Weekly 3D, VR & 3D Print News: The Week Of June 1-7

New software versions, new 3D printing tricks VR time travel apps greet us this week!

V-Ray 3.4 for 3DS Max And Maya

A fresh new version of V-Ray has been released. V-Ray 3.4 for 3DS Max and Maya offers quite a few improvements. V-Ray Denoiser cuts noise - automatically and non-destructively - to reduce rendering time to up to 50%! It can be used progressively while rendering or applied afterwards, and supports animation and other nifty stuff. GPU improvements mean support for bump maps with procedural noise and orthographic cameras. Full lists of features can be found here (3DS Max) and here (Maya).

Paul McCartney And The Beatles In VR

The Beatles are an old band, but their history is being brought to life in VR. That's what the Pure McCartney VR is doing! This is a documentary produced in cooperation with the Jaunt VR app. Already going since May 24th, this show produces an episode a week. The viewers can see McCartney talk about how some of the most famous songs in the Beatles repertoire were produced. The show is available in video format, but you are encouraged to download the VR app to get the full experience. You can view the action from all angles and the McCartney experience has been spruced up with additional visuals and archive footage. You can find the documentary here.

3D Printing On The Fly

Would you like to be able to print your models while you're still modeling? No, that's not a horrible idea at all, not at least for a Cornell University team headed by Huaishu Peng. The key to this product is an extruder that pumps out a line of fast hardening plastic. So it's essentially cribbing the process used in 3D printing pens like 3Doodler. The machine works to made a wireframe of the project by taking information converted by a plug-in for Rhino. It even updates the model as you go - they say even cutting function is added. The result is a rough wireframe model of your object that took basically no time to print. So it's great for rapid iteration for interior designers and engineers, but maybe not so much for people designing rings and miniatures.

Lumberyard For Any VR Device

In a few weeks, Amazon's Lumberyard Beta 1.3 will hit the virtual shelves and this time, this Cryengine-derived game engine is ready for anything that VR development can throw at it. This new version will use Lumberyard's Gems system to implement support for any kind of VR hardware. Gems are packages of assets and features that developers can just drag and drop into their projects. Using Gems to enable support for Oculus or Vive is easier than changing the engine code from ground-up to work with every new hardware configuration. More than that, Gems will come with templates that will allow users to create their own Gems for VR hardware, ensuring that they can be ready for any sort of peripherals and headsets than can crop up.

Affordable VR 3D Camera

Cameras that can shoot VR 360 videos are really expensive, with the good models costing up to $60,000. The cheaper ones just take a lot of 2D pictures and stitch them together. Vuze claims that their new camera has actual stereophonic recording capability and only costs $800. It records at 4K and 30fps with a rate up to 120 Mbps VBR with 8 FHD lenses, 180 x 120 FOV (field of view) and spherical FOV of 360 x 180 degrees. The camera has 64GB internal storage, the power in the battery lasts an hour, and it comes with a software studio that helps create your 3D video. The selfie stick also transforms into a tripod stand. Neat!

Microsoft Research On Powerful Low-End VR

Microsoft Research has published a paper that's detailing a new way of rendering images for mobile VR that can dramatically improve performance. Instead of rendering things real time, the system uses cached, pre-rendered images displayed depending on the user's actions. This improves frame rates eight times, uses 97 percent less energy and gives a 15-fold reduction in latency on mobile devices. The Flasback system uses "megaframes" where all moving objects are fully prerendered and displayed according to user movement. It compresses and stores the frames in any number of places on the device with impressive results: a 4K texture that normally uses 8MB of memory only takes up 100KB when compressed. You can read the research paper here.

Travel Back In Time With Timelooper

Timelooper is a new VR app that lets you experience history as if you were there. It does so by recreating certain locations at certain times in history via VR technologies and live action. The kicker is that you need to visit those locations to unlock them in the app. Want to see how Trafalgar square looked like during the Blitz? Then you'll have to go to London. You're enjoying the hustle and bustle of the square one moment, and seeing firefighters rush to douse bombing fire the next, all through the power of mobile VR. The app works best with mobile HMDs, and even the humble Google Cardboard is enough. You can get Timelooper here