Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
  US: Diana Lee  
  UK: Perry Stacy  
  JAPAN: Toshihide Miyata  
  Germany and all other countries:  Joachim Heller  

MAXON HAT TRICK AT SIGGRAPH

Upgrades to CINEMA 4D R9.5 and BodyPaint R2.5 plus new MAXON Production Bundle

MAXON, August 2, 2005 - MAXON today announced the upcoming release of CINEMA 4D Release 9.5, BodyPaint 3D 2.5 and a new MAXON Production Bundle exclusively for studio visual effects. CINEMA 4D Release 9.5 boasts improved workflow, lighting and rendering enhancements, and SKY - a tool that lets users easily create breathtaking atmospherics. BodyPaint 3D Release 2.5 provides optimized workflow and new tools to assist artists in creating high-quality textures by painting directly on their 3D models. Both these powerful tools can be found in the MAXON Production Bundle, which will include the entire MAXON product offering plus other high-end production tools such as 16/32-Bit 3D painting tools, Renderman Output, matte painting tools and a Linux version. All three exciting new developments will debut this week at SIGGRAPH 2005 in Los Angeles, California.

CINEMA 4D Release 9.5
CINEMA 4D Release 9.5 offers dramatic improvements in lighting, rendering and workflow. Lighting setup has been simplified, while more lighting possibilities exist with lights that can take any shape. Area lights and area shadows, crucial to realistic-looking scenes, now render up to four times faster than before. Images can be output in 32-bit / channel color depth as HDRI or OpenEXR, and multipass renderings can be output directly as compositing files for Shake. The brand new Content Browser gives users an overview of projects and presets - saved and organized in real time locally or on the server. Full screen mode quickly offers the maximum amount of working space. A reworked Baker lets users create textures, normal maps and UVs with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Owners of the Advanced Render module enjoy additional new features in CINEMA 4D Release 9.5, including Ambient Occlusion and SKY. Ambient Occlusion enables users to create and quickly render more realistic shadows. Ambient Occlusion can either be rendered or baked as a texture. A particular highlight of Advanced Render 2.5 is SKY, an elaborate but easy to use tool set that lets users create breathtaking atmospherics with just a few clicks of the mouse.

BodyPaint 3D Release 2.5
Wide-ranging improvements can be seen in the workflow of the stand-alone version of MAXON's 3D paint tool in BodyPaint 3D R2.5. Users of 3ds max, LightWave, Maya and Softimage XSI can now create high-end textures for complex models faster and more effectively than ever. Full screen mode and the new Content Browser give users an excellent overview of their projects here as well. Other workflow improvements borrowed from CINEMA 4D include the Heads-Up Display to view and adjust scene data within the viewport, and a one-touch customizable menu offering access to most application functions. Importing models from any application is easier than ever with support for n-gons, while users can now apply individual layers and masks from .psd files as textures. The layer shader allows multiple images, layers, filters and procedurals to be mixed into a single texture, while detachable projection layers make it easy to fit an existing texture over geometry.

CINEMA 4D R9.5 and BodyPaint 3D R2.5 will be available September, 2005. New customers who purchased a full license of CINEMA 4D R9.x or BodyPaint 3D R2.x later than July 1st, 2005 are eligible for a free upgrade.

Additional information and pricing is available upon request or at www.maxon.net.