stubble and hair with the help of dedicated attachment tools. The shaders for skin, eyes, teeth, and hair are based on HDRP.

The Demo team is preparing a package with the tech and shaders used for the digital human in the film so you will be able to use them in your own projects.

You can get Unity Free version 2019.1 beta here!

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Autodesk 3ds Max 2020

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Autodesk is going to release 3ds Max 2020

Highlights features should be:

- Chamfer modifier improvements
- Enhancements and Changes for Alembic, Civil View, Modeling, Performance

What was new in 2019.3 Update

*Interactive ActiveShade viewport
- Improvements to ActiveShade let you interact and render simultaneously in the same viewport. Your rendering workflow is extended so you can now see the final result of your adjustments as you make them.

*Revit version compatibility
- You no longer need to upgrade your file when importing a Revit 2018 file, provided you have 3ds Max 2018 and Revit Interoperability for 3ds Max installed.

*Alembic interoperability with Maya
- Custom Attributes from Maya are grouped to support attributes on transforms and shapes, and vertex color sets are compatible with Maya import and export.

*OSL Map
-Improvements include improved bracket highlighting, syntax highlighting, and better docking. Viewport support supports OSL features such as node properties and improved Bump map support.

*Revit import
-Importing Revit is twice as fast as before (depending on the dataset), lights imported from Revit (via FBX/RVT) now work and render correctly, and the Import dialog has been improved so it is easier to understand and use.

there are no much change but no worry we have something really cool coming to 3ds Max: tyFlow.

Read more about Autodesk 3ds Max 2020 new features here!    [post_ads_2]

Foundry launches Modo 13 with support for GPU-rendering with AMD Radeon ProRender

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London, 26 March 2019: Foundry, the leading developer of software for the media and entertainment and digital design industries, today launches Modo 13.0, the first in a series of three installments of the highly anticipated Modo 13 Series.


Building on its status as the industry’s leading 3D modeling tool, the Modo 13 Series strengthens Modo’s robust animation, modeling and rendering capabilities with sizeable feature additions to boost artist creativity and allow for richer content creation and sharing.

Modo 13 introduces native GPU rendering with its first iteration of “AMD Radeon™ ProRender alongside AMD’s popular denoising features. This hardware-agnostic, physically-based rendering engine leverages open industry standards to utilize a variety of GPU and CPU hardware.



Shane Griffith, Senior Product Manager, Foundry, comments:

“We are dedicated to empowering all types of digital artists in their quest to deliver creative results, faster. The Modo 13 Series will further these abilities within design creation workflows, visualization, and animation with a number of improvements focused on enhancing the creative flow.”


Andrej Zdravkovic, Corporate Vice President of Software, AMD, comments:


"As an expert in the field of graphics processing, AMD partners with leading software innovators to push the boundaries of world-class visualization. Engineering teams from both AMD and Foundry work side-by-side to develop and continuously refine the integration of hardware and software applications. With this close collaboration, we're able to accelerate the creative process and power ground-breaking rendering solutions."


With Modo 13, character artists can now non-destructively control layers of animation or easily override existing actions, while masking with the new Animation Layer system allows for individual aspects of an animation to be isolated and uniquely defined.


Other key features for Modo 13.0 include:

Modo Bridge: This feature now supports Unity and adds the same functionality that was present in the Unreal Bridge through a shared interface to streamline interaction with real-time scene creation.

MeshFusion adds Kit Fusing: Artists now have the ability to define only a portion of a mesh to be used for creating boolean operations.

Arrays: A powerful new extension to Modo’s procedural system that allows for advanced storage, manipulation, and output of data in a variety of forms, further enabling what technical artists can engineer in Modo.

For more information, visit Modo's latest release page


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Foundry released new update of Texture painting tool Mari 4.5

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Foundry, the leading developer of software for the media and entertainment and digital design industries, today releases Mari 4.5. This latest Mari update introduces a transformative Materials System that allows artists to create high-volume assets faster and more cost-effectively, in the same industry-standard package used for complex hero assets.


Until now, artists would go through a series of manual steps to set up procedural layers across their channels, in order to achieve a material-driven base look for their assets. This new workflow enables artists to rapidly block out the look of an asset using material presets, and achieve the same result with just a few drag-and-drop actions. This way they can use Mari to perfect the initial art direction of an asset in record time.


In addition, Mari 4.5 allows artists to quickly import and use thousands of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) texture sets with the Material Ingest Tool. This creates the presets, sets up the controls, and loads everything into Mari so it’s ready to use, allowing artists to continually grow their material library.


