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Check out the reel of MOPA (Supinfocom Arles) alumnus Thomas Bourdis with a compilation of his lookdev / lighting work. Watch it on Vimeo.

JewelCraft is a free Blender add-on by Mikhail Rachinskiy for jewelry design that provides tools for asset management, jeweling and statistics gathering to easily get all valuable information about your designs such as gemstone settings, dimensions and weight in different metals. The latest version brings 8 new stone types and 4 new gem cuts. Watch a video overview on YouTube and find out more on GitHub.

Lead / Senior FX artist Boris Bruchhaus has posted online his latest reel. Watch it on Vimeo.

FX artist Carlos Parmentier has made available a video with breakdowns of fluid dynamic effects he created for a spot for BMCE Bank of Africa. Watch it on Vimeo.

Autonomous is a Sci-Fi animated short set in a barren world of wrecks and autonomous weapons. It follows the journey of F.R.E.D, a recon droid`s last order. The film was done by Estonia-based artists Aleksei Shulga and Mihhail Kohtov on their free time during two years. Watch it on Vimeo.

Klaas Nienhuis has started public beta testing of his script for quick creation of terrains and globes from online map data. More information on Klaas' website.

(Updated) New preview videos have been made available and the author of the software has stated that v2 is expected to be released before the end of the month. Watch the videos: SLIK 2 Overview, Using SLIK 2 to set up a portrait lighting studio, SLIK2 Compositing.
A video preview has been made available by the developers of the Studio Lighting Illumination kit for Modo, showing features that will be brought by the upcoming version. According to developer Yazan Malkosh, v2 of the kit is expected to be released soon. Watch the video on Vimeo.

The Blender Institute has announced the release of BlenRig 5, a free auto-rigging and skinning system developed by Juan Pablo Bouza that provides a quality rig to animate biped characters and includes an advanced facial system. Rig creation includes: BlenRig armature, BlenRig Mesh Deform cage and Lattices, and basic body mesh for creating low resolution proxy versions of the characters. This is the first public release of BlenRig, according to the author more presets for quadrupeds, birds and different facial setups are expected to be made available in the future. More on the Blender Cloud.

Check out the reel of FX artist Sri Charan, created with 3DS Max, FumeFX, Krakatoa, Maya and Bifrost, among other tools. Watch it on Vimeo.

Paris-based Mathematic has made available a video with a making of a commercial directed by Xavier Chassaing, which borrows some ideas from his previous Dry Lights short. Created with Clarisse. Watch it on Vimeo.