Caustic has always had a close collaboration with its users, continuously listening to their feedback whether it is on our unique Series2 ray tracing hardware offerings or our ground-breaking Visualizer software packages. Keeping with this tradition, we have just posted a final version of Caustic Visualizer 1.1 for Autodesk Maya on our downloads page and are very excited to reveal some of the key new features in this release.
Furthermore, to celebrate this release, we are offering a discount of 30% on all our products so you can start building your own ray tracing supercomputers right away. For a limited time, the Caustic R2100 and R2500 ray tracing accelerator cards will be just $495, and $995 respectively while the Visualizer for Maya 1.1 is going to be priced at $99.
Exciting new features in Caustic Visualizer 1.1 for Autodesk Maya
Caustic Visualizer for Maya 1.1 now supports batch rendering – as well as immediate rendering within your current Maya session, you can launch additional processes for rendering sequences of images.
Caustic Visualizer’s renderer works with Autodesk Maya 2012, 2013, 2013 Extension 2 and 2014 on Windows 7 and Windows 8 and supports queue-management packages like Backburner and Deadline, so it’s possible to launch Visualizer across multiple machines in a render farm, too. You can equip your farm machines with Caustic Series2 ray tracing accelerator cards to reduce render times by as much as 500% with each card present on the network. It will not be uncommon for a typical animation scene final sequence render time to drop from “let’s look at it tomorrow morning” to “let’s look at it after lunch” or even sooner.
Ryan Montrucchio and Will Anielewicz used Caustic Visualizer for Autodesk Maya to design this interior pool
In addition to the information contained in our user guide, we have published two video tutorials on batch rendering on our web site which can be seen below.
These modes can be accessed via hotkeys when the mouse has the viewport selected. In addition to information contained in our user guide, we have provided a video tutorial on our web site which can be also viewed below:
Caustic Visualizer 1.0 Beta 1 for Autodesk 3ds Max gets added functionality
Another major release that was uploaded to our downloads page last week was the Caustic Visualizer 1.0 Beta 1 for Autodesk 3ds Max.
Gavin Greenwalt used Caustic Visualizer for Autodesk 3ds Max to design this spaceship
Like Caustic Visualizer for Maya, Caustic Visualizer for Autodesk 3ds Max enables 3D artists to accelerate their workflows by greatly reducing time spent on “iterative” scene refinement. Unlike other accelerated viewports, Visualizer’s beautifully ray traced ActiveShade environment allows scenes to be viewed and modified in real-time using 3ds Max’s standard modeling, animation and lighting toolsets – including mental ray. This Beta 1 version supports both 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design 2012 and 2013, with support for 2014 coming in a later beta release.
Mads Drøschler used Caustic Visualizer for Autodesk 3ds Max to design this boat
If you’re keen to see Caustic’s ray tracing hardware and software solutions in action, we will be attending SIGGRAPH 2013 in July. We plan to keep updating our products to incorporate more functionality and extend support for operating systems and workstations in the future so keep interacting with us on our forum.
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