Sharing isolated material set-ups across teams is also easier and reduces the amount of repetitive set-up required, as everything needed to replicate the material gets compressed, along with source images, into a single file. This eliminates the artists’ need to manage multiple files to share a Mari material.


With this update, Mari becomes the complete painting package for artists, enabling them to create both hero assets and high-volume, background assets, as well as everything in-between.


Rory Woodford, Product Manager, Mari, comments:

“This latest release is a game-changer for Mari, as the Materials System creates new possibilities for texturing artists. Mari 4.5 offers the best of both worlds: we are empowering artists to create high-volume assets far more rapidly and cost-effectively, while also giving them access to the beloved package they are used to, to create complex hero assets. Mari 4.5 is part of our ongoing mission to improve the tools that artists depend upon to create increasingly innovative work on shorter schedules.”


Other additions brought by Mari 4.5 are simple layering (artists are able to control the material properties, visibility of each component, and global material visibility, from a single area of the interface for their entire project), material grouping (a group with multi-channel layer behaviors that allows artists to apply adjustments to material streams independently of the rest of the layers in the channel), a new Arnold shader provided by Autodesk and an updated node graph UX that supports multiple output ports for additional arbitrary data streams, unlocking more complex workflows.

Introducing a new Arnold shader

Do more with the node graph

Multi-output group node support


Mari 4.5 is available for purchase on Foundry’s website and via accredited resellers.

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"Project Vincent" Digital Human Project in Unreal Engine by GIANTSTEP

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Seoul, Korea based creative studio GIANTSTEP has shown the Studio's RnD Project called Project Vincent. The aim of this project is creating a digital human as being realistic with a real-time engine. "Vincent" is able to move bodily in real time and has ultra-realistic techniques, made by Unreal Engine.

"Vincent” which is made in a way to be similar as real human including emotional expression, hairs and skins is now developing to communicate with people by grafting AI. This can be useful in a variety of ways for creating contents and videos that move and respond in real time on various devices.

"Project Vincent" shows an equivalent quality as an existing time-consuming rendering method, and even be able to close-up for realistic expression. Moreover, it has been reached a high technological advance moving in real time with Unreal Engine.



"Project Vincent" is a new paradigm to open up the bright future outlook of digital human being.
GIANTSTEP Inc., established in 2008 in Seoul, Korea, is a creative studio that provides the best digital media production for various clients’ requests related to visual image production by conducting research, planning, consulting and producing display-based images in both analog and digital images.
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Water Simulation Effects in Houdini

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Igor Zanic and REBELWAY announced the new training course: Water Simulation Effects in Houdini. This course is designed for people who have a good understanding of CG and Houdini and are interested in gaining a full understanding how to create realistic water simulation in Houdini. After the course you will be able to create 3 different water simulations: Rock splash, Whale jump, Beach shore.


Each of these projects will teach the student various technique onhow to approach 3 completely different water simulation and how to create realistic white water for each one of them and to solve all kinds of problems.
Once the simulations and mesh generation is done we will then look at how to render them using mantra while exploring various lighting, and shading techniques.
Once the render is done we will take a look at how to composite everything using Nuke.

It is required that the student have a very good CG background and an understanding of Houdini and it recommended for students who took the Introduction To Houdini For FX Artists. It is crucial to have good hardware to be able to sim and render highres water simulation (at least an i7 with 32gb memory or higher). Get in here!

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Unreal Engine 4.22 is now Available with new Real-Time Ray Tracer

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Unreal Engine 4.22 continues to push the boundaries of photorealism in real-time environments whether you are making immersive and engaging games, broadcasting live television, visualizing groundbreaking products, or creating the next blockbuster film. We don't believe significant advances in technology should result in increases in development time for you to take advantage of them, so we have once again set our sights on making workflows for users from all disciplines even faster and more accessible.

Unreal Engine delivers unbridled power to build realistic worlds with the most accurate real-time lighting and shadowing effects - including dynamic global illumination, pixel perfect reflections and physically accurate refraction - thanks to real-time ray tracing on Nvidia RTX graphics cards. Soft area shadows and ambient occlusion provide the finishing touches to ground your scenes firmly in reality.

Our vast suite of virtual production features enables you to speed up your workflow on set with the ability to capture and record complex live performances and composite them in real-time. Entire teams can work in concert to orchestrate and direct scenes live using the new multi-user editing feature.

