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OpenGL Headline News
Celestia 1.5.0 released
Jan 31, 2008
Celestia is an open source application for 3D visualization of space, from structures as small as spacecraft or as vast as galaxy clusters. After nearly two years of development since the last release, version 1.5.0 is now available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. This is the biggest update of Celestia ever, with significant improvements in rendering quality, accuracy, and flexibility. Celestia 1.5.0 uses OpenGL 2.0 shaders extensively. Shaders are used to compute atmospheric scattering effects, giving a much more realistic appearance to planets with atmospheres. A Lunar-Lambert photometric model was introduced to more accurately model the reflectance characteristics of dust covered bodies such as the moon. Per-pixel lighting effects are used for better looking specular surfaces.
Category: Applications • Permalink
Lumina 0.3.1 released
Jan 29, 2008
Lumina is a free crossplatform development environment for GLSL shaders. An ECMA script based language is used for tools and rendering control. Lumina provides maximum flexibility that allows the user to build renderer prototypes for deferred shading, depth peeling or HDR rendering, as well as vertex shader and instancing accelerated bezier objects, skinng or GPU based particle systems. This software requires an Opengl 2.0 capable card (GLSL, VBO and FBO).
Category: Applications • Permalink
DJV Imaging - Version 0.8.1 Beta
Jan 29, 2008
New beta version of DJV Imaging, professional movie playback and image processing software for the film and computer animation industries. Highlights for this version include user-interface enhancements, updated software dependencies (OpenEXR 1.6.1, libquicktime 1.0.1), extended image file format support (Softimage PIC, Wavefront RLA, and FFmpeg under Linux), and compatibility changes for the OpenGL rendering pipeline.
Category: Applications • Permalink
MysticGD Releases EMotion FX v3.6, Enabling More Detailed In-game Characters then ever before
Jan 29, 2008
MysticGD, a leader in real-time character animation middleware, today announced the release of its latest version of EMotion FX, the real-time character animation and model export system. EMotion FX v3.6 provides intuitive and efficient tools for artists, increasing runtime performance and pushing greater detail to game audiences. EMotion FX v3.6 also showcases a powerful level of detail (LOD) system that allows the developer to tune their model skeletons for optimum runtime performance, while giving artists a workflow pipeline in which they can quickly setup complete in-game characters. ‘This new SDK adds exciting new features that are in high demand among game artists and animators. EMotion FX’s tools have been redesigned to make them more intuitive and efficient to accommodate the needs of artists,’ said John van der Burg.
Category: Developers • Applications • Permalink
NVSG 4.0 Extends COLLADA Support
Jan 29, 2008
The NVIDIA Scene Graph SDK is an OpenGL-based object-oriented programming library for quickly creating rich, robust 3D scene-graph-based applications under either 32- or 64-bit Windows or Linux operating systems. NVSG Release 4.0 contains full support for COLLADA 1.4.1 including: COLLADA/FX (profile_CG), Skinning (CPU or GPU based), Animations, support for FX/Composer effects, and will also dynamically generate shaders for the profile_COMMON lighting model, implementing user-selectable per-fragment or per-vertex lighting. NVSG 4.0 includes enhanced support for Cg 2.0 features and all G80-class Texture Targets. NVSG is available free from the NVIDIA Developer Site
Category: Developers • Permalink
FluidNoise 1.0: noise generator for Mac OS X
Jan 24, 2008
FluidNoise is a random noise generator that can be used to create seamless tiling noise images and looping noise animations, which can be very useful as texture inputs to OpenGL shaders.
Category: Applications • Permalink
ActiveSolid 2.6 freeware released
Jan 24, 2008
The new release adds OpenGL 3D text labels that are easy to position and fit into arbitrary 3D rectangless. It also includes enhanced view cutting planes among other enhancements.
Category: Applications • Permalink
Lightsprint SDK 2008 released, realistic lighting using OpenGL
Jan 21, 2008
Lightsprint SDK integrates realtime and precomputed global illumination middleware for OpenGL developers. Highlights of 2008 release: unlimited number of light sources with global illumination computed in real-time using OpenGL 2.0 and GLSL; simple API, single parameter switches between static and realtime GI; performance, 400 fps in Lightsmark 2007. New Lightsprint SDK licensee: EGN Interactive.
Category: Applications • Permalink
AMD has released new Catalyst 8.1 drivers
Jan 21, 2008
AMD released an update to the Catalyst software suite making it version 8.1. This version introduces MultiView support, a feature AMD says provides “full hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering across multiple graphics adapters setup in an extended desktop display configuration.” The update is available for select Windows OS’s and Linux.
Category: General • Processors • Permalink
NVSG SDK 4.0 Final Released
Jan 17, 2008
The NVIDIA Scene Graph Software Development Kit (NVSG SDK) provides the ideal platform for Vehicle Styling, Volume Rendering, Broadcast Graphics, and Vis-Sim applications. This is a final 4.0 release and includes numerous bug fixes and updated functionality, documentation and examples. Recent updates include: a PLY loader and OBJ saver, updated Cg 2.0, wxWidgets example, support for all G80 Texture Targets, and significantly updated Skinning support (CPU and GPU-based skinning, COLLADA support). NVSG is available free from the NVIDIA Developer Site
Category: General • Developers • Permalink
