New CityEngine 2009.2 Version Available Now for Download!

Significant improvements in performance allow for the design and modeling of megacities with over 500'000 buildings.



Procedural Inc. today announced the CityEngine 2009.2, the latest version of its groundbreaking software for the fast creation, visualization and analysis of large 3D cities. The software is used by high-profile companies such as Foster+Partners, Microsoft, Navteq, Boeing, IBM, Thales, Blizzard, Square Enix, etc. and was awarded Killer Technology 2009 by 3D World magazine Procedural Inc., an innovative software company located in Zurich, Switzerland, is creator of the world’s foremost procedural modeling technology. With the CityEngine, Procedural Inc.’s graphics experts have developed a radically different 3D application that allows professional users in entertainment, architecture and urban planning to efficiently design cities. "CityEngine 2009.2 introduces significant improvements in performance and overall stability", says Pascal Mueller, CEO Procedural Inc. "Furthermore, with the integration of map projection standards and corresponding accuracy enhancements, the CityEngine is now, together with its unique reporting functionality, the perfect tool for sustainable urban planning such as accurate simulation and evaluation of new city developments."


Key Highlights of the CityEngine 2009.2

• Large Data Set Support (over 500'000 buildings on 64bit)
• Map Projections (over 80 projections are supported)
• Accuracy Enhancements (enabling high-precision at global scale )
• 3DS Export (plus advancements of Collada and FBX export)

Other improvements of the CityEngine 2009.2 include selection-sets handling, interactive editing extensions, GUI refinements, better ATI-support, advanced python scripting and many more details providing a good user experience. For more information, please visit: http://www.procedural.com/cityengine/whats-new.html

Pricing and Availability
A free 30-day trial version is available for download. The software can be purchased via Procedural Inc.’s website, or by telephone order at +41 76 720 3303. The CityEngine retails from a starting price of $ 3’450.

Tags: Modelling, Procedural, Software, Visualizations, 3D

BEEDOCS (Apple only) today announced that Bee Docs Timeline 3D software for Mac OS X will support built-in integration with Basecamp project management software by 37signals. Bee Docs Timeline 3D received an Apple Design Award for "Best Mac OS X Leopard Application - Runner Up" in 2008.

"Project managers have told us that 3D timeline presentations are a great way to communicate project status with team members and customers," said Adam Behringer, creator of Bee Docs Timeline 3D. "Basecamp project management software users can now chart their project messages, to-do lists, and milestones directly from Bee Docs Timeline 3D in just a few clicks.

You can download demo movies and a demo version of Beedocs.

Tags: Software, Productivity, Animation, Macintosh

3D Terrain Printing
by Albert Kiefer

The summer holidays are coming to a close for most of us. Some will have spent some unforgettable days, or weeks, in a fantastic location like the Swiss or French Alps, the Grand Canyon. Some will even have scaled the Mount Everest (although these might be few and far between...).
Most of you will have taken tons of digital photographs, others take a small bottle of soil or a flask of water but now there’s a new way to grab hold of a piece of your holiday locations. A 3D print!

With the advent of commercially and economically viable rapid prototype printing solutions a number of 3D printing services are quickly becoming available to the public. A very interesting niche is now being presented by Terrainprint in the UK.

UK based Terrainprint.co.uk has a 3D printing service hooked up to a kind of Google Earth type of application that quickly allows you to travel to you location of choice, make a selection and press print. After being presented with a 3D preview of the textured terrain you can order it and presto: your holiday memento extraordinaire will be on its way.

These items which have a very clear pricing structure and there should be no surprises with models that are unexpectedly pricey.

There are several types of overlay graphics that you can color your 3D terrain model with, although at the moment the full range of options is only for the USA area. But still, the continents texturemapping will have a great realistic projection of the terrain for you and should be the general choice for the holiday snap memento.

I can well see applications for terrain printing in the fields of location or prototype planning or scouting for motion picture production (although these companies might already have 3D printers hanging around their own facilities), location and site planning and presentation for architects, a special relational gift for traveling agencies, mementos for tourists that want to document and tell about their journeys, etc.

It will be well worth checking out Terrainprint.co.uk and play with the application a while. Have a test print in the smallest footprint and see how that works out.

Tags: 3D, Textures, 3D printing, Exclusive Gift

Maxon Releases Cinema 4D Release 11.5
by Albert Kiefer



Maxon has just released Cinema 4D R11.5 to the general public.

Key Highlights of CINEMA 4D Release 11.5

• Superior Rendering Performance Including New Bucket Rendering
• Enhanced Picture Viewer
• Improved Interoperability and Integration

• Numerous improvements have been made to CINEMA 4D's highly praised connectivity to Adobe® After Effects®, including support for additional object types.
• Support for Apple® Motion now includes the export of 3D data.
• Support for Autodesk® FBX® 2010.0 allows for quick and easy interchange between a variety of 3D applications.

