MAXON today announced the coming of CINEMA 4D Release 9.5, BodyPaint 3D 2.5 and a new product called MAXON Production Bundle, designed exclusively for studio visual effects. All the new tools and features are being shown off this week at SIGGRAPH at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
According to MAXON, CINEMA 4D Release 9.5 offers dramatic improvements in lighting, rendering and workflow. While the lighting possibilities have been expanded, the company says the lighting setup has been simplified. In addition, area lights and area shadows now render up to four times faster than before. Images can be output in 32-bit/channel color depth as HDRI or OpenEXR, and multipass renderings can be output directly as compositing files for Shake. The new content browser gives users an overview of projects and presets, saved and organized in real-time locally or on the server, while full-screen mode offers the maximum amount of working space. Also included is a reworked Baker, which lets users create textures, normal maps and UVs with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Also new to CINEMA 4D Release 9.5 is Ambient Occlusion and SKY for owners of the Advanced Render module. Ambient Occlusion enables users to create and quickly render more realistic shadows , while SKY facilitates the creation of atmospherics.
BodyPaint 3D Release 2.5 was developed to allow users of 3ds max, LightWave, Maya and Softimage XSI to create high-end textures for complex models faster and more effectively. Workflow improvements borrowed from CINEMA 4D include full-screen mode and the new content browser, as well as the Heads-Up Display to view and adjust scene data within the viewport, and a one-touch customizable menu. The process of Importing models from any application has also been simplified with support for n-gons, and users can now apply individual layers and masks from .psd files as textures. The layer shader allows multiple images, layers, filters and procedurals to be mixed into a single texture, while detachable projection layers make it easy to fit an existing texture over geometry.
MAXON Production Bundle contains the complete, current MAXON product palette, as well as advanced visual effects tools including 16- and 32-bit support for all BodyPaint 3D paint tools, integration of Renderman-compliant renderers such as PRMan and Air, and Projection Man, a specialized tool set for the generation of digital matte paintings.
CINEMA 4D R9.5 and BodyPaint 3D R2.5 will be available in September. Customers who purchased a full license of a previous release of CINEMA 4D R9 or BodyPaint 3D R2 later than July 1, 2005, are eligible for a free upgrade. Further information on all MAXON products is available at www.maxon.net.
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