Fusion 6.1 now supports the OpenCL language, which allows tools to take advantage of the GPU in modern NVidia and ATI graphics cards to achieve blazing speed increases. How fast? We are seeing improvements as much as 1000% on some of the most processor intensive tools in Fusion (e.g. Defocus, Noise generators). Insert OpenCL code directly into Fuse tools to create your own GPU-accelerated tools.

OpenCL’s open computing language is a framework that utilizes the massively parallel operations of GPU's for general computing. Instead of just doing 3D OpenGL rendering on graphics cards, more general processing can be achieved at orders of magnitude faster than possible with just CPU's.

Fusion 6.1 now support the Renderman renderer directly. This demonstrates the open plugin flexibility of the 3D rendering system. Making the production pipeline integration between rendering and compositing better by supporting this industry standard. This is released as open source in the 3D SDK for studios to modify and integrate.

The MOST requested feature this year! Fusion 6.1 now supports Python 3.1 right within the interface, giving your scripting gurus the choice of using the built in eyeonscript or Python languages when creating Utility, Tool and Comp scripts. Both eyeonscript and Python will work together so existing scripts will continue to work, making the change over painless and allowing better integration for pipelines that prefer a single language.

With the continued popularity of the RED camera platform, it's no mystery why the R3D™ file format in Fusion 6.1 now includes support for the new Mysterium X sensor and color science.

Fusion's ground-breaking particle system now allows the artist to use geometry as particle regions. Emit particles from the surface or interior of an imported FBX mesh, make a primitive 3D shape which acts as an attractor, or bounce particles from any geometry, dramatically improving the particle interaction with 3D scenes.

Now Fusion 6.1 particle solutions can be cached to disk! No more waiting for particles to recalculate once the particle system has been solved.

The new Film Grain tool is specifically optimized to make adding film style exponential grain to images easier and more accurate.

The new Hue Curves tool gives the artist powerful animatable splines for notching or emphasizing a very specific range of colors in the image. In addition to providing adjustable curves for Hue, Luminance, Saturation, Red, Green and Blue, powerful options for color supression are also built in, making the Hue Curves tool ideal for those persistent green edges.

Loader tools can optionally create a local cache of remote frames as they are loaded, which not only reduces the load on the network, but greatly improves interactive performance over slow networks. The original source frames are monitored for changes too, so the cache never gets out of date.

New Metadata tools make it simple to respect the metadata in a project pipeline, by providing tools for copying or inserting custom metadata to any image, and for merging metadata from multiple images.

The big features are awesome, but it's often the little changes that have the biggest impact. Fusion 6.1 is packed full of enhancments to make artists workflow more streamlined. Here are some of the interface and feature tweaks that you can expect in Fusion 6.1

• Change tabs while using the simple expressions pick whip.
• Quickly reset a tool control to it's default value.
• Hold CTRL while adjusting a slider to reduce it's sensitivity by 1/10.
• Markers for sliders and screw controls that show the default value when the current value is non-default, and can also act as a button to reset to default.
• The Custom tool now has LUT inputs.
• Coordinate transform modifier, like Locator but outputs 3D object positions, taking intervening transforms into account. Use e.g. as simple offset, or to target an object elsewhere in the scene hierarchy.
• FBX importing has many enhancements, including multi material support.