e-on 3D Environment Competition 2012 Finalists

e-on have announced the finalists in the 3D Environment Competition 2012 Finalists

E-on Software Ships LumenRT Review for SketchUp

HIGH FIDELITY, IMMERSIVE VISUALIZATION FOR SKETCHUP - SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY PRICE!

May 26, 2011. Beaverton, Oregon: e-on software the leader in 3D sky, light and nature technologies, today announced introductory pricing and immediate availability of LumenRT Review for SketchUp, the company's revolutionary new product for the visualization of architectural projects in real-time 3D with accurately simulated lighting.

LumenRT Review for SketchUp works with both the free and the Pro versions of SketchUp. Sample LiveCubes™, pictures and videos uploaded to the lumenrt.com website showcase the amazing quality of the real-time visualizations produced by the product.

Beyond Static Renders: High Fidelity Immersive Visualization

Thanks to LumenRT, architects no longer have to choose between high-quality images and real-time visualization: They can walk or fly through their designs and experience the true quality of light in fully interactive 3D!

Designed to provide high fidelity visualization with accurately simulated lighting including Global Illumination, shadows and reflections, LumenRT is the ideal solution for:

• Creating exciting virtual interactive showrooms
• Demonstrating and sharing design concepts with associates and customers
• Creating attention-grabbing client presentations
• Exposing projects in fully real-time photo-realistic 3D

Revolutionary Capabilities

LumenRT provides a number of revolutionary capabilities to breathe life into 3D designs including:

• A More Engaging User Experience which allow clients and co-workers to interact with designs in a much more immersive and exciting manner.
• No Need for Specialized Viewing Software since LumenRT LiveCubes™ are shared as self running files that play on PC and Mac platforms. Just click and run – it's as simple as that.
• Seamless Background Processing allows models to be transformed into LumenRT LiveCubes with a single mouse click, rendering in the background while you continue to work.

Technological Revolution

Accurate lighting, shadows and reflections are an essential component of most architectural projects. LumenRT captures all the subtleties of natural illumination by performing a physically accurate simulation of the light in the scene which produces vivid, life-like results.

LumenRT's incredible ease-of-use, immersive navigation, and high-fidelity imagery is the result of many years of intensive research at e-on software. E-on holds a number of patents on the key underlying technologies which serve as the framework for LumenRT.

Pricing and Availability

LumenRT Review for SketchUp and SketchUp Pro currently retails for $195 (introductory price – SRP: $295).

LumenRT is a 32 & 64 bits application, designed for the Windows® 32/64 bits XP, Vista and 7 as well as Intel Mac OS X platforms (v10.6+).

Visit www.lumenrt.com/purchase for detailed system requirements and purchasing options.

Download Sample LiveCubes on lumenrt.com

The new lumenrt.com website provides the latest, most up-to-date information on LumenRT, showcasing capabilities, tutorials, and user spotlights.

To gain better insight into how LumenRT operates, a set of sample LumenRT LiveCubes™ and electronic documentation is available for download directly from the download section.

The showcase section provides a look at the first videos and images which highlight the power and key features of LumenRT.

Visit www.lumenrt.com for more information.

RANCH Renderfarm VIP Club

RANCH COMPUTING is launching the RANCH VIP Club - see their site for more information.

Steampunk - Myths & Legends

I'm over a month late in discovering this CGChallenge which runs to 3rd February 2009. With categories for Image - Individual, Video - Team and Video - Individual along with awards for Modeling; Texturing; Animation; Lighting; Visual Effects; Landscape/Matte Painting; Art Direction; Compositing and Editing; and Best Character. The long list of sponsors includes BOXX Technologies, Autodesk, NVIDIA, Wacom, SOFTIMAGE, Luxology, Pixologic, Craft Animations, SideFX, e-on Software, Corel, Stash, Gnomon Workshop, ImagineFX, Ballistic Publishing and Esperient. Vue 7 Infinite and Vue 7 xStream are included as prizes in several categories and awards.

I'll not reproduce the official press release in full here just borrow a short section about Steampunk and the Challenge

This CGChallenge involves revamping some of the world’s best known stories and legends with gears, springs brass and steam! We are offering you the chance to re-imagine legendary characters such as a steam-powered minotaur, or a Zeppelin-mounted Thor, hurling lightning bolts from the sky as well as getting hold of some great prizes - over $220,000 worth!

