Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom, 15th November 2013

Glare Technologies, a New Zealand- and UK-based company which specialises in high-end 3D visualisation software, is proud to announce the release of the 3.6 version of their rendering products Indigo Renderer and Indigo RT.

Using unbiased, physically-based rendering techniques, Indigo generates images of unparalleled accuracy and realism. Well-known for being both user friendly and extremely powerful, Indigo has become the tool of choice for professionals demanding the highest quality visualisations possible, without having to deal with complicated renderer settings.

Indigo 3.6 brings several new, production-oriented features to the table, while improving on the core features that make Indigo great.

New Compositing Features

Compositing features have been significantly upgraded in Indigo 3.6, with enhanced support for alpha output and a new shadow-catcher rendering mode that makes many product visualisation renders a snap.

Alpha export works much better with glass objects, allowing for easy compositing of buildings with glass façades against skyline photography.

The new shadow catcher material makes rendering objects resting on the ground a simple matter, with a specialised pass to produce a perfect, ready-to-use alpha PNG layer.

New Material Types

Realistic rendering crucially relies on realistic materials, and Indigo 3.6 not only improves on the appearance of basic materials but goes a step further, with additional flexibility and useful new material types.

The behaviour of the Phong glossy coating has also been improved to better match the physical appearance and energy conservation of coated materials; the result is more realistic renders, without having to touch any settings.

Hiding Objects From View

Objects can now be made invisible to direct viewing from the camera. They still cast shadows and interact normally with any other light, except they can't be seen directly by the camera.

It can be used to make invisible light sources or to peek through walls without creating unrealistic lighting situations.

Spherical Camera

Another very useful new capability in Indigo 3.6 is rendering with spherical cameras to produce high quality panorama images in standard latitude-longitude format.

This can be used either to create new HDR environment maps from your scenes, or with an interactive panorama viewer to allow realtime 360 degree viewing.

Improved 3ds Max Integration

Indigo's integration with 3ds Max (via IndigoMax) has been tremendously improved since Indigo 3.4, with many bug fixes, workflow improvements and Indigo features supported.

IndigoMax directly integrates Indigo's rendering into 3ds Max and works entirely in memory, so you don't have to wait for your hard drive during a scene export or material preview, greatly accelerating the modelling process.

Scene changes are immediately reflected in the render output with the Interactive rendering mode, which is a great productivity enhancer if you are making many small changes quickly.

Improved Revit integration

Thanks to tremendous improvements in Revit 2014's addin system, Indigo can now access detailed material descriptions for much more accurate material conversion, without any user effort!

Grass scattering is a particularly nice new feature in this release, that makes spreading realistic 3D grass in your scenes a snap: simply select the grass materials in your scene, and it happens automatically on export.

Support for IES lights in Revit has also been greatly improved, allowing you to use many realistically modelled light sources in your scenes.

Intensive Ongoing Development

Besides the many improvements and fixes in this 3.6 release, many other exciting new features which will be available in upcoming beta releases.

Object scattering is a very useful feature for distributing many object instances over a surface, which dramatically speeds up creating many instances, for example trees in a forest.

A new architectural glass material massively improves convergence speed in typical interior settings.

The Metropolis Light Transport implementation has been greatly improved too, producing much cleaner renders for the same rendering time. Further work on this will make the performance gain even more pronounced.

Subsurface scattering (SSS) has been optimised, resulting in 2x faster rendering in scenes with heavy scattering.

About Glare Technologies

Based in New Zealand, with offices in the UK and Germany, Glare Technologies Limited is a privately owned company specialising in high-end 3D visualisation software. Indigo Renderer is Glare Technologies' flagship product.

For More Information

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Contact: Nicholas Chapman +44 77 65647336
Press enquiries: press@glaretechnologies.com
General enquiries: contact@glaretechnologies.com