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Are you ready to re-start after the lockdowns? Let’s create a perfect summer with V-Ray 5, Maxwell Render 5.1, Marvelous Designer 9.5, new procedural Ivy Generator for 3ds Max and other software and plugins for CGI and arch-viz that we have collected in our digest of the recent releases.
FOR COOL CLOTHES
- Remeshing To Retopology – to remesh selected pattern and generate retopology lines along the remeshed polygon.
- Partial Freeze – to freeze the mesh of the selected area in the pattern.
The intensity of the freeze applied depends on the transparency of the brush. - New Default Avatars and Avatar Tape – to attach avatar tapes to internal or external seam/pattern lines.
- New Export Texture Window – to configure and export textures from a project.
- New Decal Layer Mode – It creates a new fill layer in Planar Projection mode which allows to position patterns and images more easily.
- New Python Scripting – to write and run Python scripts and modules with Substance Painter.
- Improved Mesh Export (with Tessellation) and Improved Automatic UV Unwrapping
- 5 new decal materials, new Vray shader, project templates, and export presets
FOR IMPRESSIVE GREENERY AND LANDSCAPES
Based on the discontinued Ivy Generator by Thomas Luft, the new plugin by Guillermo M. Leal LLaguno works as a plugin/script combo:
- the plugin does the actual ivy growing and generation of the meshes,
- the maxscript part is the user interface, the Materials and the Corona scatter creation.
- Snow and Advanced Snow nodes
- Multi-blend for blending terrains
- Colormap node
Full compatibility with 3ds Max 2021 as a part of 2020 development before a planned major update in the summer release.
FOR LIGHTS, WEATHER AND NICE VIEWS
- Script Canvas quality of life improvements to working with node variables and math expressions.
- Visual Studio 2019 support.
- Asse Bundler, Management, and Processing
- PhysX physics systems updates
- Multiple lighting scenarios from a single render. By adding the new VRayLightMix render element, you can adjust lights interactively without rendering.
- The new Layer compositor lets you fine-tune and finish your images directly in the V-Ray Frame Buffer — without the need for a separate post-processing app.
- A library of over 500 render-ready materials including metals, glass, wood, and more.
- Materials Presets for aluminum, chrome, glass, and more.
- Materials Preview – New rendered material swatches show you exactly what your materials will look like.
- New Substance Painter assistant – to create a Maxwell material from the textures generated by Substance Painter.
- Support for coated materials and for transparent materials in Maxwell GPU;
- new versions of Benchwell, benchmarking tool, for both CPU and GPU
FOR CREATING ALL YOU NEED
- OpenVDB files can now be imported and rendered with the new Volume object. Files may be generated by Blender’s fluid simulation cache or even other software.
- Powered by OpenXR, Blender now ships with the first milestone in VR support: scene inspection.
- Cycles now supports denoising inside the Blender viewport with NVIDIA OptiX™ AI-Accelerated Denoiser as well as in final renders.
- Cloth Sculpting – Sculpt realistic wrinkles with the new Cloth Brush. Its built-in physics solver automatically creates natural-looking folds.
- The new Sharpen mode in Mesh Filter pinches the edges while smoothing flat surfaces automatically.
- Rewritten from scratch, the Grease Pencil 2D animation toolset is now much faster – and much better integrated with the rest of Blender.
- Realtime rendering improvements, updated shader nodes, modifiers, and video sequencer updates
- New tool for baking maps and surfaces offers faster performance in a new streamlined workflow
- New PBR materials make the interaction of light with surfaces physically accurate
- The Weighted Normals modifier improves the shading of models by altering the vertex normals to be perpendicular to larger flat polygons
- The Fluid loader is now exposed so that object types such as particle systems can work with the data
- Viewport improvements:
- Depth of field now affects the environment map
- Vignetting scale is now the same value as defined in the camera
- Matte/Shadows material now work in the viewport
- Each view can now have its own exposure, white-balance and vignette settings.
FOR PERFECT VACATION VIDEOS
- Tapered shape strokes – Create round, wavy, and pointy shape strokes with the new parameters – Taper and Wave, and animate the strokes to create unique graphics.
- Concentric shape repeaters – New parameters in the Offset Paths shape effect allow you to make copies of a path that radiate outward or inward enabling you to create unique background that have a retro vibe.
- ProRes RAW import support – You can now import and edit ProRes RAW files in After Effects.
- Collaboration on shared projects while working remotely.
