After a month of intense development we bring you another milestone is our project- Zookeeper 1.3! We have focused our development on the stability, usability, and, as always, new features. Containers are now supported in schematic views and templates! Moreover all local resources (such as external bitmaps and data) are also available through templates.

We worked on the schematic GUI, improved parts of tree views, fixed many workflow issues, added efficient searching for objects, and included a very useful select and rename tool. In case you want to see more on that there is a good introduction video and a set of tutorials that can help you get started.

We have also been updating and adding to our documentation and plan to post a lot more material in the upcoming month. This is one of the ways that we are improving the experience of our license owners. We are also constantly refining The Zoo and plan to add many more templates soon.

Please note that our introductory/promotional pricing ends in 5 days! So if you would still like to get a 20% discount make sure to get your license before March 15'th. After that the regular pricing takes effect. As usual we are very grateful for your support and for keeping us going! We are looking ahead and another month of heavy development and, as always, getting the little (and BIG) things right.

Zookeeper appears in the latest 3d World issue (127) under "The Filter" section. Look for more on Zookeeper in future 3d World articles.

We have been working hard on bringing you yet another milestone in the Zookeeper project, it is called The Zoo. The Zoo is a web repository of many different procedural templates and assets for use in your scenes through Zookeeper. It is now freely available to all of our current and future customers!

The Zoo is the reason why over the past few weeks we have been concentrating development towards templates and their functionality within Zookeeper. We believe this to be an important feature which could save our customers hours of hard work through readily available parametric highly functional scene asset. Go over them, check out the video, and see for yourself!

Zookeeper 1.2 (now available) boasts a myriad of improvements and additions over 1.1. Some of these include GUI improvements while the majority are improvements related to templates. To make sure that all users get to try The Zoo with Zookeeper's template features we have removed restrictions for template scene nodes. Demo version of Zoo keeper can now import templates from the web the same way fully commercial version does, however, you still need to have the full version to look inside the generated composite nodes. The node limit has also been increased to 10 nodes.

We are planning on growing The Zoo service with new content constantly so check up often and let us know what you think! This is just one of the ways we would like to show our commitment to the Zookeeper project.

If you are interested in Zookeeper please let us know! You can purchase a commercial license before March 15'th at a discounted rate (20% off).

In this first update of the year I wish to update you on our progress with Zookeeper.

The first point release is out! Zookeeper 1.1 fixes a number of issues and adds new functionality like the floating previews, node copying, and faster response times. We are constantly improving Zookeeper with about 2-3 builds a week available to our customers at a click of a button.

To show off some of this new stuff, as well as things previously not seen, we have made a new "Materials Workflow" video demonstrating the power of Zookeeper when it comes to dealing with material creation and editing. Be sure to check it out!

There will be many exciting new things coming for our Zookeeper customers and general public alike this year. First of these will be a Zookeeper community website which will host various templates and scene assets available for Zookeeper users to use at their disposal. We are confident that it will be able to improve many workflows and change the way people think about, and use, 3d Studio Max.

We are currently planning launch of "The Zoo" soon, so stay tuned!

We would like to wish everybody a Happy New Year! May 2010 bring you good fortune and make your wishes come true. Special thanks goes out to everybody who supported us in 2009 and we hope that you stay with us this year! Your support, comments, and visits are greatly appreciated and make projects like Zookeeper and Max.NET possible.

We will be doing a lot of cool stuff in 2010 on all fronts. Max.NET will see updates, Zookeeper will come to fruition and (hopefully) spawn many new versions to come, and we will be unveiling multiple new projects throughout the year!

Once again, Happy New Year!