Free tool: Open Light generates procedural HDR light textures
Skydance Animation lighting artist Borja Rama's amazing tool generates pro-quality gobos for VFX, motion graphics and general CG work.
Monday, April 6th, 2026
Free Resources
Rokoko Create generates full-body animations for free
AI-powered browser-based tool generates idles and movement cycles from text prompts. You can export five per month in FBX format.
Friday, April 3rd, 2026
3D texture painting app Wafer is now free in beta for Windows
Sparseal's promising new tool for non-photorealistic texturing is now available for Windows desktop and mobile systems, as well as iPads.
Wednesday, April 1st, 2026
Free tool VDBRender adds native OpenVDB rendering to Nuke
VFX artist Marty Blumen's neat free add-on renders volumes like clouds and fire in Nuke without round-tripping to an external renderer.
Monday, March 30th, 2026
Get neat lightweight 3D sculpting and painting app Tamga
Promising 'minimalist 3D sculpting' tool runs in a browser, on Windows, Mac and Linux, and as an iPad app. Free for personal use.
Monday, March 30th, 2026
Handy Maya add-on RefTool speeds up portrait modeling
Neat script collects the key controls for modeling to reference images into an intuitive UI, preserving your creative flow. Version 2.1 is free.
Tuesday, March 24th, 2026
Free tutorial: Creating Cinematics in Unreal Engine 5
Discover how to create an action sequence in UE5 with DNEG artist Kosuke Iwasaki's free intermediate tutorial for The Gnomon Workshop.
Monday, March 23rd, 2026
NanoGS puts 'Nanite-style' Gaussian splatting in UE5
VFX artist Tim Chen's free add-on renders large 3DGS scans more efficiently inside Unreal Engine, for VFX, games and arch viz work.
Thursday, March 19th, 2026
Canva releases first major update to its free Affinity software
Check out the new features in Affinity 3.1, including Live Tone Blend Groups and a new Tone Brush for compositing and retouching images.
Wednesday, March 18th, 2026
Blender 5.1 is here: discover its 5 key features
Read our pick of the latest features in the open-source 3D software, from the Raycast node to rendering and animation improvements.
Tuesday, March 17th, 2026
GIMP team releases GIMP 3.2 with new vector and link layers
Open-source image editor gets Smart Object-like link layers, plus a new Vibrance filter, and better interoperability with Photoshop.
Monday, March 16th, 2026
Been laid off? JangaFX is giving you its tools free for six months
Updated: games and VFX artists can now apply for temporary licenses of EmberGen, LiquiGen, IlluGen and GeoGen via JangaFX's web portal.
Friday, March 13th, 2026
Get NVIDIA's new path tracing fork of the Godot game engine
Experimental version of the game engine capable of 'really good' looking ray tracing is now available on GitHub under a MIT license.
Friday, March 13th, 2026