Pixar ships RenderMan Pro Server 17.0 and Studio 4.0
Both feature improved instancing, photon mapping and volumetrics; price of Studio edition cut by $700.
Monday, October 8th, 2012
renderer
Eye candy: the new Maxwell Render demo reel
Mainly technical tests this time round, but there is some lovely work from Dvein and the late Fuel VFX.
Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
LuxRender 1.0 released
Updated: Open-source physically based render engine for Blender, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D and Softimage hits 'official' release.
Monday, September 10th, 2012
Luxion releases KeyShot 3.3 and KeyShotVR
Updated real-time raytracer gets add-on for exporting 3D models for viewing in any HTML5 browser.
Sunday, September 2nd, 2012
RandomControl releases Arion 2.0
Physically accurate hybrid renderer gets major update - but it's now mainly for Max and Softimage users.
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012
moma: render Maya scenes with modo's render engine
Jacobo Barreiro's two-way bridge between Maya and modo 601 now in open beta and free for anyone to try.
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012
Chaos Group unveils V-Ray for Nuke and Katana
Details to follow at Siggraph, along with news of Alembic and deep image support in V-Ray for 3ds Max.
Thursday, July 26th, 2012
Preview: thinkingParticles 6 and thinkingParticles GE
3ds Max particle system to gain fluid and cloth sim tools, plus new edition for Unity and Unreal game engines.
Wednesday, July 25th, 2012
Holomatix ships SprayTrace mental ray viewer for Maya
Updated: new plugin provides interactive preview of a mental ray scene - now with Mac OS X support.
Saturday, July 14th, 2012
Refractive Software releases OctaneRender for Maya
New plugin embeds the GPU-accelerated physically based renderer directly within Maya.
Thursday, July 5th, 2012
Golaem releases Golaem Crowd 1.5
Crowd simulator now shows your actors directly within the Maya render window, rather than baking geometry.
Wednesday, July 4th, 2012
Next Limit releases Maxwell Render Learning Edition
Pay $195, and you get to use it for life, minus network rendering or export at resolutions above HD.
Wednesday, June 27th, 2012
Speed up your V-Ray renders by up to 30%
But only if you're running on an Intel x64 CPU, thanks to Chaos Group's neat new VRayEmbree helper tool.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012