Every second spent waiting to see your latest creation come to life has a cost - a cost to you, a cost to your users, a cost to your vision - so we strive to make Unreal Engine easier and faster to go from iteration to iteration with each release so you can spend more time tweaking and polishing the experience for consumers. Live Coding brings Live++ support to Unreal Engine so you can go from idea to reality in seconds while you are running your project. Build times have been optimized across the board making iteration times for incremental builds up to 3x faster and freeing up valuable resources in your pipeline.

Features are:

  *Real-Time Ray Tracing and Path Tracing (Early Access)
  *Real-Time Ray Tracer
  -Soft area shadowing for Directional, Point, Spot, and Rect light types.
  -Accurate reflections for objects in and outside of the camera frustum.
  -Soft ambient occlusion to ground objects in the scene.
  -Physically correct refraction and reflection results for translucent surfaces.
  -Indirect lighting from dynamic global illumination from light sources.

  unbiased Path Tracer
High-Level Rendering Refactor
- Mesh Drawing Pipeline Refactor
  *C++ Iteration Time Improvements
  *Virtual Production Pipeline Improvements
  *Sequencer Improvements
- Composure Sequencer Track
- Layered Animation Workflows in Sequencer


  *Animation Budgeting System (Early Access)
  *Animation Sharing Plugin
  *Preview Scene Settings Improvements


Download

See full features list and download Unreal Engine 4.22 here!

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How Houdini was used to create procedural city for Marvel’s Spider-Man

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David Santiago's presentation in GDC 2019 about how Houdini helped Insomniac Games author the ground, buildings, traffic, vignettes and crimes, props, and impostors, audio, lighting and more for Marvel's Spider-Man.


Houdini 17.5 Features with Houdini Highlight

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Adobe’s 2019 CC Latest Update Lets You Remove Objects from Video with One Click

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NAB 2019 Show is coming to Las Vegas and Adobe announced the latest release of Adobe Creative Cloud with new feature update for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Character Animator and Audition.

The most highlight feature is the After Effects is finally getting content-aware fill feature - one of the most anticipated features to make its way over from Photoshop. T

Content-aware fill works in Adobe After Effects CC the same way it does in Photoshop — you mask out the part of a picture you’d like to remove, and then with one click the software analyzes the image — or, in this case, every frame of a video — to determine the best way to fill the resulting gap.



AE now includes a completely rebuilt Expression editor with the kind of productivity features that are familiar to coders — autocomplete, inline error messages, color-coding and highlighting. “This is a full, rich code editor,” Nece said. “It makes it so much easier to visualize the structure of what you’ve written, how it’s built, and what you need to have in place to make it work and power very complex compositions.”

In a minor but welcome tweak, Adobe has reworked motion blur in AE so that blur is reflected in the composition viewer as soon as the switch is flipped to turn it on — you no longer have to render to see the results.


In Adobe Premiere Pro CC, editors now have a new way to look at their project panel — Freeform View. Aimed at visual thinkers, the new view allows everything in the media bin to be precisely organized on screen, sorted into a given order, arranged in groups, or stacked in piles. Adobe Premiere Pro Product Manager Francis Crossman suggested that editors working in different roles might prefer different visual representations of their project, and Freeform View will allow, say, the assistant editor to have a different vantage on the bin than the lead editor.

Adobe Audition CC is getting a new punch-and-roll recording mode that allows voice performers to correct errors or simply re-record takes without losing the flow of their performance. Also, the utility of Audition’s auto-ducking has been extended so that it now works with environmental, ambient and natural sounds. The auto-ducking is persistent across both Audition and Premiere Pro, allowing nondestructive workflow that incorporates both applications.

Adobe Audition Project Manager Durin Gleaves said the company has been working on keyboard-driven workflow, adding the ability to move clips without grabbing the mouse, using ALT-arrow key combinations instead. Another keyboard shortcut zooms to just clips that are currently selected, making them take up the entirety of the timeline view. And keyframe values including volume, pan and other effect parameters can now be edited manually by right-clicking on the keyframe and typing in a specific value.

And Character Animator has some new tricks, including a dynamic link to After Effects. A new visual tagging system allows elements of a character to be quickly and easily logged — head, eyes, arms, etc. — as they are imported from Photoshop — and Twitch integration gives users who want to stream live via Twitch new character triggers that enable paid audience interactions.

NAB Show, the world’s largest annual conference and expo for professionals who create, manage, and distribute entertainment across all platforms, will host the renowned Creative Masters Series, as well as a Main Stage session and special programs for content creators. NAB 2019 will be from April 6 to 11, 2019 in Las Vegas

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AI will be the power of Autodesk Flame 2020?

