Adobe released updates across the Creative Cloud applications Premiere Pro and After Effects, Substance 3D, Mixamo and the mobile painting tool, Fresco. These updates contribute to simpler, faster workflows, and launch new integrations with the open source 3D tool, Blender.
Speech to Text is a new tool and workflow in Premiere Pro that completes each step of the captioning workflow inside the NLE automatically, while leaving the creative control over the results to the user. As well as shortening the time it takes to create a transcription and captions, it gives the editor new ways to search and navigate video sequences – when you double-click on a word in the Text panel, the playhead moves to that position in the Premiere Pro timeline.
Where changes are needed, users can edit the text in the transcript. When finalised, captions are automatically created from the transcript on the Timeline, using Adobe Sensei machine learning to match the pacing of human speech. The captions can then be customised using the design tools in the Essential Graphics panel. Supporting 13 languages, Speech to Text is included with Premiere Pro or Creative Cloud All Apps subscriptions at no additional cost.
As well as joining the Blender Development Fund, Adobe is launching two new plugins — Substance 3D in Blender and Mixamo Auto-Control Rig Plugin for Blender. The Substance 3D in Blender plugin allows Blender users to access the Substance library of textures and 3D assets without leaving Blender itself, and use the Substance materials (SBSAR) files in Blender projects. With the plugin, users can tweak parameters and switch presets to iterate and reuse assets faster, optimizing the workflow as they go.
Mixamo speeds up the process of rigging biped characters for video games or visual effects, which normally is very time consuming. Mixamo’s ability to create a control rig on a character model, by applying motion capture clips, can now be accessed directly inside Blender. The plugin allows you to edit Mixamo’s mocap animations – choosing from over 2,500 clips – non-destructively in Blender. Both of these plugins are now available in beta.
Since the release of After Effects Multi Frame Rendering for export in March 2021, more features have been developed that accelerate After Effects by using all of the cores in the system it is running on. For example, Multi-Frame Rendering for Previews accelerates projects by taking advantage of the system’s CPU cores. Speculative Preview will automatically render compositions and any associated pre-comps in the background while After Effects is idle.
For rendering out compositions, especially to H.264, Multi-Frame Rendering export from Adobe Media Encoder can render multiple compositions in the background while users continue working on others. After Effects will send a notification when renders are complete via the Creative Cloud app, and Render Queue Notifications will display on the user’s phone.
Adobe Fresco is Creative Cloud’s drawing and painting app built for stylus and touch devices like iPad, Wacom tablets and phones. It has vector and raster watercolour and oil brushes, and AI-powered ‘live’ brushes. In continuous development, it now has non-destructive Adjustment Layers, Graph Grids for precise placement, expanded preferences and masking support in iPad and Windows. Like iPad users, Windows users can now access the Photoshop brush libraries by Kyle T. Webster, as well.
With the Colour Adjustment Layers, you can experiment and make a colour change without making a permanent colour commitment, which is useful for applying non-destructive tonal and colour edits. Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast and Color Balance are accessed through the Appearances icon in the taskbar.
In Fresco's Precision panel, users can now access and control new Grids graph overlays used to align the elements of a design with the overall vision, Transform mode to snap a layer to the centre of the canvas, and Rotation Snapping. Masking support is now available for Vector, Type and Image layers. Layer masking makes changes reversible on every layer in Fresco.
Beginning with this version, Fresco will remember the customisation of your work surface each time you open the app. It will also remember which tool you were using when you last closed a document. www.adobe.com
Corona PRG Clear Sky Model
Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max makes updates to the Corona Physical Material and Corona Sky, with improved effects that increase realism in 3D scenes, and achieves faster render speeds.
Corona’s Physical Material now has 35 new presets for glass, metal and fabric, with a new Oren-Nayar diffuse model. These changes make it possible to set up initial hyper-realistic scenes in a few minutes. From there, the Physical Material comes with various features for greater control over looks. These include Sheen parameters for creating photoreal fabrics, and Clearcoat lacquer.
Corona Physical Material
Materials are now defined as either Metal or Non-metal to make sure that only the correct, industry standard parameters are available for each material type. As Roughness instead of Glossiness is now the default, users switch to Glossiness and Specular when needed. Controlling the look of a metal can now be done by adjusting the Edge Colour and then fine tuning the end result by eye, or by using Complex IOR (index of refraction) for physically correct scenes.
Clearcoat in the Physical Material has an absorption layer that affects the colour of Diffuse Reflection and other aspects of the base layer in a realistic way. Achieving the same effect with the earlier legacy Material needed several layers that could be hard to control. Clearcoat also has an independent bump map, allowing you to create rough surfaces with a smooth, rippled or other clear coating over the top.
'The Dream House' Hossein Yadollahpour
The Material Sheen effects take into account the look the fibres of a fabric give surfaces. Instead of trying to manage individual fibres across the surface, users can adjust the new Sheen parameters, which make fabrics render faster and easier to control.
