Pixels for 2/26/2010: Contests, TurboSquid, and Trinigy
5:00 pm
Here are today’s pixels:
Lightworks releases Author 8.2
3:00 pm
A busy day for Lightworks Design as they’ve also just released Lightworks Author 8.2 with new support for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, real-time ray tracing, and reflection catcher. They’ve also improved the CgFX support, enabling support for multiple lights.
Joan Hirsch, vice president of Product Design Solutions at Siemens PLM commented, “With this release, Lightworks has once again listened to its customers and delivered functionality that will further enhance the high end visualisation delivered with our NX™ software.”
Already available for both Mac and Windows on their site.
via News.
Lightworks 8.1 Released with real-time Shadow Catcher
11:00 am
Lightworks Design has just rev’ed their software to version 8.1, adding support for real-time rendering of Soft Shadows and new programmable shaders.
Roland Roeder from PTC GmbH commented: “The Real-Time Shadow Catcher support in 8.1 is good news for us and the Leather shaders work great! We're also finding that the added support for Real-Time Soft Shadows is making a big difference when we use LightWorks Real-Time Rendering.”
Available now for both PC and Mac.
via Lightworks 8.1.
Lightworks Artisan and Author 8.2 at SIGGRAPH Asia
1:09 pm
Attendees of the upcoming SIGGRAPH Asia can stop by Lightworks’ booth (F01) for a quick glimpse at the new versions of Lightworks Author and Lightworks Artisan. In addition to this being the 20th anniversary year for Lightworks, the software has some impressive new features like realtime ray tracing, screen space ambient occlusion, and support for multiple lights in CgFX.
David Forrester, CEO of Lightworks commented: “Lightworks exhibited at the inaugural Siggraph Asia in Singapore in 2008 and we are delighted to be supporting this year’s exhibition in Japan. This is the first time that Lightworks has exhibited in Japan, and we are looking forward to this opportunity of meeting directly with companies in this important marketplace and to showing them some of the extremely exciting new developments that we are introducing in this, our 20th anniversary year.”
Full release after the break.
Lightworks Image Competition Winners Announced
10:55 am
Lightworks has announced the results of the most recent Lightworks Image Competition, with the winners (two of them this time) being Alex Bonner and Marius Louw.
Alex is a Design Engineer, working for JCB in England and his 4WD Teletruk image was created using Siemens PLM’s NX software. He used HDR lighting and ray tracing to add greater realism to his image entry. Marius is based in South Africa and he uses Caddie software from ACS for modelling alongside the Caddie Vio plug-in which incorporates Lightworks rendering technology.
Some truly beautiful renderings in the contest. Hit their site to see the entries, and read the full press release after the break.
Caustic Graphics announces Partners
6:01 am
Here at VizWorld we’ve been watching the Caustic graphics card with reserved excitement. The possibilities of the card are amazing, and the few results they’ve shown are impressive. However, something like this needs buy-in from the major players in the industry to add in support for existing tools before we can expect to see anything very significant. Well, Caustic is proud to announce that day is today:
Autodesk, Inc. booth (#2201) – Caustic’s technology will be featured as part of the Autodesk Design Visualization presentations shown at SIGGRAPH. The CausticRT platform will be showcased as part of a fully ray traced, interactive virtual walk through of a trellis structure designed by the architecture visionary Greg Lynn, rendered with the Brazil™ interactive renderer implemented in Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010 software..
Lightwork Design booth (#2635) – Caustic will be featured in a new Lightworks application – Lightworks Artisan, which is due to be unveiled at SIGGRAPH. The Caustic demo will demonstrate multi-core working and will also illustrate the performance improvements possible using Caustic.
Robert McNeel & Associates booth (#2030) – CausticRT will be featured in a plug in for Rhino, featuring interactive raytracing.
That’s right, Caustic’s card now works with Autodesk, Lightworks Artisan, and Rhino, some of the biggest names in 3D Modeling and rendering out there. They’ll be demonstrating the functionality all over the conference floor, in their own booth and their partner’s booth. If you’re at SIGGRAPH, make sure to stop by and congratulate them and check it out!
Read the full announcement and see some spectacular ray-traced renders after the break.
LightWorks 8.1 Released for Rendering
12:09 pm
LightWork Design has just released LightWorks 8.1. Focus areas in this release are mostly in improving the real-time rendering engine, but others include:
Soft shadows and Shadow catching are now both supported by Real-time rendering, using programmable shading;
Programmable shading is now supported for several more LightWorks material shaders, for example multilayer paints and leathers, and this gives real-time support which is closer to the software implementation;
EPix output can now be anti-aliased giving users more defined and accurate rendering. (…)
VizWorld.com 
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