TurboSquid 3D Blog

The folks at cebas Visual Technology, Inc. have been keeping very busy and last month they released a major upgrade to their flagship finalRender rendering engine for 3ds Max, and launched the 3.5 and 3.5 SE versions of these impressive tools. “We have brought this new release of our industry leading tool finalRender to market much faster than usual,” said cebas CEO Edwin Braun.”Our users asked us to make new features available as we develop them so they can put them into production immediately. cebas has responded by releasing a x.5 version as a major release for the first time in its 20-plus year history,” he added.

finalRender 3.5 brings completely new features and major enhancements, with more stability and productivity. The introduction of a brand new GI-Engine, along with an innovative concept for handling primary and secondary raytracing engines fulfills even the highest demands of finalRender users. Global illumination renderings are faster and cleaner, and show more detail than ever with unexpected ease-of-use.

HarmonicsGI Sample

“The new features of finalRender 3.5 are totally amazing,” says Michael Plängsken, founder of Ground Studios, a German television and motion picture production special effects house. “HarmonicsGI elevates to a completely new quality level, especially with interior renderings. The setup phase is much enhanced. You can now switch between all available GI engines without losing settings, which is great for testing. Also, the enhanced DomeLight can do super-crisp shadows just with an HDRI mapped into it,” Plängsken continued. “The ability to split up complete scenes into its single objects without occlusion is totally unique. finalRender has proven a crucial tool in our 3D visualization tool set. It’s their best release ever,” Plängsken concluded.

Additional features include a new 3D Camera, developed for and first used in “Alice in Wonderland”. This versatile true 3D stereo camera tool is now available to the general finalRender user to build their own stereoscopic experiences.

finalRender 3.5 also bundled in the powerful and comprehensive finalToon, ScatterTool, and OceanShader tools to provide even more value when compared against other offerings. Also, pyroCluster is now part of finalRender 3.5 SE at no extra cost. And working in concert with the team at Sitni Sati, finalRender 3.5 also provides highly integrated GI and rendering acceleration for FumeFX effects (FumeFX must be purchased separately).

finalRender 3.5, finalRender 3.5SE and the rest of the cebas plug-ins are available now at TurboSquid. And feel free to contact our Member Services team if you have any questions about any of the cebas products.

For all of you loyal AfterBurn 3.x and 4.x users out there, TurboSquid and Sitni Sati have decided to offer a special promotion for you until the end of 2010. You can now crossgrade your copy of AfterBurn to the recently released FumeFX 2.0 for only $495 (over 40% off the retail price of FumeFX 2). This promotion means you can buy the same tools used by Blur, ILM, and Encore Hollywood to make stunning visual effects at a tremendous savings.

Star Wars The Old Republic Image Courtesy of Blur Studios

As you may know, FumeFX 2 not only boasts a faster, voxel-based simulation engine, but also comes with advanced tools for adding wavelet turbulence noise to your simulations (a huge production timesaver) as well as sophisticated retiming tools for instantly tweaking the speed of your effects. It also comes with two simulation licenses so you can offload your simulations to other network machines, leaving you free to productive while FumeFX calculates its results.

In order to upgrade, contact our Member Services team and be sure to provide your AfterBurn serial number(s) with your request so that they can point you to our Director of Sales to help process your request. And if you have questions, our Member Services team can also assist in getting you all the information you need in order to make an informed buying decision.