Rough glass now produces more realistic reflections and refractions – even when using the same values, the new glass may look different and more correct. Thin glass with roughness, like frosted glass, can now blur refraction as well as reflection, and also correctly simulates bouncing within the thin glass.
'Ice King' Fabricio Pinho
Artists using the Sky Model can more accurately depict a digital sun and weather from hills, a skyscraper or at sea level in Corona Renderer 7. The new Altitude Parameter applies real-world data to calculate what the sky will look like from a user-defined height.
For sweeping landscape shots or high aerial city views, a new Volume Effect – or aerial perspective – affects objects placed in the distance, where they naturally take on more of the sky colour. Users can control the strength of the effect through a single value. Previously, such effects were only possible using the Corona Global Volume material, but were more complex to set up and could impact render times.
'Audi' Edgar Barbero Mera
Corona Renderer 7 render times generally are up to 50 percent shorter. This acceleration extends to data or scene opening, as files may now open faster due to the background loading of Corona Bitmaps and proxies. The speed improvements are especially evident in scenes that mainly use the new optimised features like transparency processing, denoising and calculating passes in 32 x 32 pixel blocks.
To maintain compatibility with pre-existing scenes, the previous Material will still be available as an option called Corona Legacy Material. Corona Renderer 7 is available now for 3ds Max 2014 to 2022 (64-bit). corona-renderer.com
Pixar RenderMan v24 releases with a new render architecture for animation and VFX, able to use both the CPU and GPU, and a new shading system for layered materials.
Read more: Pixar RenderMan v24 releases with a new render architecture for animation and VFX
Following Redshift’s April release bringing support for MacOS Metal, the Apple M1 chip and Open Shading Language, Maxon Redshift 3.0.46 includes robust support for OpenColorIO v2, enabling users to achieve more accurate and filmic colour through the use of ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) and other custom colour profiles. For users this gives significant enhancements to workflows with many new options and extra parameters.
For example, when employing ACEScg – a slightly larger colour space than the ITU Rec. 2020 colour space and linearly encoded for use within CG rendering and compositing tools – Redshift will automatically use the correct colour space for blackbody temperature on lights, melanin on hair, dispersion in the rsMaterial and the physical sun/sky. This latest version of Redshift also supports the ability to choose colours within a colour space in those host applications that already support OCIO.
OCIO v2 establishes comprehensive colour management for studio pipelines and makes it easier for everyone to achieve film-like results via ACES colour space. An OCIO configuration is supplied with Redshift, or users can reference a configuration for a specific pipeline. Users can choose from the available colour spaces when adding textures and define the colour space for rendering and viewing renders within the RenderView. Redshift for 3ds Max also includes a new Color Picker that allows users to choose colours within a colour space.
This latest release of Redshift for macOS, Windows and Linux is available now, with ongoing regular updates for stability and optimisation. www.maxon.net/en/redshift
V-Ray 5 for Cinema 4D, update 1, now supports node-based material editing, making it possible to achieve photorealistic looks without sacrificing the artist’s creative choices made ahead of rendering. Users can view and manage their complete V-Ray shading network within Cinema 4D, using the Material Node Editor throughout their creation process from the first ideas to finishing.
The V-Ray Material has also been updated to make it easier to create translucent materials in fewer steps, with built-in volumetric subsurface scattering. The result can be immediately applied to skin, plastic, wax and similar surfaces.
Material Node Editor
As an integration of two softwares, V-Ray 5 for Cinema 4D, update 1 aims for efficiency so that the artist can do more in one place, including relighting and compositing from a single render. In the latest update, artists can start rendering multiple dome lights at the same time. Direct support in Light Mix makes it possible to mix light sources and relight a scene – changing the colour and intensity of the lights – after it has been rendered.
For highly precise adjustments to renders, artists can use any of V-Ray’s masking render elements, or render passes, directly in the V-Ray Frame Buffer’s Compositor. These include Cryptomatte, MultiMatte and Object, Render and Material IDs, which may be used to fine tune an image without re-rendering or resorting to another application.
The V-Ray Material makes it easier to create translucent materials in fewer steps.
The Frame Buffer has tools for control over the rendered output, for reviewing, analysing and post processing images, and is also a place to monitor work-in-progress and manage colours.
Rendering reflected lights and refractions from surfaces like glass and water is now easier, with more realistic looks, using V-Ray’s progressively calculated caustics. It helps achieve reflections faster and can be set up without using pre-calculated photon maps. Using sampling techniques, the Progressive caustics solver is able to trace the required photons without the memory constraints of traditional Photon Mapping.
V-Ray Fur is a simple, procedural fur plugin – that is, the fur is generated only during render time and is not actually present in the scene. It can be used to produce grass and fabrics, carpets, hair and similar materials.
Another render-time effect that does not modify the actual scene geometry is V-Ray Clipper, used to quickly create cutaways and section renders for scenes or objects. Any scene object can also be converted to a clipper. www.chaosgroup.com
