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Fabric Engine have released a new video showcasing the implementation of Fabric Splice inside of 3DS Max, which will be previewed at this year's SIGGRAPH. Key developers working on the plugin are Phil Taylor (of CAT fame) and Stephen Taylor (worked on CAT, too, then on the Max dev team at Autodesk and is now working with Fabric Engine as a consultant). Also of note, the company is looking for beta testers. You can check out the full video on the Fabric Engine Vimeo channel and join beta testing on Fabric Engine's website.

Brandon Hirzel is Creative Director & founder of BEMO, and was recently interviewed on the work he and his company did for the film, Earth To Echo. In the interview, Brandon speaks of how his team used After Effects and Yanobox's Nodes plugin to conceive and deliver various effects for the film. You can read the full interview on the FX Factory website.

Side Effects, makers of Houdini, have announced plans to release their Houdini Engine plugins for 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, Unity, and Unreal in late 2014, following the previous release for Maya. The Houdini Engine API will allow for users to bring Houdini assets into the software package they are most comfortable with. Full details can be read on the .

Jarrett Heather used After Effects to create the latest video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's, "Word Crimes" in which he invested over 500 hours of blood, sweat, and tears to deliver the 3 minute, and 44 second animation. You can watch the video, as well as a behind the scenes look at the video, on Jarrett's website.

It’s a Plastic World is a motion graphics piece created using 3DS Max, that tells the story of how plastics are slowly contaminating the world we live in. You can watch the animation, and a breakdown of how the animation was completed, on the It's a Plastic World Vimeo Channel. 

Ephere, makers of Ornatrix, have posted a video showcasing the new viewport hair preview in Ornatrix v3. You can watch the preview on the Ephere Youtube channel.

CMIVFX have announced that they will be releasing a tutorial series focused on an introduction to using ThinkingParticles in 3DS Max. The training is yet to be released but will cover the basics behind ThinkingParticles, including particle interaction, rigid bodies, destruction, and much more. They have released a preview video which you can watch on the CMI Vimeo Channel.

Scanline VFX has been nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Special and Visual Effects in a television series, for the work they recently completed on Game of Thrones Season 4 final episode. You can watch a breakdown video of Wight Attack Sequence on their Vimeo Channel.

Imagineer Systems have released the latest version of their planar tracker, Mocha Pro 4.0. Mocha Pro 4.0 brings new advanced tools for stereo 3d, python scripting, Adobe Premiere support, and much more. This latest release also brings the new Mocha Plus, a replacement for Mocha AE which now includes a new 3d camera solver, and lens correction toolset. For more details on this latest release, you can check out the Imagineer Systems website.

qp Nuclear LUT is a plugin for After Effects that applies log-to-lin functions to show log colour encoded footage properly in , while still retaining the over bright values, the same way Nuke does with its read/write nodes. You can find out more about qp Nuclear LUT on the aescripts website.