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The Blender Foundation has posted a video with a compilation of work rendered with the Cycles engine, which also serves as testimony of Blender's notable advances in recent years. Watch it on YouTube.

A number of tech demos with fun remixes have been created by Italian artist CryZENx, including a couple combining Super Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog with Unreal Engine 4's Kite demo. Watch them on YouTube: Unreal Engine 4 Super Mario / Kite demo, Sonic The Hedgehog / Kite demo, Super Mario / NVidia HairWorks, Super Mario / NVidia Flex demo.

3DBenchy is a 3D model designed by Creative Tools' Daniel Norée specifically conceived for testing and benchmarking 3D printers. It is a small cartoon-style boat that offers a large array of challenging geometrical features for 3D printers. The model is available as a single STL file for monochromatic printing as well as a recently-released version of the boat made of several parts, for printing in different colors and materials. The model is freely available for download from 3DBenchy's website.

Germany-based Renderpeople are offering detailed 3D scanned models of humans. Models include a high-res color map, normal map, optimized topology, two levels of detail, clean UV-layout and alpha channels for every major surface. Custom people or poses on demand are also available. More on Renderpeople's website.

Scottish artist Gordon Robb has created a number of miniatures for the board game Star Wars: Imperial Assault. He modeled them using ZBrush, altering some of the proportions to make them more appropriate for 3D printing. More on the ZBrushCentral.

The Hellenic Institute of Marine Archaeology in collaboration with the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of Greece is conducting an underwater archaeological survey that has brought a number of shipwrecks of Classical, Roman, and Byzantine periods to light. The archaeological sites are being successfully documented thanks to photogrammetry techniques. The team of researchers is employing Photoscan, MeshLab, QGIS, AutoCAD and Site Recorder for the task. Read the paper (PDF) for more.

Multiverse is a data storage back-end to the widely used Alembic file format. It relies on Git, the distributed source control system, and inherits all of its features such as compact history, natural data de-duplication, cryptographic data-integrity and SSH Internet network protocol. In addition, Multiverse unlocks interesting workflow features such as alternate storage timelines, branching, history-as-a-feature, collaborative work capabilities and publishing. Multiverse is being developed by J Cube, the R&D entity of Tokyo-based Polygon Pictures and will be released soon as open source software under GNU GPLv2 license. More on Multiverse's website.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia have devised a method for adding dynamic, believable wrinkles to real-time cloth animations. Watch a video on YouTube.

Once again, we present readers with another thorough review. Talented Spanish artist Juan Gea puts Render Legion's Corona Renderer to the test: "... investing in Corona is an excellent choice". Read the review.

Chaos Group's Ivaylo Katev has made available a video showing a test of a new foam texture being implemented in their fluid dynamics plugin, working over an ocean displacement. The texture can be used as a foam mask or as complete foam representation including patterns and underwater foam. Watch the video on Vimeo.