Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/135926
products 8For an extensive look at all the new products unveiled at NAB 2013, visit www.cgw.com and use the top bar to get to the News: NAB section. can also control how light bounces through the scene. Raytracing is supported, as is global illumination. Another neat little feature is ground illumination, which creates an underlighting effect and can be great for product shots. Other enhancements include a bloom feature, which simulates emissive materials, as well as a vignette effect, which darkens the corners of a render. Version 4 of KeyShot also includes the ability to do simple animations. The animation is pretty much limited to translating and rotating the objects in the scene. Cameras can be animated, too. Other parameters, such as light intensity or color, cannot be animated at this time. Overall, I found the software to be excellent at what it is designed to do – making high-quality rendering easy. I found it simple to set up and render a shot that looked photorealistic. I think this software would find a very comfortable home in design studios, where realistic product shots are always in demand. Engineers could take their CAD creations and make them presentation-worthy in a snap. Architectural offices could also find a lot of use with this renderer, particularly in the realistic lighting models. While KeyShot would be great for many, there are some who will need more than what Luxion provides in KeyShot. Some architects might be disappointed at the lack of a daylight/sunlight model. VFX houses would probably need better ways to render images for layered compositing. Animators doing complex scenes would find that the animation features aren't quite there yet. But no product is meant to be everything to everyone, and KeyShot fills a very important niche in the rendering world. Luxion gives non-technical people access to powerful rendering on almost any computer. KeyShot really does make high-quality rendering an easy task. People needing photorealistic images or simple animations will find KeyShot 4 to be a very powerful companion to their CAD and 3D packages. ■ CGW May/June 2013, Volume 36, Issue 4: COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD (USPS 665-250) (ISSN-0271-4159) is published bi-monthly with special additional issues in January and July resulting in 8 issues per year by COP Communications, Inc. Corporate offices: 620 West Elk Avenue, Glendale, CA 91204, Tel: 818-291-1100; FAX: 818-291-1190; Web Address: info@copprints.com. Periodicals Postage Paid at Glendale, CA, 91205 & additional mailing offices. COMPUTER GRAPHICS WORLD is distributed worldwide. Annual subscription prices are $72, USA; $98, Canada & Mexico; $150 International airfreight. To order subscriptions, call 847-559-7310. George Maestri is a contributing editor for CGW and president/CEO of RubberBug animation studio. He also teaches Maya for Lynda.com. He can be reached at maestri@rubberbug.com. POSTMASTER: Send change of address form to Computer Graphics World, P.O. Box 3296, Northbrook, IL 60065-3296. 32 ■ CGW M ay / J u ne 2 0 1 3 H a r d wa r e TableT Nice Touch Wacom has rolled out the Cintiq 22HD touch, a new addition to its expanding interactive pen display portfolio, now featuring multi-touch. Combining multi-touch with Wacom's pen technology, the new Cintiq 22HD touch offers an immersive on-screen experience and a more intuitive and natural way to work. Additional features include a 21.5-inch, full-HD display, an ergonomic rotating stand, and 16 customizable ExpressKeys. The Cintiq 22HD touch is priced at $2,499. www.wacom.com S O F T wa r e ReNdeRiNg cRackiNg code Thinkbox Software has released Krakatoa SR, a standalone version of its high-volume particle renderer for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems that can be integrated with any 3D content creation application. CPU-based, highly optimized, and heavily multi-threaded, Krakatoa SR exposes both a Pythonbased interface and a C++ API to connect to various professional 3D applications. Krakatoa SR offers a point or voxel representation of particle data, with various filter modes, motion-blur, and depth-of-field camera effects, and HDRI render passes output to OpenEXR files. Krakatoa SR is priced at $495. www.thinkboxsoftware.com dcc MaxoN/adobe PiPeliNe Maxon has revealed the first step in its strategic alliance wit h Adobe Systems, which is aimed at delivering a new level of integration between its 3D application Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects. The next release of Adobe's software will include two Maxon technologies directly within the new Adobe After Effects: CineWare and Cinema 4D Lite. CineWare eliminates the intermediate renderings between applications by making Cinema 4D's rendering engine available inside the new version of After Effects. Cinema 4D Lite, meanwhile, provides After Effects users a taste of the software's workflow and tools. www.maxon.com; www.adobe.com MoTioN caPTuRe ReTaRgeTeR: abouT Face Faceware Technologies has rolled out Retargeter 4.0, a major upgrade to its Faceware software. The new software's key features, which include AutoSolve, Expression Sets, Tracking Visualization, Shared Pose Thumbnails, and Batch Processing, focus on automating more of the facial motion-capture process, as well as simplifying creative collaboration. Retargeter 4.0 is a lightweight plug-in to Autodesk's Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage, and MotionBuilder, and is part of Faceware's Professional Product Line, a suite of facial mocap hardware and software. The plug-in is free and will work with current versions of Faceware Analyzer. www.facewaretech.com © 2013 CGW by COP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without permission. 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