News

cebas Welcomes Customers and Interested Users to SIGGRAPH 2010

Victoria, BC - July 19, 2010

cebas Visual Technology, one of the largest plug-in software developers for Autodesk 3ds Max, 3ds Max Design, Maya and Maxon CINEMA 4D, announces their participation in this year’s SIGGRAPH exhibition taking place in Los Angeles, CA from July 27 to July 29th. Please visit us in Booth # 314.

This year marks the 15th year that cebas has represented itself as a leading 3D software house at the SIGGRAPH exposition. Being a part of the world’s largest 3D software event and community, has been critical to the worldwide success of their software and VFX production expertise.

cebas will demonstrate their revolutionary software tools which were used to fulfill the demanding needs of complex 3D effects for such motion picture productions as: “2012”, “Alice in Wonder Land”, “The Last Air Bender”, “GI Joe”, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians”, “Nightmare on Elm Street”, “Jonah Hex” and “Iron Man 2.”

For the movie “2012,” many first of a kind features and unique tools were developed to cope with the extremely demanding production environment, allowing for complete flexibility and fast turnaround times from start to finish. One of the most challenging tasks was the creation of a completely new Multiple Pass Render system, capable of outperforming the built-in 3ds Max system.

cebas Visual Technology will demonstrate advanced rendering and particle effects technologies for various platforms. Sneak previews of brand new developments can be seen on the show floor, as well as great new enhancements and upgrades to the product line of all our shipping products. More product specific press announcements and updates will be released shortly before or during the week of SIGGRAPH 2010, July 24 to 29th.

Announcements and Previews at SIGGRAPH

New Major Releases to be demonstrated:

• finalRender R3.5 and finalRender R3.5 SE and finalToon R3.5 (shipping after SIGGRAPH)
• finalRender Personal 3.5 (shipping after SIGGRAPH)
• finalRender Stage-2 R2 for Maya (shipping after SIGGRAPH)
• finalRender Stage-2 R2 for CINEMA 4D (announcement)
• thinkingParticles R4 - with a new Phsx engine, supports the latest NVIDIA hardware
• thinkingParticles Classic - equivalent in functionality to the R3 version, offered for only a 3rd of the original's price! (pre-order at the show)

Re-compiled Version:

• finalRender Stage-2 for CINEMA 4D 11.5 (shipping after SIGGRAPH)
• finalRender Stage-2 for CINEMA 4D 11.5 PERSONAL edition (Non Commercial Use Only) 
   

SNEAK PEEK :
A new revolutionary hardware accelerated solution for 3ds Max to be released in Q1 2011 - finalRender R4 and R4 SE.

As a world premiere, cebas will show its latest prototype of the first fully integrated hardware accelerated advanced global illumination rendering solution which is based on the production proven finalRender rendering system, for 3ds Max. This future relase, finalRender R4, will incorporate enhanced CUDA GPU acceleration as well as full OpenCL support, without restricting any features and functionality of finalRender for 3ds Max.

Thanks to finalRender R4’s advanced CUDA GPU support, based on the latest line of NVIDIA hardware, massive acceleration in rendering photo realistic images will be delivered by a new approach. finalRender R4 integrates Next Generation Hardware rendering acceleration transparently, with the user only being aware of the increase in speed.

New Major Release Announcement of finalRender R3.5 and finalRender R3.5 SE and finalRender R3.5 PERSONAL

About finalRender R3.5

cebas will show the next evolution of finalRender, Release 3.5, on sale shortly after SIGGRPAH. With the introduction of major “Point Releases,” cebas has responded to the increasing need of their customers for more timely new technology upgrades, in order to stay in sync with Autodesk’s 12 month release cycles.
Find below a list of new functionality and features added to finalRender R3.5 and R3.5 SE

New GI-Engine: HarmonicsGI

In the rendering software industry, it is not a common practice to introduce a brand new Global Illumination technology in such a short amount of time within such a seasoned working product environment as finalRender. HarmonicsGI is a bold step towards offering better and faster Global Illumination solutions to the cebas user base and community. This new system, available in R3.5, is meant as a future replacement of the “older” Image-GI Global Illumination Engine.

