finalRender 3.5 and 3.5 SE are now available

New Features 3D-Stereo Camera, Ultra-Fast GI Engine, and More Deliver Great Value Victoria, December 8, 2010 -- 3D visual effects specialist...

New Features 3D-Stereo Camera, Ultra-Fast GI Engine, and More Deliver Great Value
Victoria, December 8, 2010 -- 3D visual effects specialist cebas Visual Technology Inc. today released the latest version of its high-speed rendering software, finalRender 3.5. The software can be downloaded immediately from the company website as well as through cebas distributors and resellers.

"We have brought this new release of our industry leading tool finalRender to market much faster than usual," said cebas CEO Edwin Braun.
"Our users asked us to make new features available as we develop them so they can put them into production immediately. cebas has responded by releasing a x.5 version as a major release for the first time in its 20-plus year history," he added.
finalRender 3.5 brings completely new features and major enhancements, with more stability and productivity. The introduction of a brand new GI-Engine, along with an innovative concept for handling primary and secondary engines, fulfills even the highest demands of finalRender users. Global illumination renderings are faster and cleaner, and show more detail than ever with unexpected ease-of-use.
With 3D Camera, developed for and first used in "Alice in Wonderland", this advanced, versatile true 3D stereo camera tool is now available to the general finalRender user.
In making the powerful and comprehensive finalToon, ScatterTool, and OceanShader tools integral parts of the new release, finalRender 3.5 offers excellent value compared with other offerings. Also, pyroCluster is now part of finalRender 3.5 SE at no extra cost.
"The new features of finalRender 3.5 are totally amazing," says Michael Plängsken, founder of Ground Studios, a German television and motion picture production special effects house. "HarmonicsGI elevates to a completely new quality level, especially with interior renderings."
"The setup phase is much enhanced. You can now switch between all available GI engines without losing settings, which is great for testing. Also, the enhanced DomeLight can do super-crisp shadows just with an HDRI mapped into it," Plängsken continued.
"fR-Skin2 in finalRender 3.5 SE offers outstanding complexity and quality. The finalRender displacement technology, plus the good interaction with Hair Farm, makes it the top choice for creature rendering. Also, finalRender supports our linear workflow perfectly."
"The ability to split up complete scenes into its single objects without occlusion is totally unique. finalRender has proven a crucial tool in our 3D visualization tool set. It's their best release ever," Plängsken concluded.

Alice in (Stereo-) Wonderland

The new finalRender SE Stereo Camera offers the 3ds Max user a sophisticated way to reproduce true 3D stereo camera effects from within 3ds Max.

Sam Korshid, former effects Supervisor at CafeFX, approached cebas with an urgent need for a proper 3ds Max rendering solution.

It needed to work out of the box, have no issues with live action footage, allow proper compositing of existing footage (created with thinkingParticles R4), and would match rendering setups created in Maya.

Within the tight production timeline of “Alice in Wonderland,” cebas integrated a true 3D stereo camera model into finalRender, which proved to be an ideal rendering solution for this major production.


Full Set of New Features

finalRender offers complete 3ds Max core integration and is known to handle nearly every aspect of 3ds Max as well or better than its built-in tools.
Third party compatibility has been improved considerably and, thanks to new co-operation initiatives, products like FumeFX 2.1 show dramatic speed improvements with finalRender global illumination.

Major Core GI-Engine Changes

In order to re-invent the way to render global illumination faster and smoother than anyone else, cebas made massive and dramatic core changes to finalRender’s GI-Engine.
A robust concept and state-of-the-art modular coding technology have led to a flexible concept of combining and inter-mixing GI-Engines, which multiplies the possibilities in application. With the release of finalRender 3.5, the user can choose from any combination of primary and secondary GI-Engines.

New GI-Engine: HarmonicsGI

The key feature of the new HarmonicsGI can be summarized simply as lightning-fast and picture-perfect. The smoothness of the rendering results and animation stability of the GI renderings have never been better.



Ultra-High-Speed FumeFX Rendering

Rendering speeds have been increased by one order of magnitude with speed improvements up to 10x for global illumination effects and FumeFX. Other 3d-party effects have also been significantly accelerated (e.g. Hair Farm).
Speed gains of up to 5x can be expected for sub-surface scattering effects when using the AQMC GI engine.

DomeLight
finalRender R3 SE was the rendering system of choice for Uncharted Territory for the 3D VFX in the blockbuster movie “2012.” DomeLight proved to be the key lighting 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 3.5, 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 Number One when setting up scenes in 3ds Max.
Many enhancements have been added to this module for finalRender 3.5. Besides an even faster preview, proper gamma correction and a real-time vignetting preview have been added.

Ocean Object and Material Enhancements
User feedback is always important to cebas. The latest feedback on Ocean Material and Ocean Object has led to more fine tuning and upgrades in rendering and processing speed. Foam Map handling, for example, has seen a total overhaul.

More detailed product information can be found at: finalRender 3.5 or finalRender 3.5 SE

New interactive Tone Mapper

finalRender 3.5 comes with a new interactive Tone Mapper effect, enabling the user to adjust the HDRI to their liking. In a semi-automatic method that mimicks the methods and tools an experienced photographer would apply.

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 finalRender Micro Triangle Displacement (MTD) code has been greatly augmented. In its current release, enhanced performance and multi-core support has been optimized to guarantee maximum 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

Render Proxies have been an on-going topic. For some users, they have been a core feature of their future pipeline. Rendering billions of polygons has never been an issue for finalRender. However, cebas listened to its users and now offers a render pipeline tool many users wanted to integrate into their workflow.

Render Proxies are highly optimized binary files holding a fully prepared acceleration tree of a 3D object that 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 new world of possibilities. Complex, high-poly-count objects can easily be 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 any memory in the 3ds Max scene file.

Skin2 and CarPaint2

In finalRender 3.5 SE, fR-Skin2 is a new layered skin material shader that resembles the effects of human (or alien) skin much better than the previous fR-Skin.

fR-CarPaint2, with optional new material, makes the paint on your car model look exactly like a shiny, new car.

Also, fR-FastSkin has been upgraded to allow full map control of its features.

About cebas

cebas Visual Technology Inc. is a privately held software company headquartered in Victoria, BC, Canada, with employees in Australia, Chile, and Germany. The company’s 3D visualization software is used in architectural design visualization, major motion picture production, and the gaming industry.

cebas tools run mainly on industry standard software from Autodesk (3ds Max, Maya), which has been incorporating the company’s technologies into its offerings for years.

cebas software allows users to achieve realistic and compelling visual effects that are scientifically accurate and engineered entirely based on physics.

The company's advanced tools are used to drive critical visual effects scenes in major motion pictures like "Spiderman 3", "2012", "Alice in Wonderland", "The Chronicles of Narnia -- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (opening in North America December 10) and the upcoming “Sucker Punch” (2011).

More detailed product information can be found at: finalRender 3.5 or finalRender 3.5 SE

Contact

For further information please contact:
Stephan Burckhardt, VP Marketing & Business Development:s.burckhardt@cebas.com

Related links:

cebasstation.com