For the first time, the game development platform is available for Windows Vista and XP

PRESS RELEASE

San Francisco, CA – March 18, 2009. Unity Technologies, the provider of the revolutionary Unity development platform which enables console-quality games for the Web, the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii, today announced the availability of Unity 2.5 for Windows. For the first time Unity 2.5 enables our tools to be used for development under Windows Vista, XP and 2000 with 100% feature parity and interoperability with Mac OS X.

The Unity 2.5 development tool has been rebuilt to look, feel and function identically on both operating systems, each running the same underlying engine. The best part? Unity can build games for either platform, on either platform. Cross-platform development in the truest sense.

David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies said, “Starting today, Windows users can finally get their hands on our baby that has been generating an incredible amount of excitement. Unity has been used to create dozens of hit games and is already being used by thousands of developers on the Mac, and we have huge expectations of how far we and our community can go.”

Major updates in Unity 2.5 include:

• Even easier-to-use tools allowing rapid play, test and improvement of work
• A gorgeous tabbed interface
• Precise navigation and placement of tools – new flythrough controls and a newly designed rotation tool
• Information at a glance – detailed rendering stats of meshes; waveforms of audio clips; model file previews and much, much more
• Drag and drop 3ds Max support in addition to existing support for Maya, Blender and all other 3D apps
• Completely extensible toolset

The Unity tools have been hailed as revolutionary for democratizing game development, in that the same platform is being used by the big players like EA, Cartoon Network, and Funcom, as well as thousands of indie developers, startups, hobbyists and students. Hundreds of commercial games have been developed with Unity, and more are launched every day.

Unity 2.5 will be on show at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco from 23–27th March 2009. Stop by booth #5110 for a chat and full demonstration.

More information: www.unity3d.com.

NodeJoe is a new schematic material editor for 3ds Max and part of TurboSquid's collection for the Autodesk Certified Animation Plug-in program

PRESS RELEASE

(New Orleans, LA – March 17, 2009) TurboSquid, home to the world’s largest collection of royalty-free 3D models, and the exclusive worldwide publisher and distributor for the Autodesk Certified Animation Plug-in (ACAP) program, is pleased to announce the release of NodeJoe from Thinking Apes GmbH. This newest addition to the TurboSquid ACAP program is a robust, artist-friendly schematic material editor for 3ds Max that provides users with a quick and intuitive way of working with complex textures and material trees.

This powerful plug-in suite provides users with an intuitive, clearly arranged and highly visual user interface to create, analyze and modify materials and textures within 3ds Max. The main Nodeview working area is zoomable and draggable, presenting an interactive preview of materials, including all sub-materials and sub-textures, as well as showing the dependencies between them in an easy to understand way. Each material, shader and map is represented as a ‘node’ with input and output connections that can be linked in an infinite number of ways. Users can create these connections between different maps, shaders and materials simply by dragging connection lines between them in the Nodeview. NodeJoe is also intelligent enough to know when a connection can be made, and will let the user know if they try to connect two nodes in a way that is illegal. Once a material has been crafted, applying it could not be easier; straightforward drag-and-drop onto your geometry, into a light or anywhere else a standard material can live inside of 3ds Max. Moreover, the visual nature of NodeJoe makes it easy to spot and manipulate instanced maps and shaders, so that texture artists will intrinsically know what maps drive which parts of their material tree. All aspects of a material are accessible from within NodeJoe and users can even apply animation controllers to their maps and materials right within the Nodeview.

“NodeJoe is a tremendous addition to the TurboSquid ACAP collection,” explains Beau Perschall, Vice President of Business Development at TurboSquid. “It simplifies the material creation process, and does it in a completely visual way that 3D artists will intuitively understand. This is one of those ‘must-have‘ tools that will make your life so much easier when it comes to building and managing complex materials, regardless of your renderer of choice.”

Developed by designers for designers, NodeJoe builds upon the existing Material Editor functionality. This is very important because it lets users pass files without having to worry about whether NodeJoe is present or not just to open or render the file – because NodeJoe simply creates standard 3ds Max compliant materials.

Pricing and Availability

NodeJoe has a suggested retail price of $289 and is available beginning March 17, 2009 from TurboSquid or from authorized Resellers around the world. For a Reseller near you, contact sales@turbosquid.com.

About TurboSquid

Founded in 2000, TurboSquid is dedicated to the management and distribution of digital products and other relevant content for 3D and 2D designers and creative professionals. TurboSquid provides a global market for digital products by enabling individual and corporate users to list, promote and sell their content to users around the world. In 2003, TurboSquid was named as the exclusive publisher and worldwide distributor for the Autodesk Certified Animation Plug-in Program. TurboSquid is a privately held and venture-backed company. More information can be found at the company‘s web site: www.turbosquid.com.

About Thinking Apes, GmbH

The Thinking Apes GmbH was founded October 2007 in Augsburg, Germany by Ulrich Haberl and Roman Wölker to substanciate the ongoing development of professional 3D-software and services with an appropriate economic environment. In March 2008 the company moved to their new office at the Bismarckstr. 3 in 86159 Augsburg, – where all the magic happens now. For more information, visit us online at www.thinkingapes.net.

AntZero updates its digital asset management software

PRESS RELEASE

AtomicView 1.2 | New features for ever-increasing efficiency,
flexibility and speed:

• New entirely customisable interface.
• File conversion and transformation.
• Multiple catalogues.
• Keyword indexation.
• Automatic directory updates.
• Publish a custom web gallery.
• Publish an online store with integrated sales tool.
• New fast search system by imported format
• Larger thumbnail images.
• Database optimisation.
• Stability correction and performance optimisation.

Highlights – AtomicView offers you:

• An elegant interface that is wholly constructible and modulable in real time.
• Ultra-fast navigation relying on the latest generation of graphics cards.
• Multicore programming for faster processing.
• Multimedia support with multiple photo, image video and sound formats.
• Wide range of support for RAW formats.
• Intelligent management of IPTC, XMP & EXIF metadata.
• A wide range of choices to organise your media: keywords, metadata, catalogues, group hierarchies.
• A highly efficient search system inspired by Boolean logic.
• Publication of an elegant, fully customised web gallery.
• Publication of an online store complete with integrated sales tool.
• A flexible and fast video and image conversion and transformation tool optimised for multicore machines.
• Fast conversion and transformation of files and file series – crop, rotate, scale, overlay a logo and convert formats in a single operation!
• Handles image sequences for rapide rendering of your work.

Next release: AtomicView Server
AtomicView Server will be a flexible and adaptable server solution to synchronise and store your multimedia data.

For more information visit: www.antzero.com/atomicview/en