Autodesk has announced a new set of software Advantage Packs at SIGGRAPH 2011. The 2012 Advantage Packs contain powerful new enhancements, in which are integrated high-performance third-party technology, speeded up common workflows, and extended creative capabilities. The updates, which are due to ship in September, are free to users on Subscription contracts.
A first Release Candidate for Blender 2.59 has just been released. This release fixes 132 bugs. Except this contains some good addons. Additions include fly modeand Node UI improvements, 3D mouse support for 3D Connexion devices, for more natural control during view navigato, improved keymap editing or Ivy Generator, which adds the ability to "grow" curves over an existing mesh with the option of adding leaves and adjusting many parameters for the final result.
Originally L3 Texture was designed as an extension to L3 Deformer toolset. For now only this beta software provides 15 new nodes to build advanced texture networks in Maya. The plugin contains procedural noise textures, regular pattern generators, coordinate displacement nodes and additional utilities. All texture features are fully animatable and mapable. Combination of procedural textures results in a huge amount of pattern.
Pixar Animation Studios has announced RenderMan for Maya 5.0. Alongside the advancements to its ray tracing technology, the upgrade also includes a new ray tracing hider, a radiosity cache, and physically plausible shading. The lighting and shading process has also been accelerated with new lighting tools, including re-rendering technology used in Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, as well as progressive ray-traced re-rendering for real time look development.
Cebas visual technology will do a preview of their upcoming release of their new psd-manager 3.0 a file exporter for Autodesk 3DsMax. With the new release of psd-manager 3.0 you can export scene layers from 3DsMax directly to Photoshop without the need of assigning IDs to objects also the new release supports high dynamic range and color precision of Photoshop files, support for the complete Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 and 3ds Max Design 2012 product line and many more features. A gallery below shows the results which you can do using the manager.
