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Jeff Mottle of CGarchitect interviews Piotr Truszczynski from Poland about his winning entry for the Autodesk Design Hero competition. Piotr's entry will be featured on the splash screen of the next version of 3DS Max Design. The interview is posted at Livestream.

Refractive Software has announced OctaneRender for 3DS Max, embedding the Octane GPU-powered, un-biased, physically based rendering engine directly into 3DS Max. Demo videos and more information are on the Refractive Software forum.

The Iray development team has launched a blog, and the first entry looks at work being done on metallic flakes in Iray 2.0. Read the blog at blog.irayrender.com

Cebas has released service pack 6 for FinalRender and FinalToon, offering workflow enhancements as well as stability improvements. More at Cebas.

CGarchitect interviews Keith Bomley (dbox) regarding their recent work on the Discovery Channel TV series RISING: Rebuilding Ground Zero. More at CGarchitect.

Radial Symmetry is a commercial 3DS Max plugin for parametric modeling of radial structures like rims, tires, flowers, architecture that follows a circular pattern, or even organic surfaces like the tentacles of an octopus. More on Marius Silaghi's site.

Toon Boom Animation announced the release of Toon Boom Storyboard Pro 3D, a storyboarding software that allows one to import and manipulate 3D models into storyboards. They can be combined with 2D drawn elements in a 3D environment, providing integrated concept development, storyboarding and production. FBX, OBJ and OSB 3D file formats are supported. The press release can be viewed in this pdf and additional info, including a demo video can be found at Toon Boom.

AMD has revamped their 'FX' family of CPUs. The new architecture (codenamed “Bulldozer”), features eight-cores, and is fully unlocked, reaching core frequencies up to 4.2 GHz. More details can be found at AMD.

CGSociety recently interviewed David Couchariere about his career and his approach to character animation on films such as ‘How To Train Your Dragon’, ‘Madagascar 2’, ‘Kung-Fu Panda 1’, Kung Fu Panda 2', ‘Flushed Away’ and others. The full print interview and video can be viewed at CGSociety.

(Updated) The trial version is now ready and can be downloaded from the R|Shaders' website. To give time to evaluate the software, the special price will be extended until the end of November 2011.
Alessandro Cangelosi's shader collection for Max has been released. Shaders include Ice, Ocean, Sand, Snow, Ice Land, Snow Land, Magma and Ground. The majority of the shaders were developed during R&D phases on commercial international projects like movie blockbusters, videogame cinematics, commercials etc. More information can be found at R|Shaders' site.