Creo, Luxion team up to import data on Mac

Luxion, makers of Keyshot, have announced a collaboration with Creo Elements Pro (formerly known as Pro/Engineer) to bring native import of Creo CAD/CAM/CAE data into the Mac version of Keyshot, an real-time ray-tracing program. In other news, LightUp for Sketchup as well as Octane Render have both been updated, the latter of which will soon be leaving private beta, Architosh reports.

Luxion this week at an event in Boston demonstrated not only native importing and rendering of Creo Elements Pro data, but also a different plug-in for Keyshot 2 that allows for dynamic linking of the two programs. Creo Elements Pro is considered one of the leading parts-assembly design applications in the PC market, and adding the ability to natively read data from the program will be a boon to Mac-using designers, says the company.

LightUp is a lighting renderer for SketchUp, adding realistic lighting to 3D models, and has now been updated to v1.10a. Changes include a new Ambient Occlusion shader, a new "Material" attribute for the Shadow Catcher, and better load balancing on multiple threads.

Octane Render is a standalone program that renders 3D data exclusively using the GPU of the host computer, leaving the CPU free for other tasks. This allows it to be 10-15 times faster than traditional renderers, says the company, but the product is presently in private beta for existing customers only. The recently updated fifth beta of v2.3 is available for Mac OS X, Windows and GNU/Linux. Once the program leaves beta, a public demo version will be released. The beta of Octane Render is available for sale for 99€, or approximately $140. [via Architosh]

by MacNN Staff