In what amounts to the second regrettable death of the Brazil renderer, Imagination Technologies announced the EOL of the Caustic Visualizer for Maya; development of the Max plugin was already on hold for approximately a year. The technology will only survive for the time being in the $19.99 SketchUp add-on and in Rhino’s Neon renderer. The company also stopped selling their Caustic Series2 ray tracing accelerator cards and announced that it will remove most of the content of its Caustic.com website. Imagination Technologies had originally announced the acquisition of Caustic Graphics in December 2010. Read the official EOL message for more.
Caustic Visualizer for Maya end of life announced
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Wow, what a jinxed fate of Brazil…
Visualizer was working really nicely in Max already and has been way more responsive than other interactive solutions at that time. Sadly development didn’t get beyond alpha stage and the Maya plugin eventually got higher priority. Had they continued development and focused on the Max plugin entirely it would be ready to rock by now, even without the Caustic card.
Really sad to see this engine go but I guess the point of no return has been passed long ago already.
Very surprised and disappointed to hear these news! Its such a shame that one of the best core render engines never reached a bigger audience. Brazil is my favorite renderer ever, and Visualizer had huge promise – it would have blown every other interactive renderer for Max out of the sky. Would love to see Brazil resurrected in some way, but as you say Marcin – it’s probably too late.
Such a waste of the Brazil r/s renderer. So many poor decisions made by Imagination Tech, right from the initial purchase of the technology created by Splutterfish. In some ways I consider this their just reward for needlessly killing what was a major part of my pipeline. Still sad for the loss of great tech though.
Most depressingly in December the Maya Visualizer was finally ready for most production work. It had motion blur, render passes and had finally implemented all of the shaders needed for at least TV work. The back engine also finally supported SSS and volumetrics. I even got a basic SSS material running. Imagination/Caustic just got to where they needed to go all along too late after too many dead ends and detours/distractions.
This saddens me.
Brazil r/s was an amazing tool, to see it end up as scrap makes me die a little inside. Working with it for so long, it’s like a friend I will never see again.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if it was open sourced, and the community picked it up?