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Metropolitan Museum's MediaLab interns have been working on a project designed to help guide visitors through the works of art of the renowned New York museum. The project combines various technologies that improve visitors' experience at the Met and has recently been pushed forward by interns Xinyi Deng and Rodrigo Narciso, turning it into a working prototype that shows the best route to find your favorite works of art. A detailed article is available describing their contributions, and the steps that are still needed to turn their prototype into a fully-functional mobile application. More on the Met's website.

Golaem Crowd announced the release of a VRayGolaem for 3DS Max, a free plugin co-developed with Chaos Group enabling to render in 3DS Max with V-Ray the crowds created with Golaem's crowd simulation software. The plugin allows VFX studios to create their crowds in Maya and easily export them to be rendered in Max. The advantage of this method is that the workflow stays 100% V-Ray native and procedural, which enables studios to benefit from all V-Ray features and keeps exported files very light (99% smaller than exporting the full geometry via Alembic or FBX). (more...)

Pixar has released a new version of its renderer. This release incorporates noise reduction technology developed by Disney researchers that dramatically reduces the time to generate images with physically-based rendering. Read on for more. (more...)

Canadian filmmaker Patrick Boivin (Iron Baby, AT-AT day afternoon) has released a new short: Little Ant-Man. The film was commissioned by Marvel in order to promote their Ant-Man film. The 3D CG was made by Jocelyn Simard (a.k.a. Strob), who kindly shared with us some making of details. Read on for more. (more...)

(Updated) Another version compatible with V-Ray is now available, and it comes with 80 floor materials.
DGDM has released SLiB | Floor Vol. I, which includes FloorGen, a Maya plugin for quick creation of floors. It comes with presets for the most common styles and with the ability to use custom objects. The resulting floors are made of geometry, and the included textures have up to 4000x4000 pixels of resolution. The plugin provides randomize functions for tiles' position, rotation and UV shell position, which help make floors look more realistic. Also included are 80 floor materials for Maya and the Redshift renderer. Watch a video and find out more on DGDM's website.

FX artist Octavio de Lellis has posted a video showing fine control over fluid behavior thanks to a set of custom plugins for RealFlow developed by IoSim's Ole Lemming to control viscosity, surface tension and other fluid properties. This allows for more organic behavior (including smooth long drips). Watch the video on Vimeo.

Red Giant has announced an update to its GPU-accelerated library of tools for video production. Version 1.5 brings 6 new effects and transitions, new presets in ToonIt, and requested new features in Glitch, Holomatrix and ToonIt. More on Red Giant's website.

Next Limit's Luis Miguel Mora will be presenting the new version of the fluid dynamics software in a webinar today Wednesday, July 8th. He'll be covering the new DYVERSO solvers, Spreadsheets, Crown Daemon, Spline nodes as well as the OpenVDB meshing and Hybrido improvements. Visit Novedge's website for more.

Paris-based VFX studio BUF Compagnie has switched its mapping and painting pipeline to 3D, thanks to a 3D painting tool that is based on Cem Yuksel's Mesh Colors method. The method allows for associating color data directly with a polygonal mesh without the need to define texture coordinates, and presents an alternative to Disney's Ptex technology. (more...)

(Updated) The video is available once again.
Ukraine-based Postmodern studio has posted a great video showing their work on the opening credits for the Battle for Sevastopol film. Watch the video on Vimeo.