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NAB will be much more interestinteresting for VFX, Compositing artist as yesterday Adobe unveiled new After Effect with cool functionality https://www.cgrecord.net/2019/04/adobes-2019-cc-latest-update-lets-you.html, and today, Autodesk announced Flame 2020, the latest release of the Flame Family of integrated visual effects (VFX), color grading, look development and finishing system for artists. They will makse showcase in NAB show this year also.

New computer vision, photogrammetry and machine-learning techniques have been incorporated in Flame, allowing the forthcoming version of the software to extract motion vectors, Z depth and 3D normals from image sequences.. The Flame 2020 release adds built-in machine learning analysis algorithms to isolate and modify common objects in moving footage, dramatically accelerating VFX and compositing workflows


“Machine learning has enormous potential for content creators, particularly in the areas of compositing and image manipulation where AI can be used to track and isolate objects in a scene to pull rough mattes quickly,” said Steve McNeill, Director Flame Family Products, Autodesk, Media and Entertainment. “Flame has a reputation as the de facto finishing system of choice in the deadline driven world of professional production, and this latest 2020 release significantly extends creative flexibility and performance for our artists.”

Products in the Flame Family 2020 line will include a Z Depth Map Generator that analyzes live-action scenes and generates depth maps that can be used to apply effects based on distance from camera in color-grading or look development.


With Refraction feature, a 3D object can now refract, distorting background objects based on its surface material characteristics. To achieve convincing transparency through glass, ice, windshields and more, the index of refraction can be set to an accurate approximation of real-world material light refraction.

A new normal map generator has been trained to automatically recognize human faces, Autodesk said, which will have implications for color correction, relighting, retouching and beauty work centered on human performers. And a new refraction feature allows a 3D object to create distortion in the background of a scene based on its material characteristics.

A productivity enhancement called Automatic Background Reactor is only available on Linux, but aims to keep projects moving by triggering background rendering automatically whenever a shot has been modified. Flame, Flare and Flame Assist 2020 will also support Open FX plug-ins as batch/BFX nodes or directly on the Flame timeline, as well as for Cryptomatte rendering.

Simpler UX in Core Areas— A new expanded full width UX layout for MasterGrade, Image surface, and several Map User interfaces, are now available, allowing for easier discoverability and accessibility to key tools.

‘Manager’ for Action, Image, Gmask—A simplified list schematic view, Manager makes it easier to add, organize and adjust video layers and objects in the 3D environment.

Licensing has been tweaked as well, with monthly, yearly, and three-year single-user options available for Linux. Customers on single-user licenses for Mac will be able to transfer their license to Linux, Autodesk said.

Flame, Flare™, Flame Assist and Lustre 2020 will be available on April 16, 2019 at no additional cost to customers with a current Flame Family 2019 subscription. A one-year subscription to Flame is $4,205.

This latest update will be showcased at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 8-11 between 9:00am-5:00pm in a demo suite at the Renaissance Hotel.

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Creator of Cinema 4D - Maxon buys Redshift Render

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Maxon, industry-leading developer of professional 3D modeling, animation and rendering solutions, today announced the acquisition of Redshift Rendering Technologies, Inc., developers of the Redshift rendering engine. Redshift is a powerful and flexible GPU-accelerated renderer, built to meet the specific demands of contemporary high-end production. Tailored to support creative individuals and studios of every size, Redshift offers an extensive suite of features that make rendering large or complicated 3D projects remarkably faster than traditional rendering solutions. Redshift is already available as plugin rendering solution for Maxon’s award-winning Cinema 4D and other industry-standard 3D applications.

>> Redshift Blog

“Rendering can be the most time consuming and demanding aspect of 3D content creation,” said David McGavran, CEO of Maxon. “Redshift’s speed and efficiency combined with Cinema 4D’s responsive workflow make it a perfect match for our portfolio.”

“We’ve always admired Maxon and the Cinema 4D community, and are thrilled to be a part of it,” said Nicolas Burtnyk, Co-founder and CEO, Redshift Rendering Technologies. “We are looking forward to working closely with Maxon, collaborating on seamless integration of Redshift into Cinema 4D and continuing to push the boundaries of what's possible with production-ready GPU rendering.”

Redshift has quickly made a name for itself becoming an indispensable rendering solution for respected companies like Technicolor, Polygon Pictures, Digital Domain, DHX, Rainmaker, Encore Hollywood and Blizzard. Noteworthy projects where Redshift has been employed for VFX and motion graphics include Black Panther, Aquaman, Captain Marvel, Rampage, American Gods, Gotham, The Expanse and many more.

