plugin3D, formerly RTRE, claims to bring real-time high-end visualization to the 3dsMax viewports, and do it for free.
Our powerful 3D realtime rendering engine works inside any 32-bit (64-bit soon) Autodesk 3ds Max 2009, 2010 or 2011 viewport. See and interact with your fully rendered scene in realtime, even with hundreds of thousands or millions of polygons. Move around, make changes, improve look and feel, add animations and see changes instantly. Meet “impossible” deadlines. Make last minute changes. Make an image or movie instantly.
The 64-bit support is still in beta, but the 32-bit version is available for free. If you want to take your scene and create a standalone interactive visualization to share with others, that’ll only cost $99.
Just gonna toot my own horn here a bit and let you know that I just released a new version of the PLY Importer Plugin for Autodesk’s 3dsMax. The new version fixes a bug I ran into with datasets from Okino’s PolyTransfrom this PLY Exporter script (they use ‘vertex_index’ instead of the standard ‘vertex_indices’ property name), as well as adds working support for vertex-normals.
This is a plugin to enable import of Stanford PLY models into Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max. It works for both the 32 & 64 bit versions of Max, and handles both Binary & ASCII PLY models. This plugin uses the PLY code provided by Greg Turk. Unlike the PLY import plugin from HabWare for Max8, the memory leaks have been fixed and now several hundred PLY files can be imported at a time without incident.
It works for 3dsMax 2010 and 2011. Special thanks to Jen at Wunderboy.org for helping out with the Vertex Normal support :)
The Foundry has just released two new plugins for Adobe After Effects fans, adding impressive camera tracking and matchmoving directly into the popular compositing tool.
First up is ‘CameraTracker’ which can analyze a source sequence to extract the original camera information and motion, then enabling 3D compositing within the shot. Previously only available in NukeX, now it’s available directly within Adobe After Effects CS5.
The other plugins is Khronos5, the first plugin to be accelerated with the Foundry’s new GPU-accelerated ‘Blink’ technology that runs on either the CPU or a CUDA-compliant GPU for maximum performance. The new Khronos 5 offers realtime retiming and motion blur based on their popular Furnace algorithms.
Both plugins are available today, along with a special offer to get RollingShutter and CameraTracker together for After Effects for only $150. Hit up the Foundry Website for all the details.
Southpaw Technologies has just announced the immediate availability of TACTIC3.0, their production digital asset management product that has just recently achieved integration nirvana with NUKE. This new version, to be demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, offers improved interfaces and a powerful expression language enabling integration with a wide variety of systems. In addition to Nuke, this version also integrates with the Adobe Suite, Rush render queue, and IRIDAS FrameCycler.
“TACTIC is the bedrock of our pipeline,” said Todd Jahnke, head of production at March Entertainment. “We use it for our production management, asset management, and overall pipeline solution. TACTIC also manages our communications with production partners spread across four countries. For March Entertainment, TACTIC is our solution to redefining what can be achieved in the production triangle of time, money, and quality.”
Full announcement and screenshots after the break.
Next time you need a giant random scene for a project, check out Arnaud Couturier’s ‘Suicidator City Generator‘ tool for Blender.
“With it, you can automatically create entire, three-dimensional modern cities in a matter of seconds by adjusting various parameters, such as city size and complexity, rather than creating each building, each street, and each texture manually.”
It’s a tiny little python script capable of building entire cities with textures, roads, elevations, and much more with just the click of a button. And what makes it even better: It’s completely free. No charge, public domain, and source available.
Noise Industries and PHYX Inc. have announced the release of a new plugin suite for FxFactory that works directly inside AfterEffects, Final Cut, and Apple Motion to help you clean up and doctor video with ease. The suite, called PHYX cleaner, contains 5 plugins:
Chroma Reconstructor: Rebuilds pixelated chroma (color) channels. Chroma issues are most obvious when keying green or blue screens, or viewing a colorful object (red coat, etc.). The Reconstructor repairs blocky colors, and removes unwanted sub-sampling artifacts.
Deband: Restores lost information in gradients, and increases effective color depth up to 32-bits per color. Deband also works wonders for making 3D-generated images look less artificial, and for converting harsh low-bit depth images to high-bit depth smoothness.
Deinterlace: Converts fields into progressive frames free of comb-like artifacts using field reconstruction and Optical Flow.
Digital Make Up Kit: Allows users to smooth skin blemishes in post-production. This unique tool detects properly lit skin tones, and smoothes wrinkles, acne, and more.
