Real-time 3D Rendering Software MachStudio Pro 2 Released as Freeware

StudioGPU has quietly made its $3,999 flagship rendering software MachStudio Pro 2 available to the public for free. This is great news for anybody interested and associated in 3D graphics and CGI, and game industry.

Machstudio Pro 2’s strongest point is that it’s a real-time graphics render and animation system that leverages the power of fast GPUs, that promises to reduce the render times that typically take hours or days are reduced to minutes and even seconds. Aside from its own real-time rendering engine, Machstudio Pro 2 seamlessly integrate with RenderMan and mental ray, allowing 3D artist to use it as a regular rendering software.

The software offers extreme powerful tools such as real-time Ambient Occlusion, programmable shaders, HDR lightning, Screen Space Global Illumination, render passes, individual light to object linking, Depth of Field, Real-time displacement mapping using hardware tessellation, reflection and refractions, and others.

See the video demo of MachStudio Pro 2

Features

• Robust Shader and Material Pipeline
• Optimizes material creation using industry standard (blinn, phong, lambert, etc.) and specialized shaders (sub-surface scattering, reflection, car paint, etc.).
• Interactive Ambient Occlusion (AO)
• Streamlines one of the most time consuming processes in the production pipeline, the powerful real-time AO generator reduces days to hours and hours to seconds.
• Fully-configurable constraint systems for lighting and animation
• Provides unprecedented artistic freedom to design complex lighting rigs with the flexibility to quickly alter them at any point in the production process.
• Fully animatable properties for all objects, lights, materials and cameras, including auto-keying
• Bring static images to life with a flexible auto-key system. All objects, down to the fragment level and property keys can be animated.
• Real-time High Dynamic Range (HDR) cameras and lighting
• Provides powerful settings, which allow artists to choose the best exposure for their images.
• Discreet light-linking functionality
• Allows artists to easily connect lights to any object, material and even render pass.
• Fully-configurable Python Scripting, Attributes and Expressions Interface
• MachStudio Pro is fully scriptable which allows easy customization into any production workflow.

New Features

• Pixar RenderMan Integration
• Provides the flexibility to switch between or combine fast high-fidelity MachStudio Pro GPU-based rendering and industry-standard Academy Award®-winning Pixar RenderMan CPU-based ray tracing rendering software on-the-fly to create beauty shots and/or specific render passes.
• MetaSL and mental ray Support
• Allows 3D artists to quickly and easily build MetaSL-based custom procedural shaders using an intuitive mental mill® node graph user interface for rendering out to both the mental ray and MachStudio Pro renderer.
• Improved Pipeline Rendering Functionality
• Offers a new Unified Pass Renderer (UPR), which breaks out all passes for the final render, and an EXR Sandwich Tool that combines all EXR files into one layered file for compositing.
• DirectX 11-Based Workflow
• Offers more efficient rendering, tessellation, and multi-threading capabilities for improved performance throughout the pipeline.
• Volumetric and Screen Space Global Illumination (GI)
• Takes into account the bouncing of light from surfaces, allowing for more realistic renderings.
• Spot and Directional Lights
• Allows for greater freedom towards achieving perfect lighting conditions.
• FBX Output
• Exports models and baked textures in the FBX file format for compatibility with all leading 3D modeling and animation software programs.
• Increased Python Support
• Allows for the creation of custom properties, parenting objects, and spot and directional lights.
• Workflow Improvements
• Eases organization and viewing of everything in a scene, including groups, hierarchies, context menus, light sets, influencers and render pass isolation.

Additional Features

• Real-time material creation and manipulation
• Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS) depth map shadows
• Physically-based camera lenses with depth of field
• Stereoscopic camera support
• Procedural ramp texture generation for projected lights
• Real-time displacement mapping using hardware tessellation
• Vertex animation compression
• Depth-peeling for higher precision AO and transparency sorting
• Reflections and refractions
• Subsurface scattering
• Floating point velocity maps
• Multi-threaded interface and renderer
• Custom configurable anti-aliasing algorithms
• Industry standard render passes for streamlined integration with compositing

[via Freeware Genius, Blendernation]