News and views from around the international CG community
The world of 3D visualisation has seen some pretty seismic shifts in the last few decades. First up were still images, quickly followed by videos and interactive experiences hot on their heels. For most of this evolution, 3D artists have been supported by a range of traditional 3D packages including 3ds Max, Maya and Cinema 4D as well as Tenderers such as Mental Ray, V-Ray and Octane.
The latest shift has seen a move away from these applications and towards game engines. Unity, Unreal Engine (UE) and CryEngine have been around for a long while but have largely occupied the games market alone. Unreal Engine, for example, was birthed out of the first game that was developed with it, Unreal in 1998. A couple of years prior to that, Quake Engine released its debut game, Quake. These were exciting days of development and advance, but it didn't touch other industries.
It has only been in recent years that we've seen a substantial uptake of 3D artists using these engines for 3D visualisation. This has coincided with the creators