The ImageGI Global Illumination engine was cebas’ very first invention, introduced in 2002; now, new algorithms and progress in Multi Core software technology have finally made room for many new sophisticated approaches to enhancing and accelerating Global Illumination rendering for all cebas users.

Nicolas Caplat, owner of Ideas At Work, a french company specialized in visualisation for architecture, design and merchandising thinks:

"The introduction of Harmonics GI technology was something we really welcome in our daily work for architectural visualisation. It's fast, accurate and flexible. With the introduction of this new engine, cebas has provided us with the ability to choose between their various engines for both primary and secondary bounces. This now allows finalRender's global illumination to be more polyvalent than ever, which adapts to any field in which we work. From stills to animations, from interior to exterior scenes, product shots or whatever else we do, finalRender has proven, that it is more than ever, a crucial tool in our arsenal!"

The key feature of the new HarmonicsGI can be summarized simply as lightning fast and picture perfect. Along the development cycle, Beta tester reports and feedback show an overall excitement about this new technology introduced by cebas. The smoothness of the rendering results and animation stability of the GI renderings have never been better!

Massive Core GI-Engine Changes

In order to re-invent a new way to render GI faster and smoother than anyone else on the the planet, cebas made massive and dramatic core changes to finalRender’s GI-Engine. Thanks to the robust concept and state of the art modular coding technology used by cebas, the changes made lead to an amazing new flexible concept of combining and inter-mixing GI-Engines which easily multiplies the amount of possibilities. With the release of finalRender R3.5, the user may now choose from any combination of Primary and Secondary-GI Engines. 

DomeLight

finalRender R3 SE was the rendering system of choice for Uncharted Territory when they produced 3D effects for the blockbuster movie “2012.” DomeLight did not only prove to be the key lighting tool/method used to create believable and fast Global Illumination scenery, it also showed great stability in ultra complex scenes with thousands of animated objects, possessing millions of polygons. In finalRender R3.5, DomeLight is now faster, smoother and better than before, accelerating both the Animation and QMC rendering modes. 

Physical Camera - a Real World Camera model

finalRender’s physical camera with its great real-time preview option is # 1 when setting up scenes within 3ds Max. Many enhancements have been added to this module for the 3.5 Release: besides an even faster preview, proper Gamma Correction and real-time Vignetting preview have been added.

New interactive Tone Mapper

finalRender 3.5 comes with a new interactive Tone Mapper effect, enabling the user to adjust the High Dynamic Range Images to their liking; in a semi-automatic method, mimicking exactly the methods and tools that a real experienced photographer would choose. The addition of this and other tools mentioned, are what makes finalRender 3.5 the most complete and integrated solution for any 3D Artist.

Micro Triangle Displacement

The effectiveness of the Micro Triangle Displacement (MTD) code of finalRender has been greatly augmented. In its current release, enhanced performance and Multi-Core Processor support has been optimized to guarantee max speed while maintaining a low memory footprint at render time. A smooth surface is still maintained even with a highly detailed surface structure.

Render Proxies have Arrived

Render Proxies, have always been discussed in the community and for some users, they are considered a key feature to their future render and production pipeline. finalRender has always been the most efficient renderer when instancing complex meshes in the hundreds of thousands. Rendering billions of polygons has never been an issue for finalRender. Due to high user demand, with this release, cebas now offers a "render-pipeline" tool for which many users have wished and will continue to use and integrate into their studio pipeline setups.

Render Proxies are highly optimized binary files holding a fully prepared acceleration tree of a 3D object which exactly matches the native internal scene database description of finalRender. The finalRender proxy files are loaded on demand at render-time and fully replace the “container” scene object, massively reducing the workload in the 3ds Max editor and finalRender, at the same time.

This new feature opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Complex high-poly-count objects can easily be “outsourced” or referenced by a finalRender Proxy file. The file will be loaded into memory at render-time for direct processing by the render-core engine, without cluttering the 3ds Max view port or using up any byte of extra memory in the 3ds Max scene file.

