Twinmotion 2024.1
Under the hood, Twinmotion 2024.1 has been updated to Unreal Engine 5.4, the latest version of game engine and real-time renderer, and makes use of some of its new features.
Like Unreal Engine itself, Twinmotion now features a Render Layers system, making it easier to integrate the software with layer-based compositing workflows in VFX and visualization work.
Users can select objects within a scene, give them an ID number, and render them as separate render passes or as ID masks, providing more flexibility in the final composite.
The feature is a work in progress, and is currently only available for stills and image sequences.
Other known limitations include a lack of support for fog, weather effects and transparent objects as holdouts, and objects do not affect reflections or illumination of those in other layers.
For populating scenes, Twinmotion 2024.1 adds two new scattering tools: Spacing and Area.
They scatter objects in a scene along user-defined paths and within user-defined areas, respectively, but currently only work on horizontal surfaces, and don’t support rigged characters.
The update streamlines material workflow, reducing the number of clicks required to add a new material to a scene, adds a new Foliage material type, and updates the Fabric material.
The Foliage material makes plants responsive to Twinmotion’s season settings, changing the color of leaves automatically in deciduous species.
The existing Fabric material gets new Standard and Thin modes for opaque and translucent fabrics, and a wider range of readymade material types.
It is also now possible to assign an ambient occlusion texture to materials to compensate for the lack of accurate occlusion in real-time renders in the Standard and Lumen render modes.
Twinmotion 2024.1 also adds new Filmback settings for cameras, for matching the properties of real-world cameras including focal length, depth of field intensity, and image aspect ratio.
Bloom, lens flare and lens dirt settings have now been grouped in the Camera tab of the Ambience panel.
Animators get a new Sequence media type, making it possible to combine camera movements or animations from imported files into animation sequences and export them as videos.
There is also a new Action Cam camera type for sequences, which provides more user control over the motion of cameras: both the rate at which they move, and their trajectory.
Other changes include the option to parent Animators in the scene graph to create more complex animations.
Characters and vehicles from the asset library can now be animated deterministically, with Twinmotion generating identical animations when parameters are re-used.
Twinmotion 2024.1 is available for Windows 10+ and macOS 12.5+. Integration plugins are available for CAD and DCC apps including 3ds Max 2017+, Modo 16.0+ and SketchUp Pro 2019+.
The software is free to users with gross annual revenue under $1 million/year. The free edition lacks access to cloud collaboration platform Twinmotion Cloud, but its otherwise fully featured.
For larger studios, subscriptions cost $445/seat/year.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/twinmotion/twinmotion-2024.1-preview-release-notes
https://www.facebook.com/twinmotion/videos/445359721373075/?__tn__=%2CO
V-Ray for ARM
Although ARM processors have historically been associated with mobile devices, the architecture is now more widely being used in desktop systems and cloud instances.
Chaos’s blog post comments that “so far, AWS benchmarks of ARM-based CPUs against comparable x86 processors show similar performance at a reduced cost of operation” – that is, lower power consumption.
ARM processors are supported by a range of Linux distros, including those commonly used in DCC applications like RHEL and Ubuntu.
According to the blog post, Chaos is working on “general V-Ray support”, which suggests that ARM processors will be supported in both V-Ray Standalone and editions of the renderer for DCC applications available on Linux, like V-Ray for Maya.
V-Ray for ARM processors is “coming soon”. Chaos hasn’t announced an exact release date or system requirements.
https://www.chaos.com/blog/coming-soon-v-ray-for-arm
Autograph 2024.04
Autograph 2024.04 adds new features for animating objects along motion paths,.
Users can reshape paths by dragging control points, while a Motion Path tool makes it possible to adjust keyframes directly in the viewport.
The software’s Retime Graph can be used to control the rate at which an object moves along a path, with users able to choose from over 40 interpolation types.
The update also adds a new Layout tool for arranging objects in the viewport, with standard control options for aligning, evenly distributing, or mirroring them.
The software’s text tools get new interpolation and easing modes for text animation, and the option to use fonts that are not installed locally by dragging TTF or OTF files into the Project Panel.
There are also new modifiers, including Film Grain and Trigger Animation.
Workflow improvements include a new Overview Panel and Project Tree for navigating the Generators and Modifiers in a composition, and a quick access menu for adding new ones.
It is also now possible to copy and paste parameters between items in the Project Panel.
In addition, Autograph now has beta support for standard 3D files formats other than USD: the software now has importers for glTF, FBX, OBJ, STL and PLY files.
Autograph is compatible with Windows 10+, Ubuntu 22.04+ and RHEL/Rocky Linux 8+, and macOS 10.15+. The software supports Apple Silicon processors natively on macOS 11.0+.
Perpetual licences of Autograph Creator, for users with annual revenue under $1 million/year, cost $945; rental costs $35/month or $315/year.
Perpetual licences of Autograph Studio cost $1,795; rental costs $59/month or $599/year.
https://www.left-angle.com/public/doc-autograph/dev-master/chapters/whats_new/2024.4.1.html
Fusion Studio 19.0
A version of the Fusion toolset is included in DaVinci Resolve, Blackmagic Design’s colour grading, editing and visual effects software, version 19.0 of which has also just been released.
DaVinci Resolve gets more promotional support than Fusion Studio – at the time of writing, the Fusion Studio product webpage hasn’t even been updated to version 19 – so the video above is for DaVinci Resolve 19.0, but the features shown should be common to both apps.
New features in Fusion Studio 19.0 include IntelliTrack, a new point tracker powered by Neural Engine, Fusion Studio’s machine learning system, for tracking objects or stabilizing footage.
