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Thinkbox Software Expands Third-Party Metered Licensing at SIGGRAPH 2016; Previews Deadline 8.1 and New Features of Frost, Krakatoa and Stoke

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), NVIDIA Iray and Mental Ray, Redshift, and Peregrine Labs’ Yeti Available Via Thinkbox Store In Pay-Per-Use Model 

Los Angeles, CA (July 25, 2016) -  Thinkbox Software today announced the availability of on-demand, per-minute licensing for four additional third-party applications via Thinkbox's e-commerce portal, including NVIDIA Iray and Mental Ray, Redshift, and Peregrine Labs' Yeti; Next Limit RealFlow and Maxwell Render are coming soon. Cloud service bundles have also been added allowing users to purchase cloud-based compute resources through the Thinkbox Store; Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is currently available, with more to come. Additionally, Thinkbox will preview  Deadline 8.1 at SIGGRAPH 2016 in booth #449, along with the latest updates to artist tools Frost, Krakatoa and Stoke. 

“We love anticipating the needs of our customers and have extended our tools to proactively solve workflow bottlenecks. On-demand licensing has proven to be a massive hit thus far and we’re thrilled so many third-party vendors have embraced our unique model. Together, we’re opening up new, extremely flexible ways of working for our customers,” said Chris Bond, founder, Thinkbox Software. 

“Peregrine Labs is excited to work with the Thinkbox team to provide an elastic licensing solution for Yeti – we understand that our customers may, at times, need to grow their pool of resources to meet the demands of production and Deadline on Demand provides an easy and elegant solution,” shared Colin Doncaster, founder, Peregrine Labs. 

“Redshift is delighted to be working with Thinkbox to provide a simple, low-friction solution for our customers to expand their license pool almost instantly using Deadline on Demand. This gives our customers additional peace of mind when faced with surprises during production,” said Nicolas Burtnyk, co-founder of Redshift Rendering Technologies.

Per-minute licensing is already available for Thinkbox’s Deadline and Krakatoa, The Foundry’s NUKE and KATANA, and Chaos Group’s V-Ray. On-demand licensing can be purchased 24/7, with minutes consumed only while the Slave application is rendering. 

Deadline 8.1 enhancements include Remote Command capabilities for controlling Slave machines indirectly and added support for Altus, Cinebench, Keyshot, VDenoise, Clarisse’s CNode, and Redshift standalone as well as new version support for existing plug-ins. Additional improvements include updates to the Balancer and Monitor, and power management functionalities. 

Fast, flexible and easy-to-use, Thinkbox’s Frost plug-in is many studios’ go-to tool for meshing particles and fluid simulations. Frost MX 2 for Autodesk 3ds Max nearly doubles the performance of previous versions. It also integrates with Chaos Group’s V-Ray, enabling customizable particle scattering for distributing and rendering millions of mesh instances with very low memory overhead. Frost MY will bring Thinkbox’s powerful meshing technology to Autodesk Maya. 

New features in Krakatoa MX 2.6 particle renderer for 3ds Max include Adaptive Motion Blur, and faster Depth of Field with Anamorphic Squeeze and customizable Bokeh effects. The PRT Cloner modifier has been enhanced to allow chaining of cloning operations for more complex hierarchies, and World Space Modifier versions of the PR Cloner and the Krakatoa Delete modifier. The PRT Loader has also been enhanced with new partition-based channels for advanced filtering in Magma.

Stoke MX 2.3 particle reflow and editing tool for 3ds Max adds Birth Magma and Per-Step Magma evaluation to the Stoke Particle Simulator object. The update allows users to create custom channels, affect simulation channels over the course of the simulation, control particle life and death, and adjust the advection field’s influence over the particles based on custom logic.

Deadline 8.1, Frost MX 2, Frost MY, Krakatoa MX 2.6 and Stoke MX 2.3 are currently in beta. For more information and pricing on Thinkbox solutions, stop by SIGGRAPH booth #449 or visit: 
www.thinkboxsoftware.com/sales.

About Thinkbox Software

Founded by Chris Bond in 2010, Thinkbox Software develops production-proven tools for visual artists and backs each product with highly responsive support. Used across entertainment, architecture, engineering and design, Thinkbox’s products include Deadline® high-volume compute management software used to render, manage and process files locally and across the cloud as well as standalone point mesher Sequoia and particle renderer Krakatoa, which are used to create, visualize and modify massive datasets. For more information, visit  www.thinkboxsoftware.com