StudioGPU has announced the immediate availability of MachStudio Pro, a professional 3D workflow and rendering package created by artists for artists. MachStudio Pro offers a seamless way to create and interact with cinematic quality 3D objects and environments in a non-linear workspace by leveraging the horsepower of off-the-shelf professional graphics processing units (GPUs) to deliver real-time and near real-time workflow performance on a desktop workstation.
MachStudio Pro streamlines real-time 3D workflow, allowing artists to easily manage and interact with complex lighting, caustics, cameras, shaders, materials, ambient occlusion, and color grading. With MachStudio Pro, render times can be dramatically reduced from hours to minutes and minutes to seconds or sub-seconds. Comparable final scenes are consistently rendered with MachStudio Pro at rates of 500 to 900 times faster than traditional rendering packages. A complex 1.98 million polygon high-definition image, for example, renders in 14 seconds using MachStudio Pro while the same scene rendered with a traditional rendering package can take more than three hours to complete.
“Attempts at real-time workflow on workstations for the past 30 years have been futile—until now,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, founder and CEO, Jon Peddie Research. “Designed by real studio pros at StudioGPU, the MachStudio Pro product provides a design environment that professional artists and technical directors should recognize immediately. This software is fast, and it can run even faster using GPUs for real-time or near real-time 3D workflow,” Peddie emphasized. “MachStudio Pro could very well change the way things are done for real-time productivity and rendering on the desktop.”
“MachStudio Pro is a core part of our previsualization pipeline,” said Jericca Cleland, director and CEO of Twenty One Inc., a cross-media film development and preproduction studio in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It removes the stranglehold traditional CG lighting and rendering has placed on production and provides a way for directors, supervisors, and artists to creatively explore and render lighting on the fly, enabling significant increases in efficiency throughout the process,” Cleland explained. “With the fluidity of lighting in MachStudio Pro, we remain visually focused instead of technically focused during lighting, which greatly enhances our ability to host interactive sessions and deliver quality results to our clients without losing control of the budget.”
Powered by a real-time rendering engine, MachStudio Pro software fits into the creative pipeline after all 3D models are produced and provides lighting, cameras, materials, compositing and finishing capabilities. The MachStudio Pro workflow is akin to a virtual 3D real-time studio environment, allowing artists, designers, directors, and TDs to work with lighting, camera views and multi-point perspectives for a real-time view of frames as they will appear in the final rendered format.
MachStudio Pro features and benefits
Developed and continuously proven in a true high-end production environment, MachStudio Pro empowers creativity with real-time 3D workflow and rendering features that eliminate the need for expensive render farms. Key features include:
· Optimized shader and material pipeline
· Ability to adjust and view all render passes independently
· Full materials library
· Interactive ambient occlusion (AO)
· Fully configurable lighting and animation constraint system
· Animatable and keyframeable properties for all materials
· Real-time High Dynamic Range (HDR) cameras and lighting
· Real-time depth-map shadows and depth-of-field
· Exporters to support a wide range of file formats, including .fbx
· Customizable interface with hot keys, drag-and-drop tabs and scene manager
· Support for the creation of unlimited lights and gels
· Simulated global illumination, reflections, refractions and subsurface scattering
· Resolution independent with support for all popular final file formats and codecs
· Full Python scripting support
MachStudio Pro ships with an AMD ATI FireGL V8650 3D workstation graphics accelerator card featuring 2GB onboard graphics memory and a parallel processing Unified Shader architecture. Supporting a wide range of industries—from CAD visualization and 3D animation to top-quality film and broadcast projects— MachStudio Pro offers seamless interoperability with leading professional 3D modeling, animation, and 3D CAD software packages. Artists, designers, and producers facing tight deadlines, hardware limitations, or rendering bottlenecks will ultimately benefit from the real-time workflow and GPU rendering performance advantages of MachStudio Pro.
“The ongoing commitment at AMD to offer its professional customers the fastest and most innovative GPU accelerated workstation graphics performance led to our technology relationship with StudioGPU,” said Janet Matsuda, senior director, Professional Graphics, AMD. “The cutting-edge speed and performance that MachStudio Pro software offers, paired with the graphics performance of the ATI FireGL V8650 3D professional graphics accelerator card, removes performance barriers and gives production artists and technical directors a competitive edge vital to today’s ‘finish it yesterday’ delivery expectations.”
MachStudio Pro is now shipping for Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista operating systems, and comes standard with an AMD ATI FireGL V8650 3D workstation graphics accelerator card. The special introductory price of MachStudio Pro is US$4,999, which includes a full year of technical support and product maintenance updates. Education and volume licensing is also available upon request.
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