• High-Quality Visual Feedback: Caustic Visualizer for Maya provides an interactive, fully ray traced viewport complete with soft shadows and diffuse reflections, enabling artists to view their scenes with an unprecedented degree of visual fidelity.
• Versatile Material Set-Ups: the plug-in supports Maya's Hypershade render nodes and mental ray shader nodes.
• Geometry Independence: Caustic Visualizer supports a full range of standard scene geometry types, including polygons, NURBS and subdivision surfaces.
• Lighting Flexibility: The plug-in is compatible with Maya's Point, Spot, Directional and Area Light types, providing complete flexibility when creating lighting set-ups.

Continues Greenwalt: “Caustic Visualizer for Maya's interactivity eliminates the guess work that has always hampered CG lighting.  Now I'm free to explore new ideas and variations as fast as I can imagine them. It's an instant classic."

The beta version of Caustic’s Visualizer for Maya is available now for Maya 2013 64-bit and may be downloaded for free from the Caustic Professional website at visualizer.caustic.com.  Rhino 5.0 customers can download the “Neon” plug-in, which uses the same OpenRL-based ray tracing acceleration platform as Caustic Visualizer (See: http://v5.rhino3d.com/group/neon).

Caustic Visualizer

Caustic’s Visualizer for Maya is a plug-in for Autodesk Maya 2013 that enables artists to create 3D content within a fully interactive ray traced viewport. By providing a much higher degree of visual fidelity than Maya's standard rasterized viewport, including accurate global illumination, reflections and shadows, Visualizer for Maya enables artists to identify and resolve potential problems from the earliest stages of modelling, minimizing the need for time-consuming preview renders and radically streamlining the look development process.

PowerVR Brazil SDK v1.0

The Brazil SDK v1.0 is a high-level rendering toolkit that can incorporate photorealistic visualization technology into to a wide range of 3D graphics applications. It is a completely new implementation, designed from the ground up to leverage OpenRL for real-time photorealistic interactivity on a portable platform.

PowerVR OpenRL

OpenRL is a flexible low-level, platform independent API for accelerating ray tracing in both graphics and non-graphics (e.g., physics) applications, available today as a free SDK that includes a software implementation running on x86 devices. It is being integrated by a rapidly growing number of developers in rendering applications for a wide range of markets, including digital content creation, film and video, games, architecture, and industrial design. See: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/powervr_openrl_raytracing_technology.asp.

This cross-OS, cross-platform API is the only ray tracing API that supports multiple graphics devices with optimal performance and from a wide range of vendors. Like OpenGL, OpenRL hides the complexities of interfacing with different graphics devices by presenting a single, uniform interface. A free perpetual license of OpenRL is available for integration into commercial or non-commercial applications.

Source: Imagination Technologies