Alice in Stereo-Wonderland!

finalRender R3.5 SE Stereo Camera offers the 3ds Max user, for the first time, a sophisticated way to reproduce true 3D stereo camera effects right from within 3ds Max. The heavily loaded 3D effects production, “Alice in Wonderland,” required a true 3D Stereo Camera render effect that would allow proper compositing of existing footage, created with thinkingParticles R4, and special effects rendering by finalRender R3.5 SE in full stereo.

Sam Korshid, former effects Supervisor at CafeFX approached cebas with an urgent need for a proper rendering solution for 3ds Max that would work out of the box, have no issues with foreign footage and would match rendering setups created in Autodesk Maya.

Within the tight production time line of “Alice in Wonderland,” cebas developed and integrated a new true 3D Stereo Camera model into finalRender R3.5, which proved to be an ideal rendering solution for this large scale production.

Sam Korshid comments about the finalRender R3.5 SE Stereo Camera:

“When I was working on Alice at CafeFX, I ran into an odd issue with 3ds Max - there was no professional 3D Stereo Camera rendering solution available! Knowing from my past “2012” production experience what cebas was able to achieve, I contacted them about my problem. In no time at all, I was able to start using the very first 3D Stereo Camera implementation from cebas. cebas’ new camera model supports all thinkable and unthinkable output options for Stereo-3D, including a one pass Anaglyph rendering mode. It worked just fine, throughtout the entire production of Alice.”

In addition to the above changes, additional features have been added.

New Materials and Shaders added to finalRender 3.5 Standard

• fR-2Sided - a whole new way to do ultra fast and highly optimized Sub Surface Scattering and Translucency effects

New Materials and Shaders added to R 3.5 SE (Studio Edition)

• fR- Skin 2 - is the new Skin in town! This new layered skin material/shader resembles the effects of human (or even alien skin) much better than the “old” fR-Skin
• fR-CarPaint 2 - with his new material, if you want, the paint on your car model will look exactly like a shiny new car in your garage
• fR-FastSkin - has been upgraded to allow full map control of it’s features

About finalToon 3.5

finalToon, available either as a standalone feature for 3ds Max or as an integrated part of finalRender R3.5 has been enhanced and upgraded as well. finalToon is the de rigueur standard in Non Photo Realistic Rendering for 3ds Max. As well, the program supports many of the available 3ds Max renderers, including but not limited to, the inbuilt Scanline renderer and the shipping version of Mental Ray.

With this new R3.5 release of finalToon, the outline rendering and detection quality and handling of large scale scenes has been dramatically improved. Artifacts caused by immense scene scales are no longer that much of a problem. Besides speed improvements, a new NPR Shaders has been added as well.

The new NPR Shaders/materials added to finalToon R3.5 are:

• finalToon NPR Shader
• finalToon Wrapper

The newly introduced fT-NPRShader material offers greater artistic control with which to create a non photo realistic shading look. From a water color like-look to a charcoal black and white hand scribbled drawing - all is possible now! Architects and Movie Cartoon producers equally benefit from this new release and are now able to extend their artistic skills even further.

About thinkingParticles Classic

thinkingParticles Classic is a new advanced particle effects product from cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc., offering all the power and all the functionality of thinkingParticles R3, for an amazingly low and affordable price! Costing only a third of thinkingParticles R4, it clearly gives more bang for the buck than any other special effects solution on the market today!

Movie productions like “Spiderman 3,” “Blade Trinity,” “Final Destination” and “Tomb Raider,” to name only a few, are clear proof of the amazing power behind this leading particle effects system. Also, thinkingParticles is the only available particle effects system on the market with direct and advanced FumeFX Support.

Joe Scarr Lead FX Artist on a multitude of movie productions states:

”The speed, flexibility and rich feature-set combined with cebas' development drive in pushing the limits, makes thinkingParticles Classic an investment that pays for itself several times over. The gains in using thinkingParticles Classic from production to production are additive, where assets and methods build upon each other, resulting in greater capabilities and better results. When you see something incredibly cool and unbelievable there's a good chance thinkingParticles played a part in its creation.”

