By

FX artist Boris Bruchhaus has posted a new version of his Open Ocean project. Created with Houdini. Watch it on Vimeo.

German artist Till Nowak (The Centrifuge Brain Project, Dissonance, Delivery) has made available a video from his latest project, an art installation that has opened recently at the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany. Watch it on Vimeo.

The latest version of Ephere's hair, fur and feather creation plugin for 3DS Max brings many new features, including: transplant grooms with single-button detaching, new hair LOD workflow, improved vegetation and instancing, surface comb rotation and bending control make styling fur faster and better, mirroring and brush-specific settings significantly improve brush-based workflow, push away from surface modifier keeps the hair out of any object to improve realism, procedural guide data generation, Alembic cache import for applying and layering baked hair animations, hair from particles, edit hair after propagation, etc. (more...)

In addition to the paid Studio version, Blackmagic Design has now made available the free feature-limited version of its editing, grading and conforming tool for Red Hat and CentOS Linux. Previously, DaVinci Resolve Studio was only available on a special build of Linux for customers using the DaVinci Resolve Advanced control panel for colorists. The Studio 12.5.5 version for Mac, Windows and Linux costs $995 and offers additional features such as support for multiple GPUs, temporal and spatial noise reduction, HDR and collaborative tools, etc. