Cadalyst - December 2007 - (Page 19)

cadlabsreview Photoshop CS3 Extended now directly supports several 3D file formats: U3D (no surprise there), 3DS, OBJ, Collada, and Google KMZ. Native support is provided for files with 1–1.5 million polygons. Users can import, view, and interact with most 3D models, and they can easily render and incorporate 3D content into their 2D composites and edit existing textures on 3D models directly within the application to see immediate results. Autodesk • Maya 8.5 Unlimited • www.autodesk.com July 2007. Maya is an extraordinarily capable design and animation application that has been used for a wide range of professional-level still images, renderings, and animations and to produce some of the remarkable effects in many popular movies. In my review, I noted that Maya Unlimited is a powerful tool and that Maya 8.5 offers artists enhanced creative control, which enables faster completion of complex animations and simulations. ENOVIA MatrixOne • MatrixOne • www.matrixone.com June 2007. Reviewer Mike Hudspeth noted that MatrixOne is powerful software that will help a large company increase efficiency, reliability, and quality — which in turn will increase profitability. MatrixOne is aimed at the large, diversified company with global locations and collaborative needs. This software is meant for the enterprisewide approach to product management. In a nutshell, MatrixOne makes engineering data (and more) available to an entire enterprise. It can bring together documents and files from vastly different programs and make them work together to fully define every aspect of a design. MatrixOne can read and store any number of CAD formats, so it can handle just about everything. It will allow users to examine what they’re doing to their designs and then identify who else will be affected by any change — at any level. It can provide feedback so users can examine processes and optimize their product stream. MAXON • CINEMA 4D v10 • www.maxon.net June 2007. When Mike Hudspeth reviewed MAXON’s CINEMA 4D v10 he commented that it is intended as an animation tool for the product pipeline. As such, integration is vital, and CINEMA 4D v10 works well with most software packages. It is platform independent. Only 5% of the program is OS dependent, so it’s very stable. It also takes advantage of multiprocessors, meaning that it’s fast and can handle very large files. CINEMA 4D v10 is easy to learn and use, which is important because unless you work in the entertainment business or your company has you dedicated to this sort of thing, you won’t be using it every day. CINEMA 4D v10 has a great new user interface that places emphasis on quick recognition of color-coded icons. The icons can be rearranged however you want, so you can tailor your workflow for efficiency. Reviewer Mike Hudspeth noted that he couldn’t tell you how many times he had needed a tool like CINEMA 4D v10 to show someone how a mechanism worked. All it would’ve taken would have been to create a short animation of the mechanism going through its paces. Newforma • Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition • www.newforma.com November 2007. Jerry Laiserin reviewed Newforma Project Center Fourth Edition in the November 2007 issue of Cadalyst, noting that the product is “the Swiss Army knife of AEC productivity.” Newforma applies a radical but alltoo-rare approach to developing its Project Center software. Everyone in the company believes that the way a piece of software works should match users’ behaviors, www.cadalyst.com | cadalyst | December 2007 With Maya nCloth, the first module based on the Maya Nucleus solver, artists can quickly direct and control a range of simulations, including cloth and inflatable materials, in entirely new ways. Maya 8.5 boasts a number of evolutionary changes that improve workflow and development productivity, as well as new capabilities for character animation. This release includes Maya Nucleus technology, which is a unified simulation framework that allows artists to create elements that interact — in a 3D animation — with other dynamic objects such as fluids, cloth, or rigid bodies. The first module of Maya Nucleus is Maya nCloth, which facilitates cloth-on-cloth simulations that offer realistic movement. More physically accurate realizations of outdoor scenes are easier with Maya 8.5’s new physical sun and physical sky shaders, which let users create photorealistic skies based on the position of the sun using the mental-ray rendering engine. Additionally, new architectural and design shaders are included for creating architecturespecific effects. 19 http://www.matrixone.com http://www.autodesk.com http://www.maxon.net http://www.newforma.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - December 2007

Cadalyst - December 2007 Contents Editor's Window Cad Central Autodesk Gets Digital Top Honors - Saluting Outstanding CAD Products NX 5, Part 2 — CAD/CAM/CAE Software Autodesk 3ds Max 2008 —3D Modeling, Animation, and Rendering Software Document Management: Is It Still Valid? Standardizing 3D Modeling Nomenclature Share and Share Alike Cad Cartoon Issue Indexes Cad Fidential

Cadalyst - December 2007

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