In addition, Fusion Studio now supports DaVinci Resolve’s Resolve FX Surface Tracker and Resolve FX Object Removal features.
For rotoscoping, a new Multi Poly tool (shown above) makes it possible to create multiple roto masks in a single node.
In addition, all of the Shape tools now support motion paths, and there are two new nodes: sText, for adding text to shape-based node trees, and sBSpline, for creating spline shapes.
Performance improvements include a speed boost of “up to 3x” in Magic Mask.
The update also extends the new USD-based workflows introduced in Fusion Studio 18.5.
Fusion Studio 19.0 adds four nodes for manipulating textures directly in a USD scene without having to edit the source file: uTexture, uTexture Transform, uShader, and uNormal Map.
There is also a new uVolume tool (shown above), for importing, shading and rendering volumetric effects like fire and smoke in OpenVDB format.
Fusion Studio 19.0 is available for Windows 10+, CentOS 7.3+/Rocky Linux 8.6 and macOS 13.0+. New licences cost $295.
The Fusion toolset in the free edition of DaVinci Resolve has a maximum image resolution of 16k x 16k and lacks network rendering capabilities.
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=199323
DaVinci Resolve 19.0
New features in the Color Page, DaVinci Resolve Studio’s color correction toolset, include ColorSlice, a new six-vector grading palette, shown at the foot of the image above.
It provides controls for the RGB or CMY vectors of an image – there’s actually also a seventh dedicated vector for skin tone – with options to adjust the density, saturation and hue of each.
In the existing RGB Mixer palette, it is now possible to normalize channels as you adjust them.
The update also adds IntelliTrack, a new point tracker powered by Neural Engine, DaVinci Resolve’s machine learning system, available within the Tracker palette on the Color Page, for tracking and selectively color-correcting objects within a shot.
There is a second new Neural Engine-powered feature in the Motion Effects palette: the new UltraNR mode in the spatial noise reduction tool, which automatically adusts the luma and chroma thresholds of footage to remove noise, based on a user-controllable sample area.
Other changes include a new Node Stack system, which lets users break up a node graph into up to four layers to simplify complex grading workflows. The layers are applied sequentially.
Also available through the Color Page, DaVinci Resolve Studio’s library of Resolve FX image-processing plugins now includes a new Film Look Creator.
It enables users to apply filmic looks to footage by selecting from presets or adjusting over 60 control parameters, including options for creating split tone effects, and for mimicking the properties of physical film, including halation, grain and flicker.
Other new Resolve FX plugins include Defocus Background, an AI-powered effect that automatically isolates and blurs the background of shot, creating a shallow depth of field.
The existing Face Refinement effect has been updated, and can now track more than one face within a shot. There are also new options for adjusting track points and interpolating keyframes.
Performance improvements include speed boosts of “up to 3x” for the Beauty, Edge Detect and Watercolor effects on Macs, and “up to 2x” on NVIDIA systems.
In the Fusion page, DaVinci Resolve Studio’s integrated compositing toolset, support for USD-based workflows – introduced in DaVinci Resolve 18.5 – has been expanded.
The update adds four new nodes for manipulating textures directly in a USD scene without having to edit the source file: uTexture, uTexture Transform, uShader, uNormal Map.
There is also a new uVolume tool, for importing, shading and rendering volumetric effects like fire and smoke in OpenVDB format.
Workflow improvements include a new Referenced Composition system, which makes it possible to save comps and reuse them across multiple clips or timelines.
Changes made to the source composition are automatically propagated to all of the copies.
For rotoscoping, a new Multi Poly tool (shown above) makes it possible to create multiple roto masks in a single node.
In addition, all of the Shape tools now support motion paths, and there are two new nodes: sText, for adding text to shape-based node trees, and sBSpline, for creating spline shapes.
Performance improvements include a speed boost of “up to 3x” in Magic Mask.
However, the biggest changes in DaVinci Resolve Studio 19.0 are to the editing toolsets, with the Cut page getting new features aimed at live broadcast work.
They include the option to view all of the live camera feeds for a broadcast on a multi-view screen, and to set POI (Point of Interest) markers across all of the feeds in real time.
The markers can then be used to trigger replays from each Point of Interest, with a range of retiming presets for slow-motion playback.
Both the Cut and Edit pages get new AI-based editing tools, including voice isolation, speech-to-text transcription, and text-based timeline editing, similar those in tools like Premiere Pro.
The Fairlight audio toolset also gets AI-based tools, including an audio panning system based on the IntelliTrack tracker, and a dialogue separator for rebalancing speech and ambient sound.
Other new features include support for Ambisonic surround sound, and automatic binaural rendering of Dolby Atmos mixes.
We don’t cover video or audio editing on CG Channel, but you can find a complete list of changes via the links at the foot of the story.
DaVinci Resolve 19.0 and DaVinci Resolve Studio 19.0 are available in beta for Windows 10+, CentOS 7.3/Rocky Linux 8.6, and macOS 13.0+. The updates are free to existing users.
The base edition is free; the Studio edition, which adds AI features, stereoscopic 3D tools, HDR grading and more Resolve FX filters and Fairlight FX audio plugins, costs $295.
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=199322
Marvelous Designer 2024.0.173
The update introduces new USD workflows for Unreal Engine 5.4, the latest version of the game engine, making it possible to export simulation data to UE5 in USD format.
The Marvelous Designer library also now includes 18 avatars corresponding to MetaHuman body types, making it easier to create clothing for MetaHuman characters in Unreal Engine.
CLO Virtual Fashion has raised the price of node-locked Enterprise subscriptions from $1,700/year to $1,900/year.
https://support.marvelousdesigner.com/hc/en-us/articles/29074012807449-Marvelous-Designer-2024-0-New-Feature-List
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