News Releases (Last revised November 20, 1999).

JFP Inc. will release Digital Landscapes: a natural landscape graphics rendering tool in December 1999. JFP is a company based in Morioka, northern Japan and is capitalized at 10,000,000 yen. The chairman and CEO of the company is Norihiro Urushibara.

This software is designed to allow the rendering of natural landscapes including features such as trees, terrain, forests, grasses and grasslands. It includes simulations for tree growth and forest vegetation together with automatic modeling as well as texture mapping based on topographical erosion simulations. The software allows unparalled levels of realism in a graphical natural landscape based on these features and multi-resolution graphics technology.

Using this software it becomes easy to produce highly complex graphical simulations of natural scenes.

Digital Landscapes is offered as a plug-in module for the Softimage/3D (R) computer graphics application.

System requirements include SOFTIMAGE version 3.7SP1 or later, a Windows NT 4.0 or IRIS 5.3 graphics workstation and "mental ray"(R) for volume forest shading.

Complete system packages will be priced at around 500,000 yen while individual packages will be priced at around 100,000 yen.

This product was produced with the support of the Japanese Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA). The computer graphics technology involved in the tree growth simulation is based on research by Professor Norishige Chiba of the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Engineering at Iwate University.