Rendering

Autodesk’s ray tracer Arnold gets GPU support

Autodesk recently announced that Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU is available. First unveiled as a beta release in March, the company says Arnold 6 completes the Arnold GPU toolset with improvements across lights, shaders, and cameras, as well as on-demand texture loading and support for Open Shading Language (OSL) and OpenVDB volumes. Additionally, as part of Autodesk’s efforts for the … Read more

Unity HDRP and all those rays

  The latest release of Unity (2019.3) with High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) has been released. HDRP, says Unity, focuses on optimizations that can render resource-intensive visuals while maintaining constant, steady frame rates. With HDRP, claims Unity, creators can cut loose and make stunning projects without worrying about throttling graphics to optimize for low-end devices, enabling them to create jaw-dropping … Read more

The Foundry releases Mari 4.6 with enhanced materials system

Mari, the Foundry’s tool for texturing and paint was born of the film industry. It stands out for its ability to handle very large models and support very high-resolution textures. Its users are primarily content creators in the film industry, but it is staking a claim in industrial design thanks to its sibling Luxology, which is also a member of … Read more

Intel’s long-term vision for exascale content

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. Scene rendered by MoonRay (with Embree): Property of DreamWorks Animation.   At Intel’s inaugural Create event at Siggraph 2019, the company outlined its vision for rendering with exascale computing and oneAPI, and reiterated its six-pillars. Jim Jeffers, Intel’s senior principal engineer and director of Advanced Rendering and Visualization, took the stage and … Read more

Imagination announces ray tracing technology for licensing

Imagination Technologies announced its PowerVR Ray Tracing technology for licensing to enable state-of-the-art realistic image rendering using light-modeling techniques. The IP is designed to be integrated into GPUs in mobile, automotive, server, and other markets. The technology is part of PowerVR’s ongoing GPU roadmap which delivers what the company is designating PPA (Power Performance Area) solutions. Imagination says the PowerVR … Read more

The Foundry rolls out Modo 13

The Foundry is rolling out a major update to its Modo software, three installments to complete the Modo 13 Series. The first installment is out and offers significant updates to rendering, animation, and added modeling tools. Foundry’s senior product manager Shane Griffith says this version is the result of a renewed focus on the product’s strengths for its users. This … Read more

Maxon gets its own renderer in RedShift

It’s been a big year for Maxon. The company won its first Academy Award, and in the last 12 months it has gotten a new CEO, David McGavran, and it celebrated this year’s NAB by acquiring Redshift Rendering Technologies.  Maxon gathered crowds at NAB on the back of their Academy Award for Motion Graphics and their newly announced acquisition of … Read more

News from Chaos: Cloud render, V-Ray Next

Chaos Group has announced their new cloud-rendering service, which, they say, differs from competitive services with straightforward pricing that charges only for the rendering time and does not have surprise fees such as additional charges for uploading files. The company describes Chaos Cloud rendering as a single button click.  As with most rendering services, customers buy packages of credit. Their … Read more

AMD at SolidWorks World

Rendering and VR are strong messages for graphics vendors at SolidWorks World 2019 and AMD was riding high on those bandwagons. In addition, AMD is highlighting new GPU accelerated features in SolidWorks 2019. The company also highlighted new workstation options. In short, AMD had a pretty good story to tell at the show. The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer telescope is a … Read more