Fast Noise Reduction: Spatial noise reduction engine that quickly removes high and low frequency noise (fine and large noise) from images. Fast Noise Reduction also includes a powerful sharpening method similar to that used by NASA, to preserve fine details.
Available for $199.
“As one of our most newest development partners PHYX Inc. has rolled out an impressive number of creative plug-ins for the visual effects community in such a short amount of time ” says Niclas Bahn director of business development Noise Industries. “PHYX Cleaner is an extraordinary tool for patching up gritty footage and gives users a quick way to efficiently transform disappointing tape into flawless film. We look forward to the on-going success of FxFactory and PHYX Inc. visual effects plug-ins and providing creative community with a touch of originality in each new release.”
An odd effect that I’m not sure what you’ld use it for, JMS has a short video demonstrationg a true “Reverse Perspective” plugin for Maya that he has developed.
Essentially, the positions of the vanishing-point and the focal-point are swapped. So now we are at the vanishing-point, where geometry shrinks to nothingness, and the focal-point lies some distance ahead, beyond which objects scale to infinity.
The effect is achieved entirely in-camera. The scene and models themselves have no unusual scaling, they're laid out in a normal / perpendicular fashion; the way the camera 'sees' the scene is altered to create the effect. Perspective is truly reversed.
A bit day for Maxwell Render and Nuke fans, as now there is a native plugin that connects the two simply and beautifully. The new plugin brings an MXI Reader and MXI Multilight Mixer for Nuke, allowing you to load full 32-bit color information and light emitters into Nuke for interactive editing.
Jon Wadelton, Nuke Product Manager at The Foundry, is equally pleased, saying: “The Maxwell Render plug-in for Nuke is very easy to set up. It quickly enables you to adjust your lighting interactively inside Nuke, resulting in a speedy workflow. We’re excited by the possibilities that Maxwell Render presents the VFX industry and how tight and simple the integration with Nuke is.”
It’s available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, and free for Nuke license holders. You can view tutorials and demos at this website.
If you’re a 3dsMax User and fan of the e-on software products, then you might want to look into applying as a Beta Tester for their newest product “Carbon Scatter”.
E-on software also announced that is currently looking for talented 3ds Max users willing to take part in the beta testing of Carbon Scatter for the mental ray™ and V-Ray™ renderers.
No knowledge of Vue is required in order to become a qualified beta tester. However, candidates must possess the following qualities: persistence, imagination, and a desire to influence the final product, time, and of course testers should be proficient with 3ds Max and either the V-Ray or Mental Ray renderers.
The plugin is supposed to integrate the “EcoSystem” algorithms into various applications, allowing you to use millions of instances of models with any renderer of your choice.
If you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE for development and write any shader code (GLSL, HLSL, CG, etc) then you definitely should check out NShader. It’s a free addon that adds syntax highlight for those languages, making Visual Studio a much more fully functional IDE for those who work in shader languages. It does have a few limitations:
The CG syntax highlighter is using the same HLSL syntax highlighter (they have similar keywords).
No syntax analyzing and checking. NShader only use a basic tokenizer to extract keywords. Future versions may include syntax analyser.
No braces/bracket matching
No completion
No formatting
But given how poor Visual Studio’s existing support is, it’s a huge benefit.
plugin3D, formerly RTRE, claims to bring real-time high-end visualization to the 3dsMax viewports, and do it for free.
Just gonna toot my own horn here a bit and let you know that I just released a new version of the PLY Importer Plugin for Autodesk’s 3dsMax. The new version fixes a bug I ran into with datasets
Southpaw Technologies has just announced the immediate availability of TACTIC3.0, their production digital asset management product that has 
Next time you need a giant random scene for a project, check out Arnaud Couturier’s ‘
Noise Industries and PHYX Inc. have announced the release of a new plugin suite for FxFactory that works directly inside AfterEffects, Final Cut, and Apple Motion to help you clean up and doctor video with ease. The suite, called PHYX cleaner, contains 5 plugins:
A bit day for Maxwell Render and Nuke fans, as now there is a native plugin that connects the two simply and beautifully. The new plugin brings an MXI Reader and MXI Multilight Mixer for Nuke, allowing you to load full 32-bit color information and light emitters into Nuke for interactive editing.
If you’re a 3dsMax User and fan of the e-on software products, then you might want to look into applying as a Beta Tester for their newest product “Carbon Scatter”.
If you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE for development and write any shader code (GLSL, HLSL, CG, etc) then you definitely should check out NShader. It’s a free addon that adds syntax highlight for those languages, making Visual Studio a much more fully functional IDE for those who work in shader languages. It does have a few limitations:
VizWorld.com 
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