By

New features in Exlevel's plugin for creating and animating trees, plants, flowers and various types of vegetation include: (more...)

Unity has been putting its real-time engine to the test to see how an architectural interior would look in it and what level of visual quality could be achieved using their latest technology, which will be available in upcoming releases. Check out the videos on the Unity blog.

Researchers from ETH Zürich, CNR-ISTI and Università dell’Insubria have devised a new remeshing method that optimizes both the edge orientations and vertex positions in the output mesh. The algorithm produces meshes that naturally align and snap edges to sharp features, and can process a variety of input surface representations, such as point clouds, range scans and triangle meshes. It executes instantly (in less than a second) on meshes with hundreds of thousands of faces, enabling new types of interactive workflows, as well as processing of extremely large meshes and point clouds, with sizes exceeding several hundred million elements. Download the standalone application from GitHub and find out more on ETH Zürich's website.

Lead Rigger Subbu Addanki has developed a new Maya tool that automates joints placement for birds. Tested and proven on many bird rigs in production. Watch a video on Vimeo.

French director Nicolas Deveaux, known for his short 5m80 and his creative videos featuring CG animals, has made available a new promotional video he directed for a hunger-relief organization. Watch it on Vimeo.

Paris-based Galerie Sakura is having a Star Wars-themed exhibition in which 35 artists re-interpret characters from George Lucas' films. The exhibition presents a number of CG works, including those of Travis Durden, who combines Star Wars characters with historic sculptures. More on Galerie Sakura's website.

A free plugin for simulating procedural erosion for Planetside's landscape creation and rendering software has been made available. It's the first publicly available plugin using their new SDK. More information and sample images on Terragen's forum.

(Updated) The Foundry has replied to users' questions stating clearly that "there is no plan to move MODO to a subs only model". More on The Foundry's forum.
The Foundry has released an update to its Colorway application which brings an improved iterative design workflow. The software is now being offered through rental-only licensing, which has prompted The Foundry software users to raise their concerns on the company's official forum and ask for clarification about the company's licensing plans for the future. (more...)

According to news posted by Adobe resellers, Adobe Creative Cloud for teams introductory prices are ending this coming November 27, and will increase by $240 per year, starting on that date.

Andrew Hazelden has released PlayblastVR for Softimage, a renderer that creates hardware-rendered panoramic 360 degree images using OpenGL. The PlayblastVR renderer allows you to create immersive previz renderings of Softimage scenes in LatLong, fulldome, cylindrical, and cubic panorama formats. (more...)