Check out some shortfilms done by using Redshift



Press Briefings at the 2019 NAB Show


At the 2019 NAB Show, both companies will be present to brief the media at the annual Maxon press luncheon, taking place April 8th at the Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel; 12 noon – 1:00p.m. The event will include an overview and time for a Q&A. (see press contact details below)

Immediate Effects


  -Redshift pricing will remain unchanged. Customers can continue to purchase Redshift through their usual channels.
  -Redshift is and will remain available for Maya, 3dsmax, Houdini and Katana. The announced development of a plugin for Blender will continue as planned. Additional integrations may be considered in the future.
  -Release plans and development for Redshift 3.0 will not be affected.
  -Cinema 4D will also continue to support other third-party render engines through its plugin architecture.

The Perfect Strategic Addition

The combination of Cinema 4D and Redshift has already been winning over designers and production companies for many reasons including:

Ease of Use: In the complex world of 3D content creation, Cinema 4D is widely recognized as the easiest of the 3D packages to pick up and learn. Compared to other renderers, Redshift is easy to use, making rendering easier, faster, and more efficient. The combination of Cinema 4D and Redshift will bring an unprecedented accessibility and efficiency to 3D production.

Stability: Both Cinema 4D and Redshift are recognized for their stability and production reliability. In the deadline and budget constrained post production world, stability and performance are an essential component.

Speed: Redshift is a high-performance production-quality renderer that supports biased rendering techniques for incredibly fast, noise-free renders. Cinema 4D is known for its inspiring and efficient workflow. Designers have discovered using the two products together saves time and money and unleashes artists’ creative potential.

Photo-Realistic Results: Redshift is not just fast, it also provides useful features for remarkably photo-realistic imagery. The results are comparable to those rendered by unbiased rendering engines.

Interactivity: Redshift’s RenderView Interactive Preview Region (IPR) allows you to adjust the settings as you work on the scenes with no downtime. RenderView reflects changes to a scene in close to real-time.

Integration: Redshift comes with a full suite of powerful features that already integrate extremely well with Cinema 4D.

Customer Perspectives

“The Cinema 4D community has been behind Redshift since day one. It's sheer speed, production-proven features, and killer integration into C4D have made it an indispensable part of my workflow.”
- Chad Ashley Creative Director, Greyscalegorilla (https://greyscalegorilla.com/)

“With Redshift’s robust feature set, ease of use, and amazing rendering speed and quality, Cinema 4D with Redshift have become our CG toolset of choice for almost every project.”
- Matt Silverman, Executive Creative Director, Swordfish San Francisco (http://www.swordfish-sf.com/)
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Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve 16

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Blackmagic Design today announced DaVinci Resolve 16, a major update that adds a revolutionary new cut page specifically designed for editors that need to work quickly and on tight deadlines. In addition, DaVinci Resolve 16 includes dozens of other new features for professional editors, colorists, VFX artists and sound engineers. DaVinci Resolve 16 public beta is available for download now from the Blackmagic Design web site.

Designed specifically for editors working on high end fast turn around work such as television commercials and even news cutting, the cut page is all about speed. It’s an alternate edit page with a streamlined interface and revolutionary new tools that will help customers work faster than ever. The cut page lets customers import, edit, trim, add transitions, titles, automatically match color, mix audio and more. Whether you’re delivering for broadcast or for YouTube, the cut page has everything customers need to get the job done, all in one place. Plus, the regular edit page is still available so customers can switch between edit and cut pages to change editing style right in the middle of a job.

The cut page challenges the traditional way of working with innovative yet familiar concepts such as source tape mode and an A/B trim tool. Two modern features that are rooted in the past. The cut page isn’t about simplification, it’s about removing the things customers don’t need and building powerful, professional tools that help customers work more quickly. And, sometimes, it means borrowing the things that were great about the past and bringing them into the future.

Back in the days of tape, finding a clip was easy because customers could just spool up and down the tape to see their media and select shots. Today, finding the right clip in a bin with hundreds of files is slow. With source tape, customers no longer have to waste time hunting through bins to find the clip they need. Simply click on the source tape button and all of the clips in their bin appear in the viewer as a single long "tape". This makes it easy to scrub through all of the shots, find the parts they want, and quickly edit them to the timeline. It’s an old fashioned concept that’s completely modernized to help customers find the shots they need fast.

Zooming in and out and scrolling timelines is extremely slow. The new cut page features an innovative dual timeline so customers never have to zoom in or out again. The upper timeline shows customers the entire program while the lower timeline shows customers the current work area. Both timelines are fully functional, allowing customers to move and trim clips in whichever timeline is most convenient. Want to move a clip all the way to the end of a program? Simply pick it up from the lower timeline and drag it to the end of the upper timeline to move it down the edit.



