Animal Logic open-sources its AL_USDMaya plugin

Studio's in-house USD authoring plugin for Maya, used on Peter Rabbit, now available open-source.

Friday, August 4th, 2017

Fabric Software announces Fabric Engine 2.6

Platform for developing VFX and games tools gets support for USD, Autodesk's AnimX, new RBF solver.

Friday, August 4th, 2017

Santhosh Koneru: a visual effects director's progress

The Blur Studio artist discusses his award-winning short, The Legion, and new CG project The Vikings.

Tuesday, July 18th, 2017

PipelineFX releases Qube! 6.10

Renderfarm manager's new online analytics reports let render wranglers monitor site stress and system load on a per-minute basis.

Thursday, July 6th, 2017

Pixologic ships ZBrush 4R8

Updated: Long-awaited update to the sculpting tool adds real-time Booleans, vector displacement meshes, eight new deformers.

Tuesday, June 13th, 2017

Nvidia releases Mental Ray for 3ds Max

New plugin version of Mental Ray is the first for 3ds Max 2018. Use it for free, if not for network renders.

Thursday, May 11th, 2017

Allegorithmic stops 'major numbered versions' of its tools

Big annual releases of Substance Designer and Painter replaced with continuous updates, but you can still own outright.

Monday, May 8th, 2017

PSOFT ships Pencil+ 4

Popular 3ds Max cel-shading plugin gets support for material transparency; now works with XRefs and the Nitrous viewport.

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2017

Foundry unveils Elara

New cloud-based service will provide a complete VFX pipeline in a web browser, including software, storage, rendering and analytics.

Tuesday, April 25th, 2017

Chaos Group releases V-Ray 3.5 for Maya

Sizeable update to renderer adds interactive lights, better interactive look dev, resumable rendering.

Thursday, March 30th, 2017

Reallusion releases Character Creator 2.0

Free(ish) tool for creating rigged 3D human characters gets support for PBR shading, image-based lighting.

Friday, March 24th, 2017

3ds Max 2018 will include Arnold, not Mental Ray

Max 2018 to include a limited-use version of Arnold in place of Iray or Mental Ray when it ships this April.

Friday, March 24th, 2017

Side Effects Software releases Houdini 16

Updated: 'Largest ever' Houdini update adds autorigging, more simulation tools, terrain system. Now shipping.

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017