It’s taken days of pain to support MAX 2013. It’s taken minutes to support XSI 2013.

Getting ready for Unicode consists of a mix of changes in the compiler rules combined with a (massive) cascade of changes in the codebase to make sure that every routine where texts or pathnames are involved is aware of the new character set. This has taken (literally) several days of intense work.

The 3dsMax 2013 SDK has turned from ASCII-only to Unicode-only, so to make our MAX LIVE plugin compatible with MAX 2013 we’ve had to carry out all these changes. The plugin itself has required many charset-related changes as well.

For those of you who are not familiar with the term Unicode, it is a solution to support text expressed in non-latin character sets. Traditionally, computers have used the ASCII code to encode text. In ASCII, each character is stored in 1 byte, allowing for 256 different characters only, which is enough for latin-derived languages (particularly English). Unicode is a standard which uses more than 1 byte per character (typically 2 or 4), making it possible to handle text strings expressed in most of the world’s writing systems, including those with hundreds or thousands of characters, such as japanese, chinese, etc…

Wikipedia page about Unicode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode.

Read the full interview here: http://bit.ly/HNOQmk

We are pleased to announce the inclusion in the Arion code of a Kepler-specific branch, effectively providing explicit support for Kepler graphics cards. Arion, and also our upcoming Arion-based MAX/XSI LIVE plugins now support computing capabilities sm_10, sm_20 and sm_30, ranging from the old GeForce 9xxx cards to the newest Kepler models available.

We expect to release a new version of Arion (v1.6.5) very soon, so users can benefit from this upgrade and some other core fixes.

Thank you for reading.

The release is getting closer and we’ll share more stuff very soon.

This video tutorial shows the basics of the most important workflow features of Arion 1.6.0 in a complete session recording using a raw .OBJ file.

Please refer to the help panel inside the application (click on the “?” button) if you need information about the shortcuts to use the software. It’s pretty straightforward!

Thank you very much for watching.

This RandomControl Arion tutorial explains how to use the Participating Media (fog) features.
Please fullscreen the video and use at least 720p resolution to correctly see the settings.

Get the file arion_fog_start.rcs here: http://www.randomcontrol.com/downloads/tutorials/rcs/arion_fog_start.rcs

The new RandomControl BRDF material technology, which as been introduced in Arion 1.5.0, is a technical and mathematical achievement. This image above that uses very small directional spotlights to lit the scene has been rendered in Arion using ‘simple’ unidirectional path tracing in a little over 3 hours of render time. This may sounds like a lot, but for an unbiased rendering engine, it’s a fraction of what any other engine on the market is capable of.

Now I’m letting you imagine what fryrender will be able to do with that technology in bidirectional path tracing!

“My opinion about Arion is very positive, I like the software and it was pleasure to work with it. I would like to say thank you again to RandomControl for giving us the opportunity to review Arion.”

Thank you Tomas for the article!