News

Originally announced last November, LightWave 11 was originally due to ship at the end of 2011, but has been stuck in final bugfixing for a month or so. LightWave 11 is a complete out-of-the-box pipeline that puts award-winning modeling, rigging, effects, dynamics, animation, and final rendering at the fingertips of 3D artists. Lightwave offers many unique technologies such as the Virtual Preview renderer (VPR) for onscreen real-time rendering, Anaglyph Stereoscopic Preview for real-time interocular, 'red-blue' anaglyphic separations, and more.

Some month after releasing version 2.7, NVIDIA has prepared new 2.71 version of PhysX plug-ins for 3ds Max (2009-2012) and Maya (2009-2012). As usually also this updates bring many improvements and fixes some bugs. New PhysX plug-ins for 3ds Max fix a HW check issue for old driver causing crash for some users such as fix the crash with previewer, waving flag sample. This release also increases contact buffer for PhysX 3.x. New PhysX plug-ins for Maya brings toolbar improvement by switching to single click pops up menu instead of right click. Double click executes default behaviour. 

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.62. Most of features were updated and some new were added, including render layers and passes, multi GPU rendering and selection of GPU device, improved sampling for complex environment maps, border rendering,  BVH caching for faster rendering of camera fly-throughs, and new shading nodes for color correction and a checkerboard texture node. UV tools have now an advanced interactive stitch tool, to align and join together UV islands. Version 2.62 updates Blender’s Boolean operations, implementing the faster, more stable Carve library, and adds a new Remesh modifier for converting a mesh to uniform quads. This update also fixes more than 200 bugs.

Exocortex Technologies announced the immediate availability of Exocortex ImplosiaFX , a new custom shattering plugin for Softimage. Exocortex ImplosiaFX enables advanced customizable fracturing/shattering as well as robust, fast and scalable CSG boolean operations. ImplosiaFX builds upon the powerful ICE Modeling framework introduced in Autodesk Softimage 2012 and is fully compatible with the rigid body simulation features of Exocortex Momentum.