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AccuRender 

AccuRender accurately models light using radiosity and ray-tracing techniques. Most radiosity-based renderers are difficult to use, but with AccuRender you don’t need to be a professional renderer or a lighting engineer to get exceptional results quickly. Nor do you need a powerful PC, because AccuRender will run on the same specification PC required by AutoCAD.

AccuRender automatically calculates indirect light, hard and soft shadows, colour bleeding, blurry and sharp reflection, blurry translucency, transparency, refraction, caustic, depth of field, depth attenuation, and reflection. No user intervention or mapping is needed. You can conduct lighting studies too.

AccuRender is faster than other radiosity and ray-trace renderers. AccuRender supports background processing. Scenes in AccuRender can be set up in a tenth of the time needed with most other renderers. And, you can save your favourite scenes for use with other models.

AccuRender has extensive libraries of over 10,000 materials, 500 plants, and 300 light fixtures. Most other products only supply a few sample materials and no plants or light fixtures. The plants are mathematically generated 3D fractal plants with seasonal variation.

Images can be saved in Targa, Tiff, BMP or JPEG format using 24-bit, 16.7 million colours. The resolution is the choice of the user. AccuRender can be used to produce animations and walkthroughs. These can be saved in AVI or VRML formats or as individual frames in TGA, TIF, BMP or JPG formats.

AccuRender software is installed from CD-ROM to run inside AutoCAD Releases 2002 up to AutoCAD 2008. Users will need to download a Service Release for AutoCAD 2007 and 2008 support (this is free from www.mcneel.com). The manual is supplied as PDF files on the CD. The manual has colour illustrations and step by step instructions explaining how to use AccuRender effectively.

The latest version AccuRender 4.0 has many new features summarised as follows,

Enhanced user interface.
Content Browser with drag-and-drop support.
Improved Architectural Desktop support.
Windows Explorer integration for materials, plants, lights, and RPC content.
Materials and plants saved in the DWG file for easy pack-and-go.
Environment Manager with support for multiple environments and templates.
Reflected environment option.
Create materials and decals directly from bitmaps.
Powerful new camera object.
AutoCAD Property Manager integration for AccuRender object properties.
Rendering and WalkAbout layouts.
Global illumination light dome.
HDRI environments.
Support for Piranesi EPix.
Non-photometric raytracer.
Mouse control in WalkAbout window.
Floor Elevations Manager.
Run command on completion of rendering.
Sun and parallel light soft shadows.
Improved soft shadows, blurry transparency, and blurry reflection.
Foliage density per plant.
Polygonal groundcover.
Missing material/decal bitmap report.
Batch rendering manager for distributed rendering for single frames and animations.
Save photometric information to image file.
RPC 3.0 support.
Post-render, real-time glare, haze, glow, and depth of field.
Integrated coMOTION animations.
More materials and objects including free introductory set of Abscissa models.

AccuRender has a recommended retail price of £420 + vat.
An upgrade from any earlier version to AccuRender 4.0 is priced at £250 + vat.

Please note that when installing the upgrade to AccuRender 4, you must have AccuRender 3 or 3.1 installed on the computer or have the AccuRender 3 or 3.1 CD available to place in the CD Reader during installation.