Avid releases newest update to 4Designer for graphics creation

This week, Avid announced the availability of an updated version of its graphics authoring software, Avid 4Designer.

The latest version of 4Designer features user interface enhancements that maintain existing customer workflows and product knowledge, while introducing new workflow improvements and graphical features that enrich the artist’s toolset, according to a company release.

“Increased competition for viewers has intensified the need for impactful storytelling and higher production values,” said Alan Hoff of Avid. “With this new version of 4Designer we’re delivering innovations that give graphic artists and designers the graphics creation tools they need to create high-quality, engaging and immersive content in real time.”

Updates Include:

• New line charts – graphic artists and designers can generate line and area charts quickly and easily from new built-in assets and control every aspect of the chart’s appearance, making it easy to illustrate complex datasets to viewers. Any chart can be customized to match the look of the graphics to achieve a more sophisticated and cohesive design.
• New geometry modifiers – users can create completely new objects from 4Designer primitives and objects imported from third-party applications using geometry modifiers. Objects can be modified in real time without pre-rendering.
• Support for 3D maps from WorldMapper – graphic artists and designers can add visual interest and location context to news and weather reports, and work with real maps that combine high-resolution satellite imagery with detailed terrain data to create flyovers, map interactivity and more.
• Added realism – users can give scene elements new levels of realism and a smoother look without increasing geometric detail. New per-pixel lighting enables broadcasters to illuminate scenes with better shade depth, light direction, and color diffusion, giving compositions a more authentic look and feel.
• Easy handling of exports and splines – an enhanced control interface for handling exports enables graphic artists and designers to create and test arrays of data easily from a single editor. A new cross-section editor, which supports cutouts from splines, enables users to build complex cross-sections from scratch and import SVG files containing these elements.
• Expanded trigger capabilities – graphic artists and designers can extend the functionality of triggers with new trigger scripts that run inside scenes, without issuing commands from the controllers. With the new scripting language, users can simply drag and drop any scene property into the script and control it using the scripting tool.