Reprinted from a Caligari press release:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 13 /PRNewswire/ — Caligari Corporation, a pioneer provider of 3D multimedia authoring technologies, today announced the availability of rayPak, a powerful collection of plug-ins, libraries, and standalone programs for trueSpace users who want to enhance their creations with realistic, professional lighting, shaders, and presentation effects. This collection is fully compatible with Caligari’s previously announced aniPak for animation, fxPak for special effects, and dePak for professional design.
Caligari’s award-winning trueSpace combines high-end modeling, rendering and animation power with a novel and intuitive user interface based on direct manipulation of objects. Novice 3D software users and experienced 3D professionals can use trueSpace for real-time authoring in hardware- accelerated, 3D perspective workspaces. Used for product design, graphic design, video games, and web 3D-world design, trueSpace delivers advanced features including hybrid radiosity and incremental image based rendering; polyhedrons, NURBS, subdivision surfaces, particle surfaces, and metaballs- based modeling tools; as well as advanced surfacing and animation features including bones, skinning, IK, and physics simulation.
New trueSpace lighting capabilities are provided in rayPak via VirtuaLight
and Virtuaout:
VirtuaLight is a sophisticated rendering engine for previewing and photo-realistic rendering of 3D scenes. It provides distributed ray tracing with area lights, depth of field, adaptive spatial anti-aliasing, stochastic reflection and refraction models. VirtuaLight also offers global illumination for Monte Carlo irradiance, photon mapping, caustics, and sunlight simulation. trueSpace users will also appreciate its volumetric rendering capabilities and programmable surface shaders, including multi-layer shaders, composite shaders, and indexed shaders. Texture mapping and true displacement mapping are provided by VirtuaLight, as well as 22 different geometric primitives including NURBS, Blobby and Implicit/Polynomial/Parametric surfaces. Virtuaout is a plug-in for easy connection between trueSpace and VirtuaLight.
New trueSpace shading capabilities are provided by SimbiontTS, ShaderLab,
and Ray Catcher:
SimbiontTS is a shader engine for creating textures and materials. It includes photo-realistic procedural shaders and more than 100 materials. trueSpace users can build surfaces with color, transparency, displacement and reflectance, and then animate them to fit any scene.
ShaderLab, the Swiss-army knife of shader creation, is an extendable, scriptable shader system for trueSpace. Users have access to a complete custom control panel for each shader with the ability to save and edit presets. An editor, debugger, and interface builder provide a complete shader development system. ShaderLab comes with more than 200 shaders and preset variations. Users create their own shaders or customize ShaderLab shaders. Five ShaderLab libraries are included in rayPak:
— TC Packs 1 and 2 provide rendering options for heat-haze distortion,
bump maps under radiosity, scanning electron microscope and other edge
lighting effects, procedurally textured landscapes, directional surface
noise, infinite skies using simple primitives effects, and may other
powerful effects.
— TC Pack 3 includes 20 newly-released shaders for post-process effects
and greater control. Users can create masks for use in the alpha
channel or mask channel, build shaders for separate renders of diffuse,
ambient, specular, reflection and transmission passes, and control
shaders through the use of ramps and gradients in place of inbuilt
parameters.
— CGW Shader Pack includes a variety of color and reflective shaders. For
example, CGW-Eye is for complete eyeball shading, and CGW-Environment
makes it possible to blend objects in and out of the background image.
— Enhance:TS Shaders are 42 procedural shaders for textures, patterns and
surfaces. With over 200 materials organized in trueSpace libraries with
detailed help for each shader, all of the textures parameters can be
animated for countless effects.
— SL 2.0 Shaders offer a new planetary shader for control over the
surface of oceans, polar caps and clouds. Other shaders are for making
stone, dried mud, marble, clouds, ocean, wood, tile and many other
textures.
RayCatcher includes its own rendering engine for shading and global illumination. It also allows users to simulate caustic effects when focusing a magnifying glass.
To increase presentation quality with enhanced motion and perspective capabilities, the BKP rayPak suite includes:
— ObjectEffects for applying sequential animations to text and objects.
— ViewTool to capture view settings and apply them to other views. It’s
also great for custom camera views.
— GunFire for animating projectile objects firing from a source object or
weapon.
— PathTools with GluePath to glue two paths into one, and PathEffects for
creating formations that follow one another or swarm together.
RayPak also includes three Virtual Caledonia plug-ins for greater presentation capability — vcRad, vcSex(ion) and vcTNT.
vcRad is a modeling plug-in that automatically applies trueSpace boolean and glue features. Perfect for engineers, artists and even jewelry designers, vcRad is extremely precise and its AutoRad simple script language allows groups of commands to perform in sequence. Users can design toolkits in AutoRad for frequent operations such as cutting metallic teeth, dressing tooth edges, adding hubs, cutting axle holes, key slots, and even lighting windows to embed text.
vcSex(ion) creates sectioned and cutaway versions of complex trueSpace scenes. Users have complete control when showing the internal workings or detail of an object. This is an excellent tool for technical, archaeological, biological, medical and architectural illustrations.
vcTNT is for realistic explosion simulation. Using the trueSpace physics engine, vcTNT allows for complicated interaction of individual ‘shrapnel’ objects, randomness for chaotic effects, multiple explosions, moving targets, and support of doppelganger target objects.
Pricing and Availability
Valued at more than $550 and regularly priced at $199, rayPak is available now for a limited-time introductory price of $99 to trueSpace5 users. New trueSpace users can now purchase trueSpace version 5.2 for $595 with 60 days of technical support. Contact Caligari by telephone at 800-351-7620 or 650-390-9600, or by visiting the Caligari Corporation website at http://www.caligari.com/