Smaller studios investing in “Classic” will always have the option to upgrade to the full blown package for the difference in price, which makes it a rock solid investment for future growth. Upgrades to newer releases of thinkingParticles Classic are possible at any time when available.

About thinkingParticles R4

“The mother of all Particle Effects”, thinkingParticles R4 is the revolutionary most advanced rigid body particle effects system on the market today, making possible large scale disaster movies like “2012” and “Red Cliff.”

Rif Dagher, Leading VFX Supervisor at Pixelmagic and long term thinkingParticles Master states:

“thinkingParticles is the key tool that I use when planning complex large scale special effects shots. The effects for the movie, “Red Cliff,” required an armada of more than 2500 ancient ships, along with animated CG characters on each ship, engaged in an enormous sea battle which ends in a huge fight, creating havoc, with fire and destruction everywhere. By using cebas’ advanced technology, thinkingParticles, the whole sequence was done procedurally right from within tP’s powerful user interface. Also, we were able to render those massive scenes in one go with finalRender R3 SE!”

thinkingParticels R4’s advanced particle effects approach and unique physics simulation methods, replace practical physical effects in movies that require ultra large scale scenes, never before seen on the screen. The algorithms and technologies used in thinkingParticles R4 are state of the art. They use a good mix of industry standards, like NVIDIA’s PhysX 64-Bit dynamics game simulation engine and many unique highly optimized proprietary inventions that drive the technological possibilities much further than anyone else in the market has been able to achieve until now.

Edwin Braun CEO of cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. states:

”I’m confident that we are witnessing the end of a whole industry. The practical effects business and all its model building and wood chopping and gluing has been all but exterminated by the use of advanced large scale real-world computerized physics simulation systems, like the ones cebas offers with their software tools. I see thinkingParticles R4 being used in more and more studios around the globe. There is no longer a need for people to paint foam to make it look like metal; even explosions now can be created much better in 3D! Sitni Sati, a developer of the most advanced fluid system on the market, offers direct integration with thinkingParticles - what else do you need? You have it all: fire, smoke demolition - not much need anymore for burning thousands of gallons of fuel. Green Hollywood productions are now becoming a reality with thinkingParticles R4.”

Pixomondo, an international Effects Studio based in Los Angeles California and other European cities, has successfully integrated thinkingParticles R4 into their production pipeline, enabling them to produce large scale visual special effects, that audiences around the globe view in movies like “The last Airbender,” Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” “Iron Man 2,” “Ninja Assassins,” and “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

thinkingParticles R4 Dynamic Setup

Joe Scarr, renowned Lead FX Artist on a multitude of movie productions states:

“thinkingParticles R4 has proven to be the most powerful version of thinkginParticles to date, with a jointing and volume-breaking system that enables dynamic destruction with outstanding user-control and flexibility. Add to this the new thinkingParticles ScriptOp capabilities, where users can now create their own native thinkingParticles operators -- the playing field has been elevated to a whole new level. The re-written SC engine brings optimized memory and Voxel grid handling, delivering even more intense complex rigid body simulations. We sincerely look forward to a partnership between cebas and NVIDIA to further develop hardware acceleration options which will astonish audiences beyond belief.”

About finalRender Stage-2 R2 for Maya

finalRender Stage-2 R2 is the next evolution of finalRender Stage-2 for Maya, offering full support for Maya 2011 down to Maya 2008. With the introduction of Release 2, many enhancements have been added and a lot of work has been done to work-flow and feature support. fianlRender has always been on top of the best integrated 3rd party render solutions for Maya and support the widest range of native shaders and shader-tree setups right from within Maya. Hypershade, the material/shading setup system within Maya, supports hundreds of nodes, allowing the user to create an unlimited amount of materials and shaders. This advanced native system within Maya is supported to a great extent, and unlike other rendering solutions, finalRender does not force the user to use only one specialized or reduced set of shader nodes, or one fixed set of materials.

Shader thinking Re-done!

