Monday, December 23rd, 2024 Posted by Jim Thacker

RandomControl releases Maverick Indie and Maverick Studio 2024


RandomControl has begun its 2024 updates to Maverick Studio and Maverick Indie, its physically based GPU renderers for industrial designers and entertainment artists.

Maverick Studio 2024.1 and Maverick Indie 2024.1 introduced a complete new animation system, letting users create technical animations via either keyframing or a system of Motion Controllers.

The 2024.2 and 2024.3 updates refine animation workflows, and add initial USD support.

Streamlined GPU renderers for visualization and entertainment work
Developed by Arion renderer creator RandomControl and launched in 2019, Maverick Studio is a streamlined renderer aimed at product and automotive visualisation.

It provides a drag-and-drop workflow for assigning PBR materials, and for setting up lighting and a render camera, plus a physically accurate spectral render engine with built-in denoising.

The software is CUDA-based, and supports out-of-core rendering.

It was later joined by Maverick Indie, a lower-priced edition aimed at entertainment work, which lacks support for CAD file formats, plus features like NURBS and cross-section rendering.

Now features a complete new animation system tailored to marketing visuals
On their release late last month, Maverick Studio 2024.1 and Maverick Indie 2024.1 became the first updates to either application in more than a year.

That gap – the longest in their respective release histories – is explained by the scale of the new features: the 2024.1 releases add a complete animation toolset to the software.

In a blog post, RandomControl described its aim as “making everything animatable”, enabling users to animate every floating point attribute in every node inside the software, including object and camera positions, lights, materials and the background environment.

As well as a conventional keyframe animation workflow, artists can create animations using Motion Controllers: a set of readymade templates for creating common animation types.

RandomControl describes the workflow as being targeted at marketing visualization, making it possible to create “short ad-like clips without … external video-editing software”.

Other new features in the 2024.1 updates
As well as the animation toolset, new features in the 2024.1 releases include a tonemap frontplate for adding animatable logos or watermarks to renders.

In addition, the maximum resolution when baking textures has been increased from 4K to 8K, and the Scatter modifier now supports up to eight sources.

There are also performance improvements, particularly to interactive preview rendering (IPR), and when working on heavy scenes.

Pipeline integration changes include better support for materials in Substance .sbsar format, and the option to export animated GIFs as well as video.

Initial support for USD added in the 2024.2 updates
This month, RandomControl has released two further pairs of updates, Maverick Studio 2024.2 and 2024.3, and Maverick Indie 2024.2 and 2024.3.

Both are primarily workflow updates to the new animation toolset, but they do include one significant new feature for entertainment artists: USD support.

Users can now import data in .usd, .usda, .usdc and .usdz formats, although RandomControl describes the functionality as still “very preliminary”.

Pricing and system requirements
Maverick Indie and Maverick Studio are available for 64-bit Windows only. Both are CUDA-based, and require a RTX-compatible NVIDIA GPU.

You can see a feature comparison table for the two editions here.

Perpetual licences of Maverick Indie cost €249.99 (around $260); rental starts at €19.99/month ($21/month).

Perpetual licences of Maverick Studio cost €499.99 ($520); rental starts at €39.99/month ($42/month).

Read more about animation support in the Maverick renderers on RandomControl’s blog

Read a full list of new features in the online changelog


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