Dwango, the creator of openToonz, has released KumoWorks; a free nifty app that creates 2D clouds based on the shape of a closed path. There are lots of settings that enable you to control the position of the sun, the height of the horizon, the types of clouds, the ability to export a complete image or each cloud separately and more. Download the app from GitHub.

Ten24 has published their first 3D scanning reel featuring many projects created over the last 5 years using their 180 camera scanning rig. Watch it on YouTube.

Chaos Group has announced the release of V-Ray Next for Modo, bringing the features found in the 3DS Max and Maya version such as the adaptive dome light, new physical hair material and improvements to the standard shader, improved GPU rendering speed and better denoising. Read more about this release on Chaos Group's blog. 

Design Connected has released a new update for its asset management app Connecter, with some handy improvements for 3DS Max users. Materials exporting has been overhauled making it possible to use either the material editor's thumbnails for previews or use a shaderball. You can also now export every material from a scene to the asset browser automatically.  (more...)

Bone-Studio's Juan Gea (Juang3D) has released a livestream recording showing a new OpenVDB toolset implementation in Blender combined with the latest development version of
Mantaflow. Watch the recording on YouTube and check out Juan's channel for many more Blender videos in English and Spanish.

Allegorithmic has announced its spring update of Substance Painter. The release adds several new features, including the ability to view tessellation and displacement in both the viewport and the iRay renderer. Displacement updates in realtime, making it possible to use paint tools to sculpt height maps and see the results instantly. (more...)

The GIMP team has released a new version of its free image editing software. Notable improvements include a new line art detection feature added to the in the Bucket Fill tool aimed at comic artists, various usability improvements in transformation tools, a new Sample Merged option for the Heal tool and fixed in the Clone tool, the addition of  32-bit precision to the parametric brushes, improved brush and pattern creation workflow, on-canvas layer selection, speed increases when saving or exporting and layer groups rendering, DDS support and more. Read the full list of changes on the GIMP blog. 

Updated 23 April 2019. Allan Mckay has released a new tutorial for TyFlow - this time demonstrating a dispersion disintegration effect using Thanos from Avengers Endgame as a model. Watch it on YouTube.  (more...)