Steampunk grew in the 1980s and early 1990s into a fully fledged sub genre of fantasy and speculative fiction. It involved the creative application of advanced steam age technology to a modern or science fiction setting. Steampunk also covers works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used - usually the 19th century and often set in Victorian England. Just imagine inventions like those that appear in the works of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells.

For more details see the Steampunk - Myths & Legends pages at the cgsociety web site.

Renderosity: A Decade of Change

2008 is the 10th anniversary of the Renderosity community, and to celebrate they are holding a contest with over $30,000 in prizes. There are two categories: 3D/Animation and 2D/Photography and the competition theme is a decade of change. Entries can be a Renderosity birthday celebration or any representation of the last 10 years as you choose. The competition runs from Monday June 16th 2008 to Monday June 30th 2008 12:00pm NOON [CST] (Renderosity Server Time).

They are also offering a coupon for 10% off a single order in the Renderosity MarketPlace for use until June 9th.

Competition sponsors include e-on software.

Vue used for Heroes Chapter Three Kindred?

Watching Heroes last week I noticed a VFX shot with a distinctly Vue 6 flavour in the season 2 episode "Chapter Three Kindred". Its taken me a couple of days to track down a video of it on YouTube (above) and a few higher quality screen captures (below). If you can watch it on TV because it stood out even more for me then.

The background hills and clouds are fairly distinctive but for me the real give away is what looks like a large scale EcoSystem of the standard Vue palm trees made famous by the UFO video last year.

Anyway I've set up a vote so you can let me know if you think I'm right or not.

Poser Pro

I've ummed and arred about posting something about Poser Pro's release here and decided that while it's a bit tangential to the usual Vue news its probably of interest to at least some Vue users so I'll carry the press release. Your usual Vue service will be resumed just as soon as I have some Vue related news...

Smith Micro Software's Consumer Group Releases New Poser Pro For Professional 3D Artists

Poser Pro Provides Character Content for 2D and 3D Applications to Save Time and Development Resources for Studio and Production Environments

April 29, 2008

ALISO VIEJO, CA – Smith Micro Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMSI) Consumer Group today announced the immediate availability of Poser® Pro. Building on the global success of Poser® 7, long used by digital artists and hobbyists to create 3D images and animations, Smith Micro developed Poser Pro with a feature set and functionality geared for professional content creators within studio and production environments. To save users time, resources and development costs, Poser Pro offers advanced features that include scene-hosting plug-ins for popular 3D environments, as well as a 64-bit render engine, COLLADA™ support and advanced network rendering.

Poser Pro delivers a powerful, yet easy-to-use 3D character design and animation tools that help artists integrate custom and pre-built characters into professional projects and production pipelines. Poser Pro lets artists fine tune light, shadow, color and detail on figures, and ships with distributable 3D characters that are specially designed to provide a starting point for scene development, thereby saving production time. For comprehensive content and creation, Poser Pro offers the sophisticated character functionality and features of many higher priced products on the market.

"When planning the feature set for Poser Pro, we noticed professionals using Poser 7 were looking for better ways to integrate Poser content into their production pipelines," said Steve Yatson, Senior Director of Graphics Solutions for Smith Micro Software. "As a result, Poser Pro is a significant step forward for professional 3D designers looking to add character content in a cost-effective way. With the new rendering features and image controls, we're confident that Poser Pro will be well received by production artists across various industries including advertising, architecture, entertainment and education, who use 3D imagery to bring their ideas to life."

Poser Pro includes PoserFusion™ plug-ins, which enables hosting of both animated and static Poser scenes in Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya® and Maxon's CINEMA 4D. Poser Pro supports COLLADA data interchange, which permits the import of 3D data and the export of Poser scenes with character rigging and blend zones, morph targets, texture information, lighting, cameras and other scene details.

To save production resources and time, Poser Pro includes a distributed Network Render Queue and Queue Manager, which allows users to set up and manage a cross-platform rendering network. Background rendering enables users to continue working on Poser Pro scenes while rendering, and the updated 64-bit Firefly Render Engine permits full system memory to be utilized for the rendering of large scene files.

