Unreal Engine 4.24 is now shipping. This release is a significant expansion in Epic’s market reach. On the non-gaming side, big news is that Unreal Studio has been discontinued and all its components are freely available just like the Unreal Engine. Doesn't that simplify things? Unreal Studio, the company’s tools for content import are now part of the Unreal Engine … Read more
Autodesk recently announced that Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU is available. First unveiled as a beta release in March, the company says Arnold 6 completes the Arnold GPU toolset with improvements across lights, shaders, and cameras, as well as on-demand texture loading and support for Open Shading Language (OSL) and OpenVDB volumes. Additionally, as part of Autodesk’s efforts for the … Read more
Adobe’s 3D and Immersive (3D&I) group has announced the addition of Oculus Medium to an emerging portfolio that includes Dimension, Substance, and Aero, tools that complement Adobe’s flagship products Photoshop and After Effects. Facebook’s Oculus Medium was introduced to the world along with the Oculus controllers in 2016. It differs from other 3D paint tools like Facebook’s Quill and Google’s … Read more
The dogs of Autodesk; AU features a petting park for conference attendees. Maybe they relieve stress, and maybe they provide entertainment but they're also darned fine little marketers. (Source: JPR) Over the years, Autodesk’s messaging has not changed much. The company has underlined its commitment to sustainability. It has steadily advanced its technology for cloud-based computing and SaaS, and … Read more
Valve introduced their Index VR HMD mid-year 2019, with a declaration that it intended to raise the bar for VR fidelity. The company emphasized that VR needs to advance in three key areas: affordability, ease of use, and fidelity. And their conclusion is that Valve is best suited to work on the latter, while leaving the rest to others in … Read more
2019 will go down as the year of ray tracing. Kicked off by Nvidia at Siggraph 2018, the once arcane and specialized practice of ray tracing that only got used by the movies and baked into games was unleased on consumers. In addition to several new PC games being released in 2019, we were also told the PS5 due … Read more
NetEase, founded in June 1997 and based in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, is an Internet company providing online services. At the 2019 Software Green Alliance Developers Conference held recently, NetEase showed the results of realtime ray tracing technology in mobile games and used Love Is Justice mobile game to demonstrate. The company showed the first public demonstration of mobile gaming applications … Read more
Stadia is making headlines with its streaming game service but a pack is forming close behind. Sony has been in the game. Watch for entries from Sony, Microstation, Nividia, and Samsung Cloud gaming has been tried since 2003, by several companies. Since then, the internet has gotten a lot faster, and processors have too. The time may be right … Read more
The latest release of Unity (2019.3) with High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) has been released. HDRP, says Unity, focuses on optimizations that can render resource-intensive visuals while maintaining constant, steady frame rates. With HDRP, claims Unity, creators can cut loose and make stunning projects without worrying about throttling graphics to optimize for low-end devices, enabling them to create jaw-dropping … Read more
There are nearly three dozen CAD programs on the market that work like AutoCAD, but there is only one that comes close to AutoCAD's market size. Autodesk executives speak of 10–12 million versions of AutoCAD in use, of which 3/4 are, they suggest, pirated ones. So it may come as a surprise to learn that German software developer Graebert claims … Read more
Last month I wrote about a new book on Data science and visual computing. The book tells us, as we already well know, we are awash in data. It’s like the weather, we know it, we can’t manage it. We are struggling to get a grip on it, understand it, use it and exploit it, but it is being generated … Read more
This material was a 2018 winner of the Insanity Award given by Allegorithmic to developers who push the software to extremes. Game developers can use textures to add detail to primitive shapes—sometimes to the point of crazy. This kind of work can make sense in the game world where polygons are expensive. (Source: Adobe Substance, material by Jonathan Benainous) … Read more
