Contents:

• solidThinking is now part of the Altair group
  
• solidThinking 7.6 announced
  
• solidThinking to exhibit at the IDSA National Conference 2008
• Free solidThinking Trial now available
• New car demo
  
  

On July 23, the acquisition of the solidThinking company's assets by Michigan-based Altair Engineering, Inc. was announced. Following to the acquisition solidThinking Inc has been incorporated in the state of Michigan, USA. For full news release, click here.

Robert Little, previously president of Altair Engineering Canada, Ltd., now serves as president of solidThinking. solidThinking co-founders Alessandro and Mario Mazzardo will serve as Vice President Product Strategy & Marketing and Vice President Product Strategy & Management resepectively.

Privately held with more than 1,400 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific.

With a 20-year-plus track record for innovative product design and development, advanced engineering software and grid computing technologies, Altair has more than 3,000 corporate clients representing the automotive, aerospace, government and defense, and consumer products verticals. Altair also has a growing client presence in the life sciences, financial services and energy markets.

A leading global technology provider, Altair has the experience and skills required in order to increase solidThinking’s adoption in the global design community. Strong regional partners are being selected to provide local service and training. Customers can expect to receive a high level of service, see continual enhancements in the product and to be part of a rapidly expanding user community.

www.solidthinking.com
www.altair.com

solidThinking 7.6 announced

We are pleased to announce solidThinking 7.6, the new program version that introduces several new improvements and enhancements. Among them:

• Updated rendering engine: Improved accuracy, performance and ease-of-use of lighting, global illumination, tone mapping and gamma correction making the creation of photorealistic imagery even easier. Main areas of improvements include:

- Global Illumination
- Improved usability and performance
- Final Gather
- Diffuse and specular new shaders
- Extra flexibility in the way that dome lights can be used
- Improved speed and ease-of-use shadow map
- Lit Appearance reflectance shaders
- Tone mapping improvements
- Performance improvements and lower memory usage for some scenes
during shadow map creation. Improvements will be particularly
noticeable for scenes containing large textures


• New front-end plug-in for Maxwell Render 1.7.
  
  
• User Interface streamlining: no icon borders, new display colors for curves and shaded surfaces, increased default visualization detail (hardware performances now allow to increases).
  
  
• Scroll wheel implementation for zooming and scrolling.
  
  
• New Curve Antialiasing Setting for higher quality in the curve representation.
  
  
• Support of RPC third-party libraries.
  RPC Funcionality RPC stands for "Rich Photorealistic Content". Content is created using ArchVision's award-winning Image-Based Rendering technology. RPC's include people, trees and furniture, all easily placed within traditional 3D scenes. RPC has rapidly become the preferred industry method of incorporating such complex objects into 3D environments (plants, people, vehicles, etc.). High quality photographic images, combined with minimal polygonal geometry, create the illusion of 3D. Appropriate images in the scene are “synthesized” based on the placement of the RPC object and the position of the viewing camera. What is created is the effect of a 3D object without the burden of the polygonal complexity.

Physical shipping of solidThinking 7.6 packages will start in early September.

solidThinking 7.6 runs on both Mac OS X and Windows.

solidThinking to exhibit at IDSA 2008

solidThinking will be demonstrated live during the IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America) 2008 National Conference. Come and see us at booth #30!

When: September 10-13, 2008

Where: Biltmore Resort & Spa, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

www.idsa.org/polaropposites/overview/index.html

Free solidThinking Trial now available

A 30-day full-feature trial version of solidThinking 7.6 can be downloaded from the solidThinking Web site.

Available for Win and Mac. Tell your friends about this opportunity to use solidThinking.

See it! Try it! Buy it!

New car demo

Visit www.solidthinking.com to watch the new car demo. See how solidThinking lets you explore any possible design alternative in real time.

www.solidthinking.com/demos/demos.htm

More demos will follow every month.

Tell us what you'd like to see or read about in future newsletters. Email us at newsletter@solidthinking.com. Thanks!

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This newsletter is © 2008 solidThinking, Inc. All rights reserved. solidThinking is a trademark of solidThinking, Inc. All other trademarks or servicemarks are the property of their respective owners.