Exocortex Technologies has released Species, a new character - creation and rigging plugin for Softimage. Exocortex Species simplifies the process of human character creation from designing your character’s unique attributes, integrating sculpting results, to rig creation, even animation. With Species, you will create higher quality animated characters faster and at a lower cost, while avoiding the generic look that often come when purchasing off-the-shelf models.
ZBrush is a digital sculpting and painting program that has revolutionized the 3D industry with its powerful features and intuitive workflows. It offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. And now Pixologic released an update patch allowing you to take full advantage of the powerful features in Z4R2 now, without having to wait until ZBrush 5 is released. ZBrush 4R2b sets a new standard for digital art software. It includes exciting new features that are designed to push your artwork to ever greater heights e.g. FiberMesh to create true 3D fibers, fur and hair which may be sculpted, painted, UV mapped and even exported to other applications.
MadCar 3 is a plug-in for 3DS Max for quick rigging of wheeled vehicles and their animations by simulating the control. This new version allows rigging vehicles with any number of wheels, and with any of their mutual arrangements including motorcycles. There are simplified behavior setting for each of the wheels and suspension as well as fine tuning, this allows to simulate motion with qualities of a race car as well as heavy trucks. Animation is created during the simulation in real time. Simulation can be controlled by the keyboard, joysticks, game controllers, or steering wheel.
Substance Designer is the authoring tool to create substances. This version brings many improvements e.g. possibility to create, edit and delete channels in the layers or that Preferences Panel allowing the user to change application settings. This update promises complete redesign of the layer stack, which now include effects, drag and drop and mask preview and allows that packages can be publish from a new button in package explorer tool bar. Substance Designer is fully compatible with 3ds Max, Maya and Unity. This release also fixes some bugs.
Digital-Tutors present sneak peak a first look at two new tutorials covering Exterior Rendering Techniques with mental ray for both 3ds Max and for Maya. In these tutorials, they take a deep look at the various tools, techniques and procedures that you can use when lighting an outdoor scene. This tutorial starts with explaining how to set up a realistic outdoor illumination source, and how to simulate physically-accurate light behavior within the scene and continue with incorporating a proper linear workflow into our pipeline.
