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Blue Sky Studios have made available their new Ice Age short "Cosmic Scrat-tastrophe" available online. Watch it on YouTube.

(Updated) Ephere have released a new video showing how to set up a furry character in Maya by using Ornatrix's Surface Comb operator to define hair shape and Length operator to refine it. The video aims to show how the plugin's non-linear workflow can make your life simpler in every day character setup. Watch it on Vimeo. (more...)

(Updated) Sitni Sati has posted another video showing a new feature brought by FumeFX 4, in this case shader sharpening, which allows to enhance fire and smoke detail without the need for resimulation.
Sitni Sati has posted a brief video showing a simulation that uses the Black-body shader feature, which is based on Planck's law of black-body radiation. The feature was added in the recently-released v4.0 of the fluid dynamics plugin for 3DS Max. Watch the video on Vimeo.

A researcher from the University of Utah has developed a new camera color filter that lets in three times more light than conventional filters, resulting in much cleaner, more accurate pictures taken in low light. Instead of just reading three colors (RGB), the new filter produces at least 25 new codes or colors that pass through the filter to reach the camera’s sensor, producing photos that are much more accurate and with nearly no digital grain. The first consumer cameras that use the filter are expected to show up in three years. More on the University of Utah's website.

Paul Winex has generously released a free editor for writing VEX code in Houdini, which offers many improvements over the native editor, including autocompletion, live templates, syntax highlighting, ability to change font size, etc. Head over to Github for more.

FX artist Joe Gunn has kindly shared a Plasma Ball scene for ThinkingParticles that uses the recently-implemented smoke solver and point render features. Find the video and download link on Vimeo.

WTools3D's Viktor Veličko has made available a video showing the new features of v5 of his set of CAD and Archviz tools for LightWave 3D. Watch the video on YouTube and find out more on WTools3D's website.

A trailer is up for the upcoming film based on the Warcraft video game series, directed by Duncan Jones. The film is the result of a project partnership between Blizzard Entertainment and Legendary Pictures. Watch the trailer on Vimeo.

Another Warcraft-related video. A trailer has been released for promoting the sixth expansion set to the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Watch it on YouTube.

French artist and developer Clovis Gay has opened a new shop where his scripts can be purchased. The scripts are available at 15% off with the coupon "SHOP15" (the message was posted last week, so the coupon may not be valid for much longer). More on Hocus Pocus Studio's website.