NAB Show: Autodesk Enhances Flame, Maya, Arnold and More

LAS VEGAS—“It’s been a really great year for Flame,” Colin Cupp, industry marketing, film & TV at Autodesk, told the assembled crowd during the company’s Sunday night press conference at Joe’s Seafood in Caesars Palace. “We’ve had a lot of subscription growth, opened up the platform and even lowered the price.”

Colin Cupp, Industry Marketing, Film & TV, Autodesk

Cupp discussed Autodesk Flame Family 2018 update 1 for VFX, which includes new action and batch paint improvements such as 16-bit floating point depth support, scene detect and conform enhancements.

There are also enhancements to character creation tools in Autodesk Maya 2017 update 3, among them interactive grooming with XGen, an all-new UV workflow and updates to the motion graphics toolset, including a live link with Adobe After Effects.

Arnold 5.0 delivers significant updates including better sampling, new standard surface and volume shaders, Open Shading Language support, light path expressions, refactored shading API and a VR camera.

Shotgun updates accelerate multi-region performance and make media uploads and downloads faster, regardless of location.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2018 offers Arnold 5.0 rendering via a new MAXtoA 1.0 plugin, customizable workspaces, smart asset creation tools, Bézier motion path animation and a cloud-based large model viewer (LMV) that integrates with Autodesk Forge.

Copyright NAB 2017