The new DaVinci Neural Engine uses state of the art deep neural networks and learning, along with artificial intelligence to power new features such as speed warp motion estimation for retiming, super scale for up-scaling footage, auto color and color matching, facial recognition and more. The DaVinci Neural Engine is entirely cross-platform and uses the latest GPU innovations for AI and deep learning to provide unparalleled performance and quality. The DaVinci Neural Engine provides simple tools to solve complex, repetitive and time consuming problems. For example, it enables facial recognition to automatically sort and organize clips into bins based on people in the shot.

DaVinci Resolve 16 also introduces powerful new features that customers have asked for across the rest of the application. New adjustment clips let customers apply effects and grades to clips on the timeline below, quick export can be used to upload projects to YouTube and Vimeo from anywhere in the application, and new GPU accelerated scopes provide more technical monitoring options than before. The massively updated Fairlight page adds elastic wave alignment so customers can stretch waveforms to precisely sync dialog replacement with video, immersive 3D audio support, new bus tracks, automation previews, dialog sweetening tools and even more FairlightFX.

DaVinci Resolve Studio 16 features major improvements to existing ResolveFX, along with several new plugins that editors and colorists will like. There are new ResolveFX plugins for adding vignettes, drop shadows, removing objects, adding analog noise and damage, chromatic aberration, stylizing video and more. There are also improvements to the scanline, beauty, face refinement, blanking fill, warper, dead pixel fixer and colorspace transformation plugins. Plus, customers can now view and edit ResolveFX keyframes from the timeline curve editor on the edit page or from the keyframe panel on the color page.


"The new cut page in DaVinci Resolve 16 is the first professional editing interface designed to help television commercial and other high end editors meet super tight deadlines on fast turn around projects," said Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design CEO. "It’s exciting because we’ve designed a whole new high performance non-linear workflow! The cut page is all about power and speed. Plus, editors that need to work on more complex projects can still use the regular edit page. DaVinci Resolve 16 gives different editors the choice to work the way they want!"


DaVinci Resolve 16 Features

  -DaVinci Neural Engine for AI and deep learning features.
  -Dual timeline to edit and trim without zooming and scrolling.
  -Source tape to review all clips as if they were a single tape.
  -Trim interface to view both sides of an edit and trim.
  -Intelligent edit modes to auto sync clips and edit.
  -Timeline review playback speed based on clip length.
  -Built in tools for retime, stabilization and transform.
  -Render and upload directly to YouTube and Vimeo.
  -Direct media import via buttons.
  -Scalable interface for working on laptop screens.
  -Create projects with different frame rates and resolutions.
  -Apply effects to multiple clips at the same time.
  -DaVinci Neural Engine detects faces and auto creates bins.
  -Frame rate conversions and motion estimation.
  -Cut and edit page image stabilization.
  -Curve editor ease in and out controls.
  -Tape style audio scrubbing with pitch correction.
  -Re-encode only changed files for faster rendering.
  -Collaborate remotely with Frame.io integration.
  -Improved GPU performance for Fusion 3D operations.
  -Cross platform GPU accelerated tools.
  -Accelerated mask operations including B-Spline and bitmap.
  -Improved planar and tracker performance.
  -Faster user and smart cache.
  -GPU accelerated scopes with advanced technical monitoring.
  -Custom and HSL curves now feature histogram overlay.
  -DaVinci Neural Engine auto color and shot match.
  -Synchronize SDI output to viewer zoom.
  -Mix and master immersive 3D audio.
  -Elastic wave audio alignment and retiming.
  -Bus tracks with automation on timeline.
  -Foley sampler, frequency analyzer, dialog processor, FairlightFX.
  -500 royalty free foley sounds effects.
  -Share markers and notes in collaboration workflows.
  -Individual user cache for collaborative projects.
  -Resolve FX plugins with timeline and keyframes.

Availability and Price
DaVinci Resolve 16 public beta is available now for download from the Blackmagic Design web site www.blackmagicdesign.com.


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Unity Teams with NVIDIA to Deliver Real-Time Ray-Tracing

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Unity Technologies, creator of the Unity real-time 3D development platform, announced it is working closely with NVIDIA to offer production-focused early access for real-time ray-tracing in the High Definition Render Pipeline with an optimized preview solution available for customers in the second half of 2019. Once thought impossible to achieve, performant real-time ray-tracing delivers, via the NVIDIA RTX platform, photorealistic image quality and lighting for any task where visual fidelity is essential, such as for design, engineering, or marketing, at a fraction of the time of offline rendering solutions. The technology provides a key advantage to creators because it mimics the physical properties of light, allowing developers to make and dynamically alter creations that blur the line between real-time and reality.

