studioGPU

Every single hardware renderer always has a laundry list of things it won’t support. The results look beautiful but what can’t it do? Particle support? Displacement maps? UV image maps? Physics? So far it seems like it just kind of sort of supports Maya and Max. Unfortunately the ones on the way are of no use to me. My favorite is XSI Softimage. Any hope of supporting that soon? Maya is powerful it’s just slow and clunky to work with. XSI is a more straightforward animator.

I’m starting a new feature and I’m setting up from scratch so I’d love to avoid the render farm. The price is very reasonable it’s just the limitations and sparce support for animation packages that has me hesitant. You’re after pro customers given your price point and every pro customer knows the drill so you aren’t going to scare anyone off with a list of unsupported features it’d just save time and a lot of questions.

I’ve been looking for a solution like this for years so I’m extremely interested I just need a lot more information. It’s a lot to pay for shelfware and I have been bitten before on these deals.

Hello and thanks for the thoughtful analysis.
Some of the features you are mentioning will be available in the next release of MachStudio Pro (scheduled to be released in August-already in beta). The application will support displacement mapping with hardware tessellation enabling you to achieve sub-pixel displacement on any material-surface with real time feedback. We have also added velocity based motion blur which can be enabled in view or rendered out as a pass in a floating point format.
We are already working on a full particle system - motion and shaders for later MSP releases. For now, you would work in a more standard methodology, whereby you can use the render passes and layers and depth renders in MSP to composite your affects in a composting application. We are also looking to fully support XSI as well. I don’t have a definitive target date for you… but it is becoming more clear that we need to do it soon.

About the price; I want to clarify that MachStudio Pro. is a software and hardware (ATI-FireGL V8650 ) package. We do this to guarantee the best possible performance for the professional user.. So in considering the price please keep in mind that what is possible in this configuration is truly unprecedented in terms of production throughput and creative flexibility.