Impossible Objects Visualises Mexico’s Sport Heritage for UFC at Sphere Las Vegas
VFX Supervisor Morgan McDermott at Impossible Objects talks about making their immersive film for UFC’s debut at the Sphere, combining heros and symbols of Mexican independence with UFC legends.
Chaos puts Project Arena’s Virtual Production tools to the test in a new short film, achieving accurate ICVFX with real-time raytracing and compositing. Christopher Nichols shares insights.
Moving Picture Company (MPC)has appointed Lucinda Keeler as Head of Production for its London studio, bringing over 20 years of experience and leadership in the VFX industry.
REALTIME studio has launched a Virtual Production division, following its grant from Media City Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub to develop a proprietary Virtual Production tool.
ZibraVDB plugin for Virtual Production and CG studios delivers high compression rates and fast render times, making it possible to work with very large volumetric effects in real-time.
Maxon One 2025 updates Cinema 4D, Redshift, Red Giant and Cineware, and releases ZBrush for iPad, putting ZBrush sculpting tools into a mobile device with a new UI and touch controls.
Das Element asset library software version 2.1 has new video playback controls, hierarchy tree customisation for libraries, faster set-up processes and simpler element migration.
Autodesk returned to SIGGRAPH 2024 to show software updates that include generative AI and cloud workflows for 3D animation in Maya, production scheduling and clip retiming in Flame.
Shutterstock launched a cloud-based generative 3D API, built on NVIDIA Edify AI architecture, trained on licensed Shutterstock content, as a fast way to produce realistic 3D models with AI.
Freefolk has promoted Rob Sheridan to VFX Supervisor in their Film and Episodic division and Paul Wight is now the company’s first Chief Operating Officer.
Golaem 9 includes a new animation engine, helps create new shots without simulations, and has better crowd control, helping artist improve the quality of their animated hero characters.
Adobe’s Generative Remove feature, based on the Firefly AI model, is now part of Lightroom, and the AI-powered Lens Blur tool has now become generally available with new presets.
Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max makes updates to the Corona Physical Material and Corona Sky, with improved effects that increase realism in 3D scenes, and achieves faster render speeds.
Corona’s Physical Material now has 35 new presets for glass, metal and fabric, with a new Oren-Nayar diffuse model. These changes make it possible to set up initial hyper-realistic scenes in a few minutes. From there, the Physical Material comes with various features for greater control over looks. These include Sheen parameters for creating photoreal fabrics, and Clearcoat lacquer.
Corona Physical Material
Materials are now defined as either Metal or Non-metal to make sure that only the correct, industry standard parameters are available for each material type. As Roughness instead of Glossiness is now the default, users switch to Glossiness and Specular when needed. Controlling the look of a metal can now be done by adjusting the Edge Colour and then fine tuning the end result by eye, or by using Complex IOR (index of refraction) for physically correct scenes.
Clearcoat and Sheen
Clearcoat in the Physical Material has an absorption layer that affects the colour of Diffuse Reflection and other aspects of the base layer in a realistic way. Achieving the same effect with the earlier legacy Material needed several layers that could be hard to control. Clearcoat also has an independent bump map, allowing you to create rough surfaces with a smooth, rippled or other clear coating over the top.
'The Dream House' Hossein Yadollahpour
The Material Sheen effects take into account the look the fibres of a fabric give surfaces. Instead of trying to manage individual fibres across the surface, users can adjust the new Sheen parameters, which make fabrics render faster and easier to control.
Rough glass now produces more realistic reflections and refractions – even when using the same values, the new glass may look different and more correct. Thin glass with roughness, like frosted glass, can now blur refraction as well as reflection, and also correctly simulates bouncing within the thin glass.
'Ice King' Fabricio Pinho
Sky Model
Artists using the Sky Model can more accurately depict a digital sun and weather from hills, a skyscraper or at sea level in Corona Renderer 7. The new Altitude Parameter applies real-world data to calculate what the sky will look like from a user-defined height.
For sweeping landscape shots or high aerial city views, a new Volume Effect – or aerial perspective – affects objects placed in the distance, where they naturally take on more of the sky colour. Users can control the strength of the effect through a single value. Previously, such effects were only possible using the Corona Global Volume material, but were more complex to set up and could impact render times.
Render Speed
'Audi' Edgar Barbero Mera
Corona Renderer 7 render times generally are up to 50 percent shorter. This acceleration extends to data or scene opening, as files may now open faster due to the background loading of Corona Bitmaps and proxies. The speed improvements are especially evident in scenes that mainly use the new optimised features like transparency processing, denoising and calculating passes in 32 x 32 pixel blocks.
To maintain compatibility with pre-existing scenes, the previous Material will still be available as an option called Corona Legacy Material. Corona Renderer 7 is available now for 3ds Max 2014 to 2022 (64-bit). corona-renderer.com
Pixar RenderMan v24 releases with a new render architecture for animation and VFX, able to use both the CPU and GPU, and a new shading system for layered materials.
