Golaem announces Golaem Crowd 1.4, the latest update to its crowd simulation software for Autodesk Maya. Creating visually compelling and believable crowds for movies, where budgets are shrinking and timescales are getting shorter, can be a challenge. It is not only important to represent the crowd behavior as a whole, but the appearance and motions of each individual must be believable. Golaem Crowd 1.4 now includes support for Mental Ray procedural rendering, geometry instancing, as well many others improvements. Geometry instancing brings the ability to declare characters as geometry instances in order to allow rendering thousands of entities with amazing performances.

Yesterday e-on software the leader in light and nature technologies announced the immediately availability of a new version of Ozone 6, its atmospheric plugin for 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, Cinema4D, and LightWave, together with the Ozone 6 Personal Learning Edition. Ozone 6 uses the Spectral 3™ cutting-edge technologies developed by e-on software for the simulation and rendering of atmospheric effects. Like this it’s able to accurately simulated environment that affects all scene elements and behaves according to nature’s rules.

Cebas announced the immediate availability of psd-manager 3.1 - “the V-Ray release” of the multi-layer PSD exporter for Autodesk 3ds Max. The new version is at no charge available for current customers providing a major workflow update and new features for those using psd-manager 3 in combination with the V-Ray renderer. From this point psd-manager is able to access directly the V-Ray frame buffer including render elements export, mask generation for objects and materials and 8/16/32-bit HDR PSD export.

Basefount Technology has released an update for Miarmy, its crowd-simulation system for Maya. This version provides some new features and also changes many parts of system infrastructure.  Miarmy 1.2 integrates Nvidia’s PhysX 3.1 engine, effectively removing the upper limit on the number of actors or physics objects that can be included in a scene. With Mesh Drive Techniques, the character can be interactive display, enable blendshape and render them by arbitrary renderer directly in Maya. Miarmy 1.2 also contains Improved 3Delight Render Plugin and Agent Cache which allows you to create once cache file for all the agents, the cached scene will become real-time including there have clothes. Miarmy Pro 1.2 is available for Maya 2011 and above.