Autodesk Announces Subscription Advantage Packs for 2012 Entertainment Software

files/pictures/picture-3306.jpg

Press Release from Autodesk

Vancouver, British Columbia, (Aug. 8, 2011) — At SIGGRAPH 2011 — Autodesk, Inc., has announced Subscription Advantage Packs for its Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites 2012, as well as most of its portfolio of Digital Entertainment Creation (DEC) toolsets. Subscription Advantage Packs provide current Autodesk Subscription customers with early access to new features and enhancements that help manage complexity, make everyday workflows more efficient and expand creative capabilities.

“Subscription Advantage Packs allow us to get new functionality out to our Subscription customers much sooner than would otherwise be possible,” said Marc Petit, Autodesk senior vice president, Media & Entertainment. “This is great because the 2012 Advantage Packs contain powerful new enhancements that are going to help artists work more efficiently and creatively. We’ve integrated high-performance third-party technology, speeded up common workflows, and extended creative capabilities.”

Digital Entertainment Creation Subscription Advantage Pack Features

The Autodesk Subscription Advantage Packs for Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites 2012 contain new features and functionality found within the Subscription Advantage Packs for the products included in the suites.

The Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Maya 2012 software provides new tools to help manage the increasing scene complexity required by today’s games, film and television productions. It provides:

• Support for the Alembic point cache format that helps artists move complex data through a pipeline in a manageable form, and reduces the overhead and loss of interactivity associated with transferring fully editable scene data
• The open source AMD Bullet Physics engine, engineered to handle large-scale, highly realistic dynamic simulations — featuring discrete and continuous 3D collision detection, and enabling the simulation of both soft and rigid bodies in a single system while using a rich set of constraints
• A new Node Editor that helps artists and technical directors to more easily work with and debug complex node network

Furthering the Rendering Revolution, the Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk 3ds Max 2012 software delivers new solutions that help artists create and refine the look they require faster and more easily. The Advantage Pack offers:

• A completely new render pass system to help artists more easily segment scenes for downstream compositing
• ActiveShade rendering for the iray renderer from NVIDIA enabling artists to iterate more effectively through interactive rendering sessions that constantly update as changes are made to cameras, lighting, materials and geometry
• New and enhanced interoperability with Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop software
• New .NET exposure of the 3ds Max SDK (software development kit) that helps developers to more effectively extend and customize 3ds Max*

The Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Softimage 2012 software delivers practical production tools to Softimage artists and technical directors. The Advantage Pack provides:

• New modeling and selection tools that greatly improve productivity and ease of use
• New options for ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) rigid body dynamics that enhance the simulation toolset
• Extended SDK access that provides greater control over customization

The Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Mudbox 2012 software delivers powerful new tools to help solidify its position as an industry-leading 3D paint and sculpting solution. The Advantage Pack offers:

• A new Gigatexel engine to enable artists to create substantial amounts of detail, scaling with the artist’s hardware configuration
• An extended creative painting and sculpting toolset providing support for edge sharpness data, the ability to combine bump and normal map information, and easier methods for creating and extracting tiled detail

The Creative Finishing extension releases for Autodesk Flame Premium 2012, Autodesk Flare 2012 and the Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Smoke 2012 for Mac OS X software deliver powerful new creative and technical tools, plus increased digital file format support for film, television and commercial post-production. The releases provide:

• New stereoscopic 3D viewing modes, enabling digital artists to scan for differences between left and right eye clips
• Enhanced creative tools providing stylized graphic effects to create original looks and more control over relighting, motion blur and recursive operations
• Expanded format support for Flame Premium now includes HDRx support, MXF export, and AVCHD codec import. For Smoke for Mac, format support now includes Apple ProRes QuickTime, IMX and MXF OP-1a export, RED Epic HDRx support, AVCHD codec import, and Avid DNxHD export in a QuickTime wrapper

Availability

The Subscription Advantage Packs and Creative Finishing extension releases are expected to be available to current Autodesk Subscription customers in late-September 2011. Subscription customers will be able to download the Advantage Packs and extension releases in one of two ways: from the Subscription Center or directly through the interface of the Autodesk software.