NEW TOON AND ILLUSTRATION RENDERER PLUG-IN FOR 3D STUDIO MAXr4 NOW SHIPPING

St. Rose, LA -- Digimation Inc., a leading worldwide publisher and distributor of 3D computer animation software, introduces ILLUSTRATE! 4.0, the latest version of the markets leading toon and technical illustration renderer for 3D Studio MAX.

From its initial inception over five years ago the Illustrate! Plug-in has grown and advanced, continually bringing you the best cutting-edge non-photorealistic rendering technology. This latest version pushes that envelope far beyond anything available today.

"Illustrate! 4.0 boasts a wide range of features that help animators and artists produce professional artwork with a minimum of time and effort," says Beau Pershall, Sr. Product Manager at Digimation. "You can now render, directly from 3D Studio MAX, a Shockwave Flash animation of your scene. Just click Render and Illustrate! will produce a Flash file that is not only incredibly small but highly optimized for the fastest playback. Imagine the possibilities."

Illustrate! 4.0 includes the Rendering Wizard that sets up the animators' output simply and easily. Just answer a series of questions, including output format, background color, and so on, then Illustrate! 4.0 prepares the rendering for you. All that remains is for the animator to click on Render.

"We choose Illustrate! 4.0 for our production (Le JourNul de Francois Perusse) because of its quality and speed of process, we tested other cartoon renderer and Illustrate! 4.0 is really the fastest, with our series we need to render more than 2000 frames in NO TIME and Illustrate! 4.0 give us the best results," says Laurent M. Abecassis, technical director at Klik Animation, the Montréal-based 3D animation company.

Illustrate! 4.0 lists for $395 and is available through Digimation and its worldwide dealer network. Upgrades are available from previous versions of Illustrate. Visit the Digimation web site http://www.digimation.com/plugins/illustrate/.