Arion 1.6.0 unlimited
RandomControl is very proud to announce the immediate availability of Arion 1.6.0!
Three weeks only after the release of 1.5.1, RandomControl strikes again with amazing technical and workflow improvements.
Support for unlimited objects, textures and materials is here!
This version is a free of charge upgrade for all v1.x customers.
Please take a breath and enjoy this presentation.
The whole RandomControl team wishes you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year 2012! We'll bring you bigger and better news next year.
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Bigger, better, stronger
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We have improved so many things in Arion 1.6.0.
We have rewritten the memory management completely to make it stronger, better, more reliable and before all: unlimited.
That's right, Arion 1.6 can now render an unlimited number of objects, materials and textures.
Welcome to yet another era of hybrid rendering, coming to you now.
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Unlimited objects
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Unlimited objects in Arion 1.6.0 opens the doors of massive physics simulations, crowds, vegetation... And everything you can think of!
And if you cannot make your scene fit in your GPU memory, you can still render it on the CPU at a very nice speed - Arion's speed.
The image above was made in 3D Studio Max using MassFX and features over 30,000 copies of a rigatone pasta model, all with Sub-Surface Scattering!
Click on the image to display it full size in another window.
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Unlimited materials
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What would unlimited objects be without unlimited materials! You can now use as many materials as you want in your scene.
Arion 1.6.0 lifts all the limits and sets your imagination free. If it fits in the RAM, it'll render.
We can't wait to see in what creative ways you'll be taking advantage of this feature, we'll be expecting your renders!
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Unlimited textures
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Arion 1.6.0 has absolutely no limit in terms of number of textures or their size. The only limit here is the available memory to render.
These new features comes also with a set of remarkable memory consumption improvements that are explained in details in another paragraph below.
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Great memory improvements
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Not only we have removed all the barriers to your creativity by setting all the objects, materials and textures counts free, but we have also vastly improved the memory used by bitmaps.
- 25% memory saving in RGB map channels (Ref0°, Ref90°, Absorption color etc.)
- 75% memory saving in grayscale map channels (Roughness, bump, opacity etc.)
- Up to 50% memory saving on non-square textures
Click on the thumbnail on the right to watch a full size comparison of a real case memory usage improvement.
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Camera roll
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Among the most requested features, is the camera roll. This is now available in Arion 1.6.0.
The camera roll function is available as a camera property, along with other properties like shutter speed, f-stop...
This featue is indeed very important to make creative shots and bring some sharpness and motion to a render.
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Wavefront OBJ
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The Wavefront .OBJ format importer has been improved and integrated into the application, you can now open that format just like you can open .RCS or .FRY files.
The .OBJ importer is now faster and stronger and can import the large majority of .OBJ files coming from various modeling applications.
You can click the banner image to display the full resolution render.
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Direct Quicktime VR export
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Arion 1.6.0 comes back with an integrated Quicktime VR exporter!
All you have to do is to place a panoramic camera in your scene, let it render, press the 'Save QTVR' button and you're done!
With this feature you can quickly create a lightweight 360° file that you can send to your client, or show off more efficiently small spaces like a boat hull, etc.
This nice 'little' addition comes for free with Arion 1.6.0.
Click on the 360° panorama to see the full size tonemapped render.
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Hide & isolate
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Arion 1.6.0 comes with a set of hide and isolate tools.
This is particularly handy to hide a transparent object to reach the material behind and edit it for example.
Hidden objects now hide from mouse selection as well, and you can click through.
To improve the workflow even more, we've added the 'isolate' tool, that hides everything but the selected object to focus on its editing.
By clicking on the thumbnail on the right you can watch a short presentation video of this set of tools.
This car was setup from a raw .OBJ file import, entirely inside Arion 1.6.0.
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Demo version
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The release of Arion 1.6.0 will set the date for an upgraded public demo version.
Shortly after the customers release, we will upload on our website a brand new demo of the latest flavor of Arion with all the fancy new features included.
The demo is fully functional so you can render any amount of polygons, materials or textures just like with the full version.
The only limits are: Resolution is limited to 800x600, a watermark is applied, you cannot save or export data to a .OBJ file and the command-line renderer is not included.
You can download the demo version here.
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NVIDIA CUDA 4.1
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We have kept our pace to stay up to date with the newest CUDA technology, embracing fully the new CUDA 4.1 version already.
CUDA 4.1 comes with a nice little gift, a 10 to 15% speed boost!
This version of CUDA is embedded in our software and it doesn't require you to install the CUDA toolkit. Of course keeping your video drivers up to date is important to ensure the best compatibility and performance.
This version of CUDA requires the latest available video drivers for your GPU from NVIDIA. You can download them here.
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Softimage LIVE plugin
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A completely new line of plugins is coming: The RandomControl LIVE plugins.
RandomControl LIVE is a line of products that fully integrate our technology in the modeling package.
The first modeling package that we are proud to support is Autodesk Softimage. Our plugin supports Render Region, native rendering of animations, native Softimage frame buffer as well as a cool RandomControl LIVE viewport with realtime feedback.
We also have fully integrated our material system into Softimage interface, with nodal support for BSDF layers, bitmaps etc. Everything is Softimage-like and straightforward to use!
Pricing and licensing policies will be presented when the LIVE plugins are released. Owners of an Arion or fryrender license, will be offered the LIVE plugin of their choice for free.
Click on the image to see it full size.
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And all the new features from 1.5.1
- Faster speed, better noise
- Sub-Surface Scattering
- Single Sheet Sub-Surface Scattering (S5)
- Participating media (fog)
- Mapped emitters
- Real world emitter units
- Coated reflections
- Integratable rough dielectrics
- Improved UI: Scene tree
- Scenes repository
- Exclude from camera (hide)
- Decal mode shows emitters by color instead of power
- Dispersion ON/OFF switch
- Emitters and 'others' (like physical sky) ON/OFF switch
- Color maps ON/OFF switch
- Bump maps ON/OFF switch
- Explicit material ID: Make your custom MatID channel
- Explicit object ID: Make your custom ObjID channel
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- Improved physical sky
- Draft engine
- State of the art BRDF
- Dielectrics improvements
- Stereoscopy
- Falloff
- Material override
- New compositing channels
- Wireframe override
- Better fresnel
- LUA scripting
- Emitters and Sun are now working together
- Caustics ON/OFF flag
- Ability to rename objects, camera, materials
- Aspect ratio is saved in the file
- FOV is now horizontally docked
- Smoother navigation noise (antialiased)
- Editable emitters in realtime
- Check out the 1.5.1 announcement here
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...and more to come soon!
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Special thanks
We would like to thank all our customers for their amazing works using Arion.
We are also specially grateful to the people who have helped us during the testing and the production of this fine release of Arion:
NVIDIA, Evermotion, Fran Davey, John Strieder, Johnny Butcher, Pawel Filip, Marco Podrini, Raphaël Aguirre, Roman Vrbovsky, Shaun Keenan, Stéphane Moya, Luis Morillo and Héctor Pérez.
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