Maxon just announced significant updates to several products in its Maxon One subscription bundle. These specifically include Capsules visual assets, Forger mobile sculpting app, Redshift GPU-accelerated renderer, and Trapcode particle simulations and 3D effects for motion graphics.
Capsules
Capsules is Maxon’s collection of tailor-made assets, specifically designed to enhance the realism of artists’ projects. Hence the latest additions to Capsules include a collection of Redshift materials created by visualization experts Fuchs & Vogel. It also includes a new set of Laubwerk plants.
Updates to Maxon One. Redshift Capsules materials demonstration. Image: Maxon.
Redshift now has twenty-six new glass materials. These are ideal for architectural visualization, motion graphics, and product shots. These new materials also include a collection of condensation materials that make it easy to add rain on windows or moisture droplets on cans of cold drinks.
In addition to basic “perfect” glass, Maxon has included a collection of smoked, distorted, dirty and smudged variations perfect for visualizing downtown lofts or creating VFX shots. Half of these materials are available to customers with active Cinema 4D subscriptions while the other half are an exclusive benefit for Maxon One subscribers.
In addition, Maxon releases the second pack of Laubwerk plants, featuring fifty-one high-quality plant models perfect for architectural visualization, visual effects shots and illustration. Designers can also add a natural touch to any scene by scattering lifelike Birch, Pine, and Willow trees, Rosemary plants. These offer a variety of ages, seasons, and shape variants to make renders appear more realistic.
Forger
The latest update to Forger comes with a very useful new set of tools.
- Lighting toolset. This includes Area and IES lights, which enable designers to place sources of light with great accuracy. Area and IES Lights also complement the existing types of lights.
- Set Flow. This is a useful tool for rounding out harsh bevels by adjusting the curvature on a selection of edges based on surrounding geometry.
- Fit Circle tool allows designers to model rounded details easily. Simply select a group of polygons and use interactive handles to adjust the size of the circle. Thanks to the flatten option, the surface can be averaged at the same time.
- Sketch Sculpt brush. This allows designers to create new shapes easily.
- Action Point camera navigation makes it more intuitive to rotate your camera around the area of interest.
- Sweep and Lathe tools add new modeling capabilities to Forget. The Sweep tool can create pipes or horns. Designers can also use the Lathe tool to create complex profiles.
Forger also offers complete hierarchy support, making it easy to organize your creations, group elements, and manipulate groups together.
Redshift
One of the most significant updates for Maxon is the a new Jitter Node for Redshift 3.5.17. This can accordingly apply a variation in color across a large number of objects with the same material texture. This is particularly useful for for creating foliage, rocks, or a fruit of varying degrees of ripeness. In the same way, authentic colors can be applied to a collection of battered old tools, as shown below.
Updates to Maxon One. A box of battered old tools – a Redshift Jitter example render. Image: Maxon.
The new Jitter Node is currently available for a variety of visual effects software. This includes 3ds, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Katana, Max, Maya, and ZBrush. Redshift additionally allows for easier randomization of materials. It also improves performance when using Redshift in CPU mode.
The new MatCap Shader Node designers quickly to create simple stylized materials by mapping an image onto a mesh relative to the render camera. This lays the foundation for non-photo-real materials in Redshift.
Redshift CPU rendering performance now scales better with additional CPU cores or even multiple CPUs in one system. Consequently, this results in faster render times for users of Redshift CPU. Similarly, Texture Memory Optimizations provide overall performance improvements when handling textures in Redshift.
Trapcode
Maxon has paid particular attention to ease of work flow in its latest release of Trapcode particle simulations and 3D effects.
The new built-in Bounce Ground Plane serves as an additional bounce surface with its own height and rotation controls. It allows VFX and motion graphics artists to easily set up an infinite bounce plane. The new Bounce Ground Plane comes with several pre-designed setups and allows you to create and save your own Bounce presets.
Child systems can now inherit the Particle Type, Size, and Opacity values from their parent system at the time of their creation. Consequently, this expands the creative possibilities of parent-child setups. It also allows designers to create stunning effects with each child particle exactly matching the attributes of its parent particle.
Trapcode additionally features three new gradient interpolation models in addition to the existing RGB model. This allows for a wider array of creative choices and possibilities for crafting captivating transitions.
A new Curve Mirror Mode enables designers to create perfectly symmetrical curves. Simply click “Mirror” in the menu and perfectly mirrored curves will appear along the horizontal axis.
Maxon is trying to offer a more consistent user experience across various systems and software packages. Consequently, Particular Designer now calls the After Effects color picker instead of the operating system’s default color picker.
Availability
To enjoy all these new features, Maxon One users are encouraged to update immediately through the Maxon App. This requires either
- Microsoft Windows 10 or 11,
- Apple macOS 10.14, 10.15, 11.x, 12.x or 13.x, or
- A GNU/Linux x86_64 OS with glibc 2.17 or later, and systemd support.
The app is available here. Please note app download requires users to sign in.
About Maxon
Based in Bad Homburg, Germany, Maxon creates powerful yet easy-to-use software for content creators working in 2D and 3D design, motion graphics, visual effects, and visualization. Maxon’s innovative product portfolio helps artists supercharge their creative workflows. Maxon is part of the Nemetschek Group.