• • Stereoscopic rendering for stills and animations available for panoramic and non-panoramic renders. The user is able to define the interpupillary distance and final image layout and select one of 3 convergence modes for handling parallax: Parallel, Converged and Off-axis.

• • The ability to render a 180° vertical and horizontal FOV that can be automatically recognized by VR180-compliant platforms.

• • Several multi-pass rendering improvements including optimised handling of semi-transparent materials and the ability to embed alpha channels for each mask pass.

• • Path tracer renderer improvements including support for normal mapping and the ability to select OpenCL devices using 3 categories: All Available Devices, GPU Devices Only, or CPU Devices Only.

• • UX/UI improvements to add support for CPUs with more than 64 cores on Windows, improve 4K/HiDPI display compatibility, and improve responsiveness and faster computation of Procedural Terrain within the Terrain Editor.

• • Alembic compatibility updated to version 1.7.3.

• • xStream support added for Maya 2018 and Cinema 4D R19.

New features of PlantFactory 2016 R4 include:

• • The addition of multi-polygonal single-plane Leaves that are intended for use with offline rendering and light enough for real-time. The technique uses a grid based mesh and leaves can be bent, curved, folded and react to wind. The resultant plant is compatible with auto and user-defined LODs, color shift, multi materials, two-sided materials and more.

• • New crossed-plane leaves features suited for real-time engines, or low level LODs. Useful for complex plant geometry parts such as flower groups or dense foliage. Users have options for either 2 or 3 crossed planes (2 vertical + 1 horizontal).

• • The same Improvements to multi-pass rendering as Vue, including optimised handling of semi-transparent materials and alpha channels for each mask pass.

• • Improved Exporting.

• • Improved sap inheritance.

• • Support for CPUs with more than 64 cores on Windows.

• • A new wireframe display for billboards and improved display of billboards back face.

• • Enhanced image browsing.

• • Improved hooking points placement for warpboards.

PLE editions of both tools are available. Find out more on the E-On blog.