Join Unity Artist Group


“As part of our commitment to best-in-class visual fidelity graphics, we rolled out the preview of the High Definition Render Pipeline last year -- a highly-optimized, state-of-the-art raster-based solution capable of achieving stunning graphics in real-time on consumer hardware. We built HDRP with the future in mind and today we’re excited to announce that we are working with NVIDIA to adopt its RTX real-time ray-tracing capabilities so we could bring this technology to all,” said Natalya Tatarchuk, Vice President of Graphics, Unity Technologies. “Real-time ray-tracing moves real-time graphics significantly closer to realism, opening the gates to global rendering effects never before possible in the real-time domain.”



To highlight what is achievable with real-time ray-tracing, Unity and NVIDIA collaborated with the BMW Group to showcase the 2019 BMW 8 Series Coupe, recently lauded as “Design of the Year” by Automobile Magazine, in a demo called “Reality vs Illusion: Unity Real-time Ray-tracing.” Rendered in real-time in Unity, viewers are shown a real car and a version of the car powered by Unity and NVIDIA; the dazzling array of lights and visual fidelity makes the vehicles indistinguishable from one another.

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For situations that demand maximum photorealism and the highest visual fidelity, ray-tracing provides reflections and accurate dynamic computations for global lighting. This more accurately demonstrates the physical properties of a surface and creates lights and shadows that mimic how they would appear in real life. Real-world applications for ray-tracing within the automotive industry include the power to create and rapidly iterate on lifelike marketing stills and videos that are near-film quality.

In engineering and design, real-time ray-tracing’s ability to faithfully recreate real-world materials and lighting scenarios unlocks the capabilities to identify design flaws, such as dangerous reflections or blind spots in a car’s design, and address them before going into production.


“Until NVIDIA RTX, real-time ray-tracing was perpetually on the horizon. Now millions of developers working in Unity can achieve amazing graphics with lightning speed,” said Bob Pette, Vice President, Professional Visualization, NVIDIA. “Unity’s plug-and-play resources for developers and popularity with brands large and small make its users a natural audience to take advantage of RTX ray-tracing capabilities.”

Unity exists to empower success of the world’s creators with the most accessible and powerful real-time 3D development and monetization platform. Games and experiences made with Unity have reached more than 3 billion devices worldwide this year and were installed more than 29 billion times in the last 12 months. For more information on Unity’s Automotive offerings, visit the Unity for Automotive & Transportation Website. See the Breakdown here!

Free Forest Bundle Model of Tree with 4K texture

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The team behind student movie Alter ’49 has shared a free pack that includes some of the production-ready assets they created for their upcoming student short film included:
  -17 assets in .OBJ format
  -4K textures (Diffuse, Gloss, Normal, Opacity)
  -LOD versions
  -Optimized for large-scale scenes
  -Playful silhouettes without needles
  -Absolutely FREE CC0 license

Download


Download the pack from the Gumroad store. Also don't forget to check Tree Texture 4K
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How V-Ray was used to create sturning Automotive CGI Rendering

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Recom Farmhouse Teamed up with Alessandra Kila. The London studio came up with a custom process to speed up the lighting simulation for ultimate creative flexibility using V-Ray for Autodesk Maya.


"For this project I have imagined a series of site-specific art installations that experiment with the materiality of light and with the emotional effects of luminosity. Within the journey from one installation to another, the BMW 7 is incorporated in these installations, becoming itself a light sculpture."– Alessandra Kila.


Simulating light in volumetric space is challenging enough, and quick previewing of iterations fast enough as to not inhibit the creative process raises further issues. In order to deliver such ambitious images, we developed an intricate technical framework within the CGI software. This custom lighting rig can abstract the visual effect of using a fully physical lighting simulation, but render in a fraction of the time, allowing creative freedom and experimentation. For the final rendering we used the fully physical lighting model for accuracy and photorealism

The team called on Alessandra’s strong experience with still life art photography to set up varied and subtle lighting for depth and believability in the car and environment. A myriad of tiny details, such as effects of bleeding and darkening, give a natural look, along with elements of photographed neon tubes and illuminated screens. Further lighting directed the balance of warmth and cold in the images.

