Cebas releases finalRender for Maya 2018 as free open beta
Cebas Visual Technology has released finalRender for Maya 2018, an updated version of the renderer for Autodesk’s 3D animation software, as a free open beta.
The release makes the functionality of the old production edition of the renderer “free to use … and keep”.
Use “the full-blown version” of finalRender on Maya 2018 for free
The release is the first update to finalRender for Maya for some time: the last major commercial version, finalRender R2 for Maya, came out in 2010.
The open beta makes it possible to use the features from that version on Maya 2018, and for free. Cebas tells us that the beta is licensed for use on commercial projects.
In the launch video, cebas CEO Edwin Braun describes the initial open beta release as the “production-proven … version we had a few years ago. It’s the full-blown version of finalRender for Maya”.
Cebas says that it now plans to collect user feedback before adding more recent features from the 3ds Max edition of the renderer, like the new GPU rendering architecture.
‘One of the easiest and most efficient integrated rendering systems for Maya’
Cebas describes finalRender for Maya as “one of the best integrated rendering systems” for the software, with “full support for Maya’s Hypershade editor and many of the native Maya shader nodes”.
You can find a summary of its key features in cebas’s news announcement.
Availability and system requirements
finalRender for Maya is available for Maya 2018 running on 64-bit Windows only. To download the free open beta, you will need to register for an account on cebas’s website.
The free version is fully functional, but as you would expect, there is no support or maintenance, and it’s worth reading the licence conditions.
Cebas says that you may have to uninstall older commercial versions of its software in order to install it, and that future releases are “unlikely to offer backwards compatibility” with the initial open beta.
Read more about finalRender for Maya 2018 on cebas’s website
(Includes download link for the free open beta edition)