Thursday, May 24th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Luxion ships KeyShot 3.2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7lvLI4gn5U
Material creation in KeyShot. Materials and textures now load instantly in the latest release, KeyShot 3.2.

Luxion has released a free update to KeyShot, its intuitive technical animation and rendering software.

The KeyShot 3.2 update is mainly focused on performance: Luxion says that materials, textures and environments now load instantly in the software, smoothing workflow.

From a DCC perspective, the update also adds import support for Maya 2013. Last week, the developer released a new import plugin for 3ds Max.

KeyShot 3.2 is available for Windows and Mac OS X. The standard edition of the software costs $995, while the Pro edition costs $1,995.

PRESS RELEASE (Excerpts)
Luxion, the leading developer of advanced rendering and lighting technology and makers of KeyShot®, the first real time ray tracing and global illumination program, is is proud to release KeyShot 3.2 with major updates to existing functionality, UI improvements and additional file format support.

A specific focus on updates and improvements to the existing KeyShot toolset is the focus of this release with enhanced speed, a cleaner interface and a handful of fixes to make creating 3D renderings and animations even faster. KeyShot 3.2 now support instant loading of materials, textures and environments decreasing the time it takes to find and apply materials. Material Templates can now be applied after a model has been imported while applying materials to the 3D model on import becomes even faster with the support of part names and wild cards. Additionally, the UNDO capabilities have been greatly increased with a completely re-worked UNDO stack that provides the option to UNDO nearly every command.

The new Material Templates now support the mapping of part names and wild cards to speed the process of material assignments on import.

UI improvements bring a cleaner layout to property settings and options. With this, arrow keys can now be used to navigate through the scene tree and the camera list. Along with improvements and speed increases across many features, additional enhancements have been made to the SolidWorks importer adding improved tesselation and material mapping. Additional import support has also been added for Autodesk Alias 2013 and Maya 2013.

Improvements include:

  • Instant loading of all library content (no waiting for material/environments/textures to display)
  • Support for part names and wild cards (*.*) in material templates
  • Completely re-worked UNDO stack – UNDO nearly everything
  • Use arrow keys to navigate through the scene tree and camera list
  • Sync of realtime and advanced render settings in render dialog (raybounces, shadow quality)
  • Support for scale and transformations (scale and transformation remembered on all levels)
  • Increase of maximum raybounces in realtime settings to 64.
  • UI cleanup throughout the system
  • Bug fixes

Additional enhancements include:

  • Improvements to SolidWorks importer
  • Support for Creo 2.0
  • Support for Autodesk ALIAS 2013
  • Support for Autodesk Maya 2013
  • Added Spanish language support (UI only)

Updated plugins
Independent of KeyShot 3.2 but also being released today are updated plugins for Creo, Rhino and SolidWorks. Updates include improved import and bug fixes.

Visit the KeyShot website