J-Cube in partnership with Foundry has announced a new release of Mulitverse, their advanced asset interchange tool that wraps around modern standards such as MaterialX, USD, and Alembic. New features of version 5 include:
- Multiverse Look Outliner (MLO) provides the ability to quickly expand complex hierarchy trees, pattern–search, select hierarchy items and perform multiple hierarchical overrides for visibility, material/displace assignments, attribute set overrides and afne transformations. Always operates on packed geometry, fully in-sync with the Maya VP2.
- Hierarchical Selection allows a user to select any hierarchy item of a packed geometry without unpacking it both in the VP2 and in the new Multiverse Panel UI.
- Hierarchical Assignments make it possible to assign materials/displacements and attributes to any hierarchy item of a packed geometry without unpacking it.
- Arnold, 3Delight and RenderMan procedurals resolve materials, displacements and attributes assignments and overrides procedurally.
- The ability to read and write sequences of Alembic or USD fles as “fle-per-frame” in Maya (rather than as a single, and potentially very large, fle). File-per-frame sequences can be also written by Houdini 16.5.
- The ability to selectively write and easily read Alembic data as layers and override any properties, such as Transforms, Positions, UVs, Normals etc.
- Improved playback performance of packed geometry thanks to a new parallel architecture and an dry-run playback cache.
- “Bounding boxes” and “Point cloud” draw modes for quickly and efficiently displaying packed geometry, respectively drawing as a bounding box or as a point cloud for each hierarchy item.
- Shading and texturing in VP2 according to material assignment to hierarchy items. Shading is enabled for all data: poly mesh, curves and points.
- Many improvements and fixes.
Multiverse 5.0 also sees the introduction of rental licensing and a new less expensive indie tier with no revenue restrictions, in addition to the existing perpetual scheme. Find out more on the Multverse website.
