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You can do it! VFX has released YVR, its new multiplatform tool that allows to view your mono and stereo 360 renders in real-time directly on your device, either in 360 or cardboard mode. YVR works locally for artists that want to see their work directly on their final medium or across the internet to showcase to clients and get fast and efficient feedback on 360 projects. YVR Client for IOS and Android downloads are available. YVR Client for PC and WebGL are included in the installer. The tool is priced at 50€. More on You can do it! VFX's website.

The Blender Institute has released a three-minute teaser for a full-length animated feature based on the Agent 327 comic series by Dutch cartoonist Martin Lodewijk. The short was co-directed by Hjalti Hjalmarsson and former Pixar artist Colin Levy. Watch it on Agent 327's website.

For the Agent 327 movie itself, the Blender Institute is establishing Blender Animation Studio, a separate department devoted to feature animation, for which it aims to recruit a team of 80 artists and developers from its international network. To help raise the film's proposed budget of €14 million, the Institute has signed with leading talent agency WME, which represents Hollywood directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Michael Bay. (more...)

A preview video of the papers that will be presented at this year's SIGGRAPH is now available. Watch it on YouTube.

Channel Chimp is a new add-on by Apptastic Software that lets you control Modo using external input devices including game controllers, touch screen tablets and smartphones, MIDI, and OSC. More on Apptastic Software's and the Foundry's websites.

Nvidia has made a number of announcements at the GPU Technology Conference. Project Holodeck is a collaborative VR environment based on Unreal Engine and Nvidia technology. Deep learning for raytracing allows to significantly speed up denoising. The new GV100 GPU delivers considerably more compute performance, and adds a number of new features compared to its predecessor, the Pascal GP100 GPU and its architecture family. Watch a video by Engadget on YouTube.

ActionVFX announced a discounted bundle of all of the company's VFX stock footage and sounds packaged in a hard drive. The ActionVFX Drive includes 1316 individual elements from 7 different categories: Explosions, Fire, Gun FX, Smoke, Particles, Debris and Sound FX. The files are delivered in ProRes, .R3D, OpenEXR and/or .MXF. More on ActionVFX's website.

The End User Event has announced the full lineup of expert speakers with details on their presentations for this year's edition of the renowned CG event held in Utrecht's Florin pub. More on EUE's website.

As was predictable after Autodesk's acquisition of Solid Angle, the renderer developed by the Madrid-based company is being transitioned to rental-only licensing. Arnold is now available for renting for $600/year, or $65/monthly. Artists can still purchase and own perpetual licenses of the software for $995 through April 30, 2018. After that date, owners of perpetual licenses will retain their license rights and will be able to continue to use their software, according to Autodesk. Also of note, the company states that they will continue to develop plugins for using Arnold with third party 3D applications. More on Solid Angle's and Autodesk's websites.

DECALmachine is a Blender add-on developed by MACHIN3 designed to simplify and automate working with mesh-based decals, which in turn facilitates quick design thinking, iteration and exploration. The software allows you to model a part and instantly create and use a decal based on that geometry without leaving Blender. Baking, bake processing, thumbnail generation and decal scene creation are 100% automated. Exporting models to Unity and Unreal is under development, with Sketchfab expected after that. The add-on is available for purchase for $12. More on Gumroad and the author's website.

A recent email from Allegorithmic detailing changes to its licensing model has caused heated reactions from some artists. The company has answered related questions on its forum, explaining the changes more clearly and reassuring customers that the rent-to-own model stays in place, and the company is NOT going rental-only. It should be noted Allegorithmic came up with the rent-to-own business model to help artists, both Sébastien Deguy (CEO) and Alexis Khouri (Vice President) are to be thanked for this. More on Allegorithmic's forum.