To create the required atmosphere, she drew on her ongoing exploration of the use of haze to soften light. Here, the haziness carries the light and colour that are central to the project. You can see full detailed article here

Credits

Client: BMW
Creative Supervision BMW: Florian Hartmann
Creative Direction BMW Group Design: Julia Obermeyer
Concept & Art Direction: Alessandra Kila
CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Carlos Pecino, Anna Toropova / Recom Farmhouse
Post Artists: Pepê Alram, Kate Brown, Riikka Eiro, Maria Luisa Calosso / Recom Farmhouse


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London Symphony Orchestra - Roots and Origins

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As a part of new season campaign for London Symphony Orchestra, Lukas Vojir & Alexa Sirbu created a film driven by motion capture of Sir Simon Rattle for Superunion by using Houdini. Expressing the enormous power and complexity of the orchestra and tracing it back to a single seed.


Music: Nimrod' from Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, ‘Enigma’, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
Some Still Images
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Download Unity 2019.1

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Unity Technologies, creator of the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, today announced that Unity 2019.1 is now available to creators worldwide. Unity 2019.1 includes almost 300 new features and improvements, including powerful, production-ready versions of the Lightweight Render Pipeline, the Burst Compiler, and the Shader Graph, which are helping creators and teams of all sizes more easily build high-fidelity, high-performance experiences on the widest range of platforms available today. Unity 2019.1 is available to download from the Unity Store.

“With the release of Unity 2019.1, we are continuing to deliver on our promise of making Unity the most powerful and accessible real-time 3D development platform, regardless of team size or skill level,” said Brett Bibby, vice preside495of engineering, Unity Technologies. “Powered by production-ready versions of the Lightweight Render Pipeline, and the Burst Compiler from the Data-Oriented Tech Stack, Unity 2019.1 will help further expand our leadership in mobile, while also pushing the capabilities of our platform to provide even greater support for high-performance, high-fidelity creations.”

Unity currently powers more than 45% of the top 1000 mobile games. Innovators in the world of mobile continue to use Unity to engage audiences and entertain them on the widest range of platforms. Upcoming titles include Disney Sorcerer’s Arena (Glu Mobile), which uses the Lightweight Render Pipeline to capture the look of storied Disney characters, and Call of Duty: Mobile (Activision and Tencent), a new free-to-play game built in Unity that brings together maps, modes, weapons, and characters from across the Call of Duty franchise.

The release of Unity 2019.1 expands capabilities in the world of mobile development and introduces new key features and improvements including:

  -Lightweight Render Pipeline (Release) - now production ready, a pre-built Scriptable Render Pipeline that is optimized for delivering high graphics performance. It’s scalable to mobile platforms, as well as high-end consoles and PCs.
  -Burst Compiler (Release) - the Data-Oriented Tech Stack unlocks high-performance, multithreaded capabilities on Unity that scale all the way from the high-end to the low-end platforms, empowering developers to achieve high-end performance faster. The Burst Compiler is a component which compiles Entity Component System C# Jobs to leverage comparable performance to hand-optimized custom solutions.
  -Shader Graph (Release) - artists now have the power to easily customize object surfaces without writing any code through a real-time drag-and-drop interface, encouraging experimentation and speeding up the iteration process.
  -Mobile Adaptive Performance (Preview) - building on Samsung’s GameSDK, Unity and Samsung have partnered to help developers optimize their mobile game experiences on the Samsung Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Fold, balancing hardware demands to provide a better user experience on mobile. More handsets will be added in the future.
  -Unity Physics (Preview) - Unity has partnered with Havok to build a world-class physics system on top of the Data-Oriented Tech Stack. The new physics system, Unity Physics, is available now, while Havok Physics will be available in June.
  -AR Foundation Framework (Preview) - will allow developers to build once and deploy across ARKit and ARCore. It also helps them overcome some of the common challenges of AR development, such as anchoring digital objects in the real world, the visual fidelity of those digital objects, and more, saving hours of time and resources.

Unity 2019 continues the biggest evolution in the history of Unity, and the latest innovations were on display at GDC 2019. Creators looking to get the most out of modern GPUs were shown The Heretic, the latest real-time cinematic from the Unity Demo Team. It utilizes the High Definition Render Pipeline, along with other off-the-shelf Unity technologies, to demonstrate what is possible today in Unity. Additionally, Unity announced that it is working closely with NVIDIA to offer production-focused early-access for real-time ray tracing in the High Definition Render Pipeline, with an optimized preview solution available for customers in the second half of 2019.

Unity exists to empower the success of the world’s creators with the most accessible and powerful real-time 3D development and monetization platform. Games and experiences made with Unity have reached more than 3 billion devices worldwide this year and were installed more than 29 billion times in the last 12 months.

Click here for a full list of Unity 2019.1 updates and download it!


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