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Pixar has made available the official trailer for its Cars 3 animated film, directed by Brian Fee. Watch it on YouTube.

(Updated) A new preview video is available: sneak peek 3. (more...)

New features in Escape Motions' wet media paint software include: stencils, masking tools, PSD support, new brush system that allows to create custom brushes, improved watercolor and acrylic brushes, etc. Rebelle is priced at $89.99. More on Escape Motions' website.

Japan-based PSoft have released the latest version of their NPR shader plugin for 3DS Max. New features include: Nitrous shader, material transparency, light intensity control, multi-threaded rendering, a spreadsheet for handling materials, rendering of edge selections, open edges, merged groups, self-intersections, etc. Pencil+ 4 is priced at 60480 Yen (Approx. USD $543). More on PSoft's website.

New features in CLO Virtual Fashion's cloth design and simulation software include: Seam Taping to reinforce pattern edges, unified texture export, ability to simultaneously modify patterns cloned as instances, attach 3D trims to the garment and simulate them, etc. Marvelous Designer 6.5 is available through permanent licensing for $550 as well as annual and monthly rental for $360 and $59.99. Upgrades are available from previous versions at discounted prices. More information on Marvelous Designer's website.

HeavyM is a software developed by Digital Essence dedicated to video mapping. It comes with a number of effects and animations that react to music and sound. More on the official website.

The latest version of Blackmagic Design's editing and grading application brings 10x performance improvements, a new audio postproduction suite with Fairlight audio built into the software, collaboration tools that let multiple people edit, color and mix audio from multiple systems in the same project at the same time, new editing and grading features, and a price reduction of its Studio version from $995 to $299 (permanent licenses, no rental). (more...)

Researchers from Disney and the University of Southern California have developed a method for capturing dynamic hair and automatically determining the physical properties for simulating the hairstyle in motion. The output consists of both the static hair geometry as well as its physical properties. The hairstyle can be easily edited by adding additional external forces, changing the head motion, or re-simulating in completely different environments. More on Disney Research's website.

New features in the latest version of Render Legion's Corona Renderer for 3DS Max include: 200% speed boost in scenes where direct lighting from HDRI environment is dominant, interactive rendering is virtually real-time thanks to subsampling, significantly improved distributed rendering, portable Corona Image Editor application, triplanar mapping, improved rendering of round edges, Corona Scatter improvements, free set of IES profiles, free photographic LUTs, reduced memory requirements, etc. (more...)

Unwrap Pro is a Max plugin by Marius Silaghi that unwraps meshes and produces low distortion, overlap free, weighted density UVs, providing a better result than the 3DS Max Peel command. According to the author, Unwrap Pro is fast (a 1 million triangle mesh can be unwrapped in 23 seconds), easy to use (just select some UVs and hold down a button), and allows to use vertex colors or soft selections to increase the pixel density of important features. Unwrap Pro is priced at €100 and is compatible with 3DS Max/Design 9-2018 (32 & 64 bit). More on Marius Silaghi's website.