Following Redshift’s April release bringing support for MacOS Metal, the Apple M1 chip and Open Shading Language, Maxon Redshift 3.0.46 includes robust support for OpenColorIO v2, enabling users to achieve more accurate and filmic colour through the use of ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) and other custom colour profiles. For users this gives significant enhancements to workflows with many new options and extra parameters.
For example, when employing ACEScg – a slightly larger colour space than the ITU Rec. 2020 colour space and linearly encoded for use within CG rendering and compositing tools – Redshift will automatically use the correct colour space for blackbody temperature on lights, melanin on hair, dispersion in the rsMaterial and the physical sun/sky. This latest version of Redshift also supports the ability to choose colours within a colour space in those host applications that already support OCIO.
OpenColorIO v2
OCIO v2 establishes comprehensive colour management for studio pipelines and makes it easier for everyone to achieve film-like results via ACES colour space. An OCIO configuration is supplied with Redshift, or users can reference a configuration for a specific pipeline. Users can choose from the available colour spaces when adding textures and define the colour space for rendering and viewing renders within the RenderView. Redshift for 3ds Max also includes a new Color Picker that allows users to choose colours within a colour space.
This latest release of Redshift for macOS, Windows and Linux is available now, with ongoing regular updates for stability and optimisation. www.maxon.net/en/redshift
V-Ray 5 for Cinema 4D, update 1, now supports node-based material editing, making it possible to achieve photorealistic looks without sacrificing the artist’s creative choices made ahead of rendering. Users can view and manage their complete V-Ray shading network within Cinema 4D, using the Material Node Editor throughout their creation process from the first ideas to finishing.
The V-Ray Material has also been updated to make it easier to create translucent materials in fewer steps, with built-in volumetric subsurface scattering. The result can be immediately applied to skin, plastic, wax and similar surfaces.
Material Node Editor
As an integration of two softwares, V-Ray 5 for Cinema 4D, update 1 aims for efficiency so that the artist can do more in one place, including relighting and compositing from a single render. In the latest update, artists can start rendering multiple dome lights at the same time. Direct support in Light Mix makes it possible to mix light sources and relight a scene – changing the colour and intensity of the lights – after it has been rendered.
For highly precise adjustments to renders, artists can use any of V-Ray’s masking render elements, or render passes, directly in the V-Ray Frame Buffer’s Compositor. These include Cryptomatte, MultiMatte and Object, Render and Material IDs, which may be used to fine tune an image without re-rendering or resorting to another application.
The V-Ray Material makes it easier to create translucent materials in fewer steps.
The Frame Buffer has tools for control over the rendered output, for reviewing, analysing and post processing images, and is also a place to monitor work-in-progress and manage colours.
Rendering reflected lights and refractions from surfaces like glass and water is now easier, with more realistic looks, using V-Ray’s progressively calculated caustics. It helps achieve reflections faster and can be set up without using pre-calculated photon maps. Using sampling techniques, the Progressive caustics solver is able to trace the required photons without the memory constraints of traditional Photon Mapping.
V-Ray Fur is a simple, procedural fur plugin – that is, the fur is generated only during render time and is not actually present in the scene. It can be used to produce grass and fabrics, carpets, hair and similar materials.
Another render-time effect that does not modify the actual scene geometry is V-Ray Clipper, used to quickly create cutaways and section renders for scenes or objects. Any scene object can also be converted to a clipper. www.chaosgroup.com
Weta Digital has designed and developed a set of tools embedded in Autodesk Maya, and has partnered with Autodesk in order to market them as a subscription cloud service called WetaM.
Weta Digital, one of the world’s top VFX studios, has already won 13 Academy Sci-tech Awards for its tools that artists use to produce some of the world’s best known film and TV series including ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ‘Avatar’, ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Planet of the Apes’. Weta intends to release WetaM as a private beta towards the end of 2021.
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Weta’s proprietary VFX tools have been built on Maya’s open API, and will be commercialised through WetaM. Artists from around the world will have access to a complete cloud-based pipeline, running from stage to screen. WetaM is the first product launch under a new division within Weta Digital devoted to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This new arm of the business is integral to Weta’s expansion strategy to make professional and prosumer tools available to artists working in media & entertainment. The dedicated website will be located here.
As a leader in VFX and animation for the last three decades, Weta Digital is founded in technological innovation, artistic talent and exceptional visual style. “Weta Digital has brought together the most creative minds in the world and been a pioneer in the visual effects and entertainment industry for decades,” said Prem Akkaraju, CEO of Weta Digital. “WetaM is the first step toward making VFX and animation production accessible to every artist.” www.autodesk.com
Comparison of Weta Koru software with Autodesk Maya.