Powerful New Motion Graphics Capabilities

Release 11.5 promises a tighter integration with Apple’s recent Final Cut Studio upgrade, more specifically with Apple Motion3 from that package with its strengthened 3D capabilities.

Support For the New Generation of Operating Systems

• Apple - R11.5 is fully compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, including access to up to 64GB of virtual memory. This is a great relief since it’s always a wait-and-see if a new OS is supported by current products.
• Microsoft - R11.5 is fully compatible with Windows 7, including enhanced file dialog.

Apart from their flagship product Cinema 4D they have also release a new specific version of the product called Cinema 4D Broadcast Edition which, like the Architecture Edition and the Engineering Edition caters to a very targeted market for animation in the broadcast industry.

Tags: 3D, Animation, Modelling, Textures

by Albert Kiefer

The developers at HDR LightStudio have just announced version 1.5 of their high dynamic range image creation software. Now I almost always enjoy using my Mac system, but it’s on occasions like this that I cannot help but feel a little left out because of a really nice piece of software that I could use in my every day production of visualization or general 3D illustration work.

Just one look at the interface and the options in this package show that it’s a really very well rounded out package that enables you to quickly generate custom HDRI maps as a lighting map for your 3D scenes and instantly make your work look better.

Since High Dynamic Range Images can also be used in radiosity calculations you can use the image both as a reflection map (for the cool refelctions in a scene) and at the same time as an image map that drives the lighting calculations.




Let’s hope that somehow a nice OS miracle will happen and make these people develop this for Mac OS X too! I will still try and review this package on my Dell Laptop as soon as it’s released. I’ll keep you posted on my findings.

by Albert Kiefer

Axceleon, a leader in high performance distributed computing solutions for render farms and clusters today announced that EnFuzion is the first commercial product on the market today to enable seamless rendering with major 3D applications in the Amazon EC2 Cloud.
more on Axceleon’s website

Tags: 3D, Distributed Rendering

by Albert Kiefer
Pixologic have just released version 3.2 of their flagship product Zbrush. This release currently is only for Mac OS X.

The new version which is available for immediate download here contains the usual optimizations and bug fixes but more importantly contains some core functionality of the new goZBrush which is going to improve te workflow beteen ZBrush and Maya, Modo and Cinema 4D (I think the PC version will obviously support 3DS Max when it is released).

more information about goZbrush can be found here

Also great new is that with the new release come two plug-ins that were supported by earlier versions (PC) of ZBrush but now are available to Mac users too. They are decimation master, a plug-in for simplifying the very heavy meshes that ZBrush can generate for use in production packages like Maya, Cinema 4D, and Modo. Not that it’s impossible to work with heavy meshes in the programs but often times it’s just not that practical in a production envirnoment to animate these very heavy files.





these plug-ins can be picked up right here

Tags: 3D, Modelling, Software

Yesterday Grid Iron Software released version 1 of the asset tracking software for Mac and PC. Flow is a fantastic piece of software for keeping track of items that designers and illustrators, who use packages from the Adobe range of products and Apple’s and Microsoft. The one thing for me as a visual designer working in 3D that clinched the deal was compatibility . You can now even see the files, xrefs and everything a Cinema file is referencing. Great stuff.

I will add a review here soon...

In the meantime check out some clear introductory tutorials on their site.

Tags: 3D, Graphic Design

Luxology has just released Modo 401

In this latest incarnation Modo has broken the animation barrier and added lots of really cool features for both still and animated imagery.

A quick run down the feature list reveals some solid new possibilities.



Fur
Fur in Modo is much more than just some simple strands that can be turned into hair or grass or, yes, furry coats for animals. The system has been expanded to allow you to create many types of fiber based materials or organisms like roots, anemones, textured rugs, etc. The fur can be brushed into shape very interactively. Check out the demo video here

Volumetric Lighting
New to 401 is the ability to apply volumetric lighting to a scene. With volumetric light shadows will even cast onto air, much like beams of light that shine against objects in a haze. The really great thing is that you can check out volumetric effects right in the preview renderer. Demo video here



Replicators
Fantastic for adding just tremendous amounts of detail that would normally kill any renderer are the replicators. With these you can add the proverbial sand to the desert, the fish to the ocean and the leaves to the trees. You have to see this to believe it. You start out with just a single source element and then spread this across a designated area using wieght maps to add variation to density, placement, rotation, scale, etc. And they preview really really fast in the editor. Check them out here



And there’s more!
There’s a lot more in the new Modo and for people who use it for more than just modelling this is a very worthwhile upgrade that has a lot going for it.

You can download a demo of Modo here.

Modo lists for $ 995
Upgrades start at $ 395 for the download version.

Tags: 3D, Visualizations