17 new shaders have been added to the library. You can use complex, all-in-one shaders, like fR-Architectural and fR-Carpaint, or you can choose to build your own complex material, starting from simpler shaders called fR-BuildingBlocks. Other engines provide a collection of simple shaders to connect up, but they fail in formulating a stright forward solution to wiring them into a solid, physicalcorrect material with advanced RE capability.

With the help of a sophisticated and yet very simple to use stack shader(bbStackMat), the user is able to build up highly complex materials by stacking simple layers, like a variety of Diffuse, Specular and Reflection/Refraction, metal flakes, velvet and other models, all designed to work together in a physical correct way and with each layer capable of delivering arbitrary RE data.

Shader swatches now Preview using finalRender engine for an exact feedback. Boost your rendering in compositing! finalRender Stage-2 for Maya redefined the potential of RenderElements in Maya. Now R2 extends the capability, offering user defined RE out of each material. This is the perfect companion of fR-BuildingBlocks. You can render more out of a single render pass. The limit is only the one that you decide. 

Make it your Own !

Maya is known for its flexibility to adjust its work-flow to every possible pipeline in the market. finalRender does not come short. The new Release 2 comes with a sophisticated API which allows advanced users to write their own shaders and solutions. It is the very same API with which core shaders are built. Also,integration of your custom shaders into Maya has been made simpler and streamlined. Nodes are dynamically generated and integrated into the GUI, based on simple description files (fRd).

fRd files can also be used to create so called “fR-MagicBoxes”. These are somehow similar to maya built-in phenomenon nodes. fR-MagicBoxes encapsulate a shading network which hides the complexity of networks and expose only the attributes you wish to control and connect. However, fR-MagicBoxes are dynamic; their content can vary, depending on attribute settings, active connections and more. You can really capture and control the essence of a complex shading network, without the burden of managing them every single day.

New enhancements and additions to finalRender Stage-2 R2 for Maya

• Maya’s cameras, especially the Stereo-Camera, is now fully supported.
• Implementation of a proper linear color space workflow
• Added physical exposure for improved image rendition
• Enhanced render time subdivision surface performance and capability - now supports multiple UV sets
• Instance more object by using fR-Procedural node. Viewport preview of cloned geometry is improved for a much nicer feedback. Instanced geometry uses even less memory than before and translates much faster.
• Uses per-particle data and texture cycling (same as sprites) to texture and shade particle instanced geometry.
• Render settings can be fully animated.
• New GI and detail detection features to boost GI quality
• Improved general Multi-Threading (Multi-Core) performance. Scene
• translation is multi-threaded too.
• Performance improvements across the board including displacement,
• transparency and light cache for layered shaders.
• New command line options for fRstation (in-render mode) to match
• those of standard Maya Batch render options
• New Materials, Shaders and tools:
• frCarPaint - easy to use, fast to setup Car Paint material
• frProximity - an advanced shader based on measured distances to points in a scene
• frColorSpace - a all purpose shader that defines and sets color spaces
• Conversion Utility - frPhotometricExposure
• New physically accurate Exposure Controls for Camera Attribute Editor
• New Area-Light options
• Workflow enhancements, thanks to shader swatch rendering and extended Attribute Spread Sheets
•  Many fixes for improved performance and stability

About finalRender Stage-2 R1 for CINEMA 4D

cebas is excited to announce the re-compile release of its finalRender Stage-2 R1 for CINEMA 4D 11.5, to be released shortly after SIGGRAPH 2010. This free recompile which is available as a download for registered customers, clearly states the commitment cebas makes to bring advanced rendering technology to the 3D modelling and animation mass market.
cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. has always been in a close relationship with MAXON, maker of CINEMA 4D, who have bought and licensed several cebas technologies which have become part of the core CINEMA 4D product line. cebas will continue to set new standards for the CINEMA 4D platform in the future.