For extreme realism in rendered images, Poser Pro provides both high dynamic range (HDR) image import for textures and image-based light (IBL) maps plus optimized export of those rendered HDR images. Gamma Correction permits users to accurately match rendered image output to the final output or display device by setting gamma values on a material-by-material basis.

Poser Pro offers new content specific features, including Normal Mapping support to increase surface detail without increasing polygon count. Also unique to Poser Pro is a collection of four medium-resolution, face room compliant, rigged human characters that can be modified and freely redistributed as new content, serving as an excellent starting point for the development of new characters for games, movies and other real-time 3D projects.

Pricing and Availability

The MSRP for Poser Pro is $499.99. The application is available at the Smith Micro web store at www.smithmicro.com/poserpro, and at select resellers and distribution partners worldwide.

Registered users of Poser 6 and Poser 7 can side-grade to Poser Pro for $199.99 until July 31, 2008. Please visit: www.smithmicro.com/poserpro/upgrade for more information.

To learn more about Poser Pro and our complete line of software, visit: www.smithmicro.com.

Starbucks` Maelstrom made with Vue?

I was watching the Battlestar Galactica episode Maelstrom earlier. The viper flight through a storm looks like it was done with Vue 6. It's season 3, episode 17 if you want to see it or you can see clips on YouTube.

What do you think, am I right or wrong? Vote now and let me know what you think.

The RANCH renderfarm V2 is online

The RANCH renderfarm is now offering a guaranteed 340 GHz power for your Vue projects. The RANCH web site and renderfarm user guides (english and french) have all been updated to reflect the new capacity.

3DM3.com's Ghost City : Infection Competition

3DM3.com have a new competition to create an image of an imaginary city view after the explosion of a nuclear reactor causes its evacutation. There are three competition categories:

• 3D Environment
• 2D Environment
• 3D Character

There are lots of prizes including Vue 6 Infinite, Vue 6 xStream, texture bundles, CINEMA 4D Core and magazine subscriptions. The competition started on October 15^th and ends on December 10^th.

The rules of the competition and the prizes can be found on the 3DM3.com's Ghost City : Infection pages.

Shape Magic Road Maker

Shape Magic Road Maker is a free program can be used to carve roads into Vue's grayscale terrain maps. The road will rise and fall with the terrain. After importing the greyscale map you draw the road on it and it generates a new terrain map which can be saved and then imported into Vue. Road Maker also creates road texture and alpha maps that can be used in Vue to provide a road texture that is different from the rest of the terrain.

Cloud Shaping Tutorial

I've just posted a work in progress of a tutorial on how to cut shapes from cloud layers to create clouds that look like things. If your interested pop over to my blog and have a read of Vue Tutorial: Cloud Layer Sculpting.

Tip: Hand Held Camera Shake in Vue

To give your camera movement in an animation the hand held camera look you can use the vibration controls in the animation tools. You can change the magnitude of the vibration over time to vary the effect or to simulate outside forces acting on the operator or the operator moving.

Realms Art Forest Terrains

Realms Art Forest Terrains is a collection of materials and plants for forest scenes. Available as either seasonal packs or a combined pack the total package consist of 27 Materials, 15 Ecosystems and 26 SolidGrowth Plants.

Postcards From The Rim

Monsoon has released a new Vue set for creating science fiction images, Postcards from the Rim, at 3D Commune. It includes 90 materials, 65 objects, functions, 2 atmospheres and a selection of scenes to get you started.

Free Tower Model

I've just posted a free tower block model for Vue on my Too Many Ideas blog.

Creating Height Maps using Vue

Keith Wilson has made a series of video tutorials on creating height maps from Digital Elevation Model data (DEM) using Vue 5 Infinite, Photoshop cs2, Google earth and Lightwave.

You can download them now at: http://www.starssite.com/dem/

New E-on Software Newsletter - May 30, 2007

e-on have just posted a new newsletter including:

• Ozone 3.0 PLE
• Try Vue 6 for free
• Render Farm news
• New Training CD

Read the newletter at e-on's site.

Cornucopia 3D Newsletter Number 16

A new Cornucopia 3D Newsletter is now available from the Corunucopia 3D web site.

Free Vue 6 Materials

Agiel has made a nice set of free materials available for Vue 6.

Download: Agiel Materials experiments