L'Ancien Regime

There's a lot more to this than I thought.

If you look at the gumroad page it says; "More videos and tutorials are coming" And as for " With a comment on which areas this asset shines in and what are some of its drawbacks to be aware of?" It's funny because I was just watching this video when the ad for DM1.5 arrived in my email. It makes a pretty good enquiry into the use of n-gons in modern modeling and their drawbacks. This Direct Modeling is essentially the same as Groboto's Mesh Fusion in Modo. So there seem to be n-gons galore in this application. Is that a deal killer?

https://gumroad.com/l/GVLLS/dm_discount DM 1.5. What's new: SoftBoolean 1.1 - UI improvements and small optimizations, groups preservation, new soft boolean tools Geometry Library 1.5 - add elements by the construction plane, filter items with mask, set a material for icon rebuilding operation, UI fully revamped Menu. fully redesigned menu subsystem. You can now create custom menus with submenus by using a simple Python syntax Menus are now fully customizable and works much better with HiDPI displays DM shelf fully redesigned All tools and HDAs have icons Lots of new modeling HDAs Python code is now open Modeler - a brand new classic modeling environment. From now you can really model in Houdini like in other modeling programs

The big advantage mesh fusion has over booleans in 3d coat is the control you have over beveling and chamfering the intersections between boolean objects which simply doesn't exist in 3D Coat, at least it didn't exist the last time I used 3D Coat two years ago.

It was purchased by Modo and it's embedded fully in Modo and it rules.

The thing that gets me is with their zillion dollars of cash warfund, and all the super high paid creative talent they've got in their super space age headquarters it takes them four years to come up with piece of junk like this and charge more than double the price for it. Just what are they doing in there?

https://wccftech.com/mac-pro-apple-intel-amd-launch/ GPU options for the MacPro start from AMD’s Radeon 580X and go all the way up to the Radeon Pro Vega II. The aforementioned 56 teraflops of output is achieved by equipping the Mac Pro with two APX modules, which allows two Vega IIs on the rig, for a combined output of 56 teraflops. To expand the Mac Pro ecosystem, and to learn from the past, Apple also introduced its custom expansion card for the Mac Pro earlier today. This card, dubbed as ‘Afterburner’, is an FPGA ASIC that capable of decoding 6.3 billion pixels per second. It can also handle 12 streams of 4K video and 3 streams of 8K video. The standard version of the Mac Pro will feature an eight core Intel Xeon processor that’s coupled with 256GB of SSD storage and 32GB of RAM at a $5,999 price tag. Thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments section below and stay tuned. We’ll keep you updated on the latest.

This is getting pretty awesome. I sure hope I can get to this level one day. https://blenderartists.org/t/human-progress/1143224/131

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-super-graphics-cards-june-announcement/ NVIDIA GeForce ‘SUPER’ Announcement Is Still Happening With Two New Turing Graphics Cards in June – One Variant Faster Than RTX 2070, Second Faster Than RTX 2080

https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-3000-zen-2-cpu-5-ghz-overclock-4-5-ghz-all-core-boost/ AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs Can Overclock To 5 GHz Single & 4.5 GHz All Core OC at 1.35V, 5 GHz Special Variant In The Works For 2020 4.8GHz is achievable on all cores ~4.4GHz performs similar to a 5Ghz 9900k – in Cinebench 5.0GHz is doable, but it’s a challenge Overclock for overclocking, Ryzen 3000 is still faster 5GHz boost isn’t infeasible 5Ghz all core is pretty much a no-go. 1.35V for all core 4.5Ghz Memory is being run very loose and slow to assure the stability for testing

ASRock X570 AQUA – A $1000 US, All Liquid-Cooled Motherboard https://wccftech.com/amd-x570-flagship-motherboards-msi-asus-aorus-asrock/ four DDR4 DIMM slots can support up to 64 GB of memory with speeds of up to 4666 MHz OC+.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2019/05/discover-how-dice-la-created-battlefield-vs-environments/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art)