Edwin Braun, CEO of cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. sates:

“finalRender Stage-2 for CINEMA 4D is the simplest way to bridge the professional world of movie quality 3D animation business and the mass market of 3D visualisation. finalRender is available among the best and most widely used 3D modelling platforms: 3ds Max and Maya, all of which are used in high profile Movie productions every day. It does not take much more learning on the rendering side for a CINEMA 4D user, to step forward into the real world of Movie and Animation business, once they realize that the full power of finalRender for CINEMA 4D is built upon exactly the same rendering core as finalRender for Maya.”

Shader Tree Unqiue in the World of CINEMA 4D

cebas always undertakes to create the best integrated rendering solutions possible for each target platform addressed. In the case of CINEMA 4D this has meant the continuous invention of new features not previously available to CINEMA 4D users. For example, a fully blown professional shader-tree interface has been developed uniquely for CINEMA 4D, which supports all the advanced professional rendering features that finalRender has to offer.

About finalRender Stage-2 R2 for CINEMA 4D

cebas is happy to announce a future CINEMA 4D development stream, beyond CINEMA 4D 11.5, which will be supported by the future finalRender Stage-2 R2 release. cebas is committed to delivering state of the art technology to its customers whenever possible and occasionally to cebas supported vendors of 3D applications, when they conduct a massive overhaul of their own applications and development environment; this sometimes means, that products of such complexity as finalRender may require some extra development effort from both parties until perfected.

Users of MAXON's CINEMA 4D will be happy to learn that all the rendering core benefits and enhancements of finalRender Stage-2 R2 will be available for them, in CINEMA 4D! In addition to the rendering core enhancements, platform specific tools have been added as well, some of the CINEMA 4D specific tools and enhancements are listed below:

• New Physical Camera Model with Realtime Preview and Adjustments
• New Unique Materials added to R2 are:
• fR-VolumeSolid - a true volumetric rendering material
• fastSSS Material - adds ultra fast Sub Surface Scattering
• fR-Carpaint - adds a real Car Paint material with complex metal flakes
• fR- Matte Shadow Material - an advanced matte rendering material
• Enhanced Light material now uses real Physical Units
• All new Physical Sky Rendering Model
• Native finalRender Instancing Power - renders millions of objects
• Better and Faster 3D Motion Blur from within CINEMA 4D
• New Object Tag: Matte/Shadow - now every object can become a Matte-Shadow
• finalDOF post effect is now standard with R2, adding Realtime Depth of Field

About finalToon for finalRender Stage-2 R2

Finally, there is a choice for more quality effects and more individual renderings in CINEMA 4D! finalToon, the Non Photo Realisitc Rendering (NPR) standard on all versions of 3ds Max, which comes as part of finaRender Stage-2 R2, opens up a whole new world of illustration and cartoon rendering effects for which finalToon has become famous. The unique look, that finalToon creates, has allowed many studios around the globe to win hundreds of awards for their creations. One great example is the praised Warner Brothers’ Kids full feature movie, “Laura’s Star,” created by CartoonFilm Germany which was awarded “Outstanding Children or Youth Film”.

Until now, there has been no real choice for CINEMA 4D users, who have wanted to express themselves with professional 3D cartoon or NPR renderings, in general. A highly accurate line and cartoon rendering system like finalToon was just missing. The wait is over, now! cebas announces its upcoming release of finalToon for CINEMA 4D, offered as a standard option with finalRender Stage-2 R2.

finalToon for finalRender Stage-2 R2 is a full blown True Line Renderer (TLR), with unparalleled line quality and rendering speed. finalToon is implemented in two ways: as a native finalRender “Post Effect," which creates and renders ultra fast outlines and in the form of advanced finalToon shaders, so that users can enjoy all the great benefits of such an implementation. finalToon perfectly supports finalRender Stage-2 R2 with all of its advanced options, including GI rendering and hatching for cartoon style objects!

About cebas Visual Technology Inc.

cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. is a developer of advanced 3D software for 3ds Max and other 3D applications, based in Victoria, BC. With more than 20 years of experience in software development for the 3D market cebas has become renowned for its quality and unique software products, serving graphics and animation studios around the world. More info is available at www.cebas.com , cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc.

Contact:
Edwin Braun
press@cebas.com
www.cebas.com