September 18 2008

VENTUZ 2008 is available from this day forward. The Ventuz 2008 core has been completely recoded from the ground up and is now based on Microsoft .NET 3.0 to provide a future proof base and full compatibility with Microsoft Windows Vista. The team developed a complete new font engine to produce more text excitement for the customers.

Ventuz 2008 has a completely new user interface with four new visual styles and a faster and more precise window docking manager for increased GUI layout control. All Editions of Ventuz are now conveniently bundled in one setup file including all installation pre-requisites. These and several more new features are now available with Ventuz 2008 !
 
New Text Engine

Ventuz 2008 features a completely new font and text rendering engine. New features include advanced font style control, beveled 3D fonts, outlined text, higher quality, style presets and much more.

Please refer to the documentation and compatibility sheet for a detailed description and help for importing scenes from Ventuz 2006.

• The Font Engine now uses Windows Presentation Foundation to access font typefaces. This allows correct access to all styles within a font.
• Simulated typeface styles (bold, italic …) are recognized as such and are managed accordingly.
• Non-standard Windows fonts selected are always imported into the Ventuz font project folder which will guarantee that necessary fonts are included in Archives and Presentations.
• Higher quality and increased sharpness of texture fonts.
• The new Enriched Block Text node allows font and color changes within texts.
• The Text Provider nodes (Block Text, Scroll Text and the new Enriched Block Text) have a new font property. The existing format (“ventuz://Fonts/$System$/Arial,Bold“) is no longer valid. A new syntax for addressing font typefaces has been introduced.
• The font style properties, e.g. Resolution or Extrusion are no longer available in the Text Renderer nodes (Texture Text and Mesh Text). All font styles can be accessed with the new style properties which can be edited using the Style Editors.
• Texture Text as well as Mesh Text now offer a new „Very High“ quality setting which produces even higher-resolution meshes and textures.
• Mesh Fonts can now be rendered using the following styles: variable extrusion depth, inner and outer bevels, custom bevel shapes and sizes, user-defined mesh subsets (Front, Back, Hull, FrontBevel and BackBevel)
• The three standard blur levels of Texture Fonts are no longer automatically generated.
• Texture Fonts now consist of three layers: front, main and shadow on which individual styles can be applied to create many more new designs and visual effects.

Animation

• The Animation Logic now offers direct access to all keyframe animation node methods in order to view, create, delete, bind and invoke any method from within the Animation Editor.
• The Logic now also outputs detailed information about its own status, including its current state, which connection is being played back, the direction and whether an animation is playing or not.
• The time marker now follows the animation timeline when playing back animations.

Broadcast

• The Broadcast Edition now support a simultaneous preview output via DVI.
• The Broadcast Edition now supports pre-multiplied alpha keying on DVS CentaurusII video boards for optimal keying quality.
• The Ticker quality has been enhanced to avoid flicker effects and the Ticker now supports instantaneous display of messages using the new FILL command.

Miscellaneous

• Full Support for Microsoft Excel 2007 file format and very large Excel sheets.
• The new Image Metadata node reads EFIX, ITPC, TIFF and COM image metadata.
• New Color variable node added.
• All variable nodes now throw an event when their values change.
• The monitor mode in the Property Editor has been enhanced and now includes all values, methods and events.
• New and improved scripting editor with syntax highlighting, color coding and support for #region and #endregion keywords in C#.NET scripts.
• Script nodes can now receive a numeric argument from event nodes.
• Switch and ValueSwitch node can now be controlled with the numeric argument of event nodes.
• The Axis node allows changing the rotation order to comply with other DCC tools.
• The texture size of the Blur Texture node is now customizable for higher quality options.
• ...

Download Ventuz 2008 now!