Here’s a quote from the latest newsletter:

“Silex development is nearing completion. The past months we worked hard to deliver the best graphics available for real-time architecture visualization. Watch the Silex blog to view screenshots and movies. http://www.silex3d.com

• User friendly fast and responsive world building tool
• Realisticly simulated clouds
• Skylight and sunlight simulation
• High quality landscapes
• Specialized photographic exposure simulation
• Volumetric fog and water effects
• Large library of high resolution trees and vegetation
• Save MP4 files for YouTube or HD playback
• Save print resolution screen shots
• Movie editor including post-processing effects
• Intelligent camera, making smooth camera paths easy
• Importing and material optimized for speed and quick iterations
• Huge library of materials, vehicles, buildings, animals, trees, objects, water and landscape types.
• Includes motion captured animated content
• Supports PSD, BMP, JPG, FBX, DAE, 3DS and other formats
• Both 32 and 64 bit version available
• Available in multiple languages”

Click here for the full newsletter: http://ymlp.com/zmEKhL

A new addition is the ability to animate zoom and exposure.We made a movie to test this new feature.

Watch on Vimeo

Here’s a movie of some of the models that are included with Silex. We include many commonly used models. In earlier movies we showed vegetation and trees. Expect more screenshots and movies later.

Watch on Vimeo

This was the initial version of the new camera path editor for Silex. The purpose of the camera path editor is to offer a method for editing camera paths without any envelope editors or other complicated stuff you usually have to deal with when are creating camera paths. It’s easy to see why this design was rejected because it’s just too much clutter, it’s confusing and after some testing some prototypes with real users we concluded that building a path in 3D was too complicated for novice 3D software users.

Here’s a shot that’s close to the final version. As you can see there is no more clutter. The user can simply take some snapshots and we built some intelligent software that creates a nice camera path from it. You do not have to deal with key frames or envelopes. Simply specify the shots you want in your movie and let algorithms do the work for you. At the top there are some elements to control exposure and view angle. When you are finished you can modify the clip with effects to tweak timing or visual style. This is the first time effects are so powerful in any video editor. The effects allow you to change sun, camera and other elements from the scene whereas normal effects only influence the image or movie speed.

The name Silex3D was a name we used during development of the software. We still had to settle on a final name for the product and find the final logo. The name Silex stayed, we dropped the 3D and we have a new logo:

This week we did a major overhaul of some of the rendering mechanics and some new features were added.

The camera is now able to dive under water, we have some experiments with cloud shadows and we have a new high resolution rendering mode. It is now possible to save still shots from a movie in high resolution, including all post process effect and motion blur. We also added some great effects to edit  movies like changing speed and changing the beginning or end.

The new high resolution feature allows people to save screenshots from a movie or the scene editing section. Resolutions from 2 to over 30 mega pixels are supported. This is perfect when you need images for print. The overhaul this week made sure that the new rendering features are completely compatible with the real-time engine.

Motion blur and sobel filter (click to enlarge)

We improved a large portion of the rendering pipeline. The result is perfect gamma correct anti-aliasing, reduced memory usage and as a bonus all post-processing effects are now also anti-aliased. The video below has all effects enabled:

• Volumetric fog
• Screen space ambient occlusion
• Depth of field
• Motion blur
• Bloom and streaks
• Film tone mapping
• Sobel post processing for more stylized images.

Watch on Vimeo

Here’s an movie of the first underwater tests. The motionblur gets thrown of by the underwater effect but everything else looks good. Edit: we fixed the motion blur so don’t worry.

Watch on Vimeo

Here’s a movie of the new super-sampling in combination with god rays and motion blur. The motion blur, shadows, ssao are all super-sampled.

The previous post aready showed a significant bump in quality. Here is an image to see the improvement in quality:

In the next image you can see how we improved shadow quality. Compare this with the shadows in the previous post and see how much smoother they are.