MAXON announces 3 new releases at SIGGRAPH

Developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions MAXON Computer announced the release of CINEMA 4D Release 9.5, BodyPaint 3D 2.5 and a new MAXON Production Bundle exclusively for studio visual effects at SIGGRAPH last week.

The CINEMA 4D Release 9.5 boasts an improved workflow, lighting and rendering enhancements, and SKY - a tool that lets users easily create breathtaking atmospherics.

The BodyPaint 3D Release 2.5 provides optimized workflow and new tools to assist artists in creating high-quality textures by painting directly on their 3D models. Both these powerful tools can be found in the MAXON Production Bundle, which will include the entire MAXON product offering plus other high-end production tools such as 16/32-Bit 3D painting tools, Renderman Output, matte painting tools and a Linux version.

Amongst the new things about CINEMA 4D Release 9.5 is a simplified lighting setup wherein more lighting possibilities exist with lights that can take any shape. The company press release states that 'Area lights and area shadows, crucial to realistic-looking scenes, now render up to four times faster than before. Images can be output in 32-bit / channel color depth as HDRI or OpenEXR, and multipass renderings can be output directly as compositing files for Shake.

Owners of the Advanced Render module enjoy additional new features in CINEMA 4D Release 9.5, including Ambient Occlusion and SKY. Ambient Occlusion enables users to create and quickly render more realistic shadows. Ambient Occlusion can either be rendered or baked as a texture. A particular highlight of Advanced Render 2.5 is SKY, an elaborate but easy to use tool set that lets users create breathtaking atmospherics with just a few clicks of the mouse.

CINEMA 4D R9.5 and BodyPaint 3D R2.5 will be available September, 2005.