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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...)

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. 

Goldtooth has released a breakdown video of the animated artworks they created for Magic: the Gathering. Watch it on Vimeo.

Allegorithmic has released an update to Alchemist, its tool for creating, managing and processing materials using procedural, hand-made, capture-based and AI-based workflows. (more...)

Realtime UK has released a new making-of video with Stuart Bayley, the director of the Game of Thrones trailer and senior artists Chris Scubli and David Weaver who discuss the challenges of recreating well known characters without access to the actors or scan data. Watch it on Vimeo.  (more...)

Epic has announced the release of Unreal Studio 4.22. In addition to the benefits of the 4.22 release of the Unreal Engine such as real-time ray tracing, the Studio sister product adds several improvements aimed at non-game users. (more...)

State of Art Academy has announced this year's Academy Days conference which takes place in Venice between 3 - 5 October. 

Us CG Artists used to find that our careers isolated us. Of course we have friends and family, but our passion is not their passion. Talk about tris and most people think rugby, mention a normal map and they’ll hand you an atlas. (more...)

Ziva Dynamics has released an update to Ziva VFX, its character creation tool for Maya. (more...)