I've used it in Houdini BUT uh...what a mess it all is...I'll tell you more about it later. Sad.

https://wccftech.com/watch-nvidias-computex-super-announcement-livestream-here/ Is the company teasing a specific new graphics card? a new product line of superclocked variants of its current Turing lineup? or perhaps next generation gaming laptops? It’s hard to tell

wow

You know why I posted this? Because it's all very enjoyable to watch, and yet there's nothing there that most of use couldn't do using 3D Coat and Blender etc. It's doable and I hope you're all inspired to do your own projects. Don't be afraid of failure.

https://www.artstation.com/dimafedotov

https://wccftech.com/intel-xe-gpu-supports-ray-tracing/ Intel has just announced something pretty big at FMX in Germany: that their Xe GPU architecture will support hardware acceleration of Ray tracing. This is a pretty big deal because it puts this architecture on par with Turing as far as DXR goes and makes it far superior to solutions that rely on software or GPGPU acceleration (like the Pascal series). Ray tracing is a bleeding edge technology right now and pretty much in its infancy for the consumer market but has pretty huge implications in the data center segment as of now. Intel Xe supports ray tracing Ray tracing has deep reaching implications in the data center market. Ray tracing for big budget movies like Pixar films is done traditionally on CPUs because they are 100% accurate. Unfortunately however, they are also orders of magnitude slower. If a GPU solution exists that can offer a high level of accuracy (preferably 100%) at a GPU levels of speed then this would quickly revolutionize he brief of the announcement made at FMX is given below: At FMX, Intel Graphics-related news will be disclosed that Intel: Xe architecture roadmap for data center optimized rendering includes ray tracing hardware acceleration support for the Intel® Rendering Framework family of API’s and libraries. Establishing the Intel® Graphics and Visualization Institutes of XeLLENCE (Intel® GVI) and has selected three founding institutions (University of Utah, University of Texas, Austin and University of Stuttgart) to participate based on their significant open research and open source contributions related to Intel Rendering Framework, large scale graphics and visualization. Building on the Intel Rendering Framework with the introduction of the Intel® Open Volume Kernel Library (set for release in Q3 2019) to enhance support for volume rendering – a critical capability for scientific visualization and high-end digital content creation. Intel also talked about the rendering performance of its processors at FMX but that is something that is just an iterative improvement and not something as revolutionary as an Xe datacenter GPU with hardware acceleration for Ray tracing. Now considering the company was talking about PIXAR and the likes I am going to assume the ray tracing implementation features a very high and close to 100% rate of accuracy. I cannot imagine that it is 100% because if that were the case the CPU rendering industry would be completely and irrevocably disrupted as soon as the first Xe GPU lands. A close to 100% ray tracing accuracy would allow budget film makers and significantly lower the threshold for high quality animations in the film industry. In fact, the average laymen would probably find it impossible to tell the difference between a CPU and a GPU ray traced image. Needless to say this is very exciting stuff and we can definitely expect this technology to be part of a consumer lineup of GPUs as well – whenever they land.

Elliot Lilly Art eh? Intredasting. I wish my replacement power supply would get back to me so I could participate in this.

Here's another Gumroad Houdini plug in for doing architectural modeling in Houdini, called Houdini Architecture Nodes - Pack #1 By Quaternioff Procedural Tools. It's $19.99. Create complex structures in hours instead of days! These are the first batch of procedural modeling tools designed to accelerate the creation of surfaces commonly used in architecture. Made for Houdini Indie. No black boxing; all the internal networks and code are accessible. https://gumroad.com/l/han1/hxdj6zr

OH YES AMD RX Vega 64 Outperforms NVIDIA RTX 2080 by up to 20% in Vulkan Enabled World War Z https://wccftech.com/amd-rx-vega-64-outperforms-nvidia-rtx-2080-by-14-in-vulkan-enabled-world-war-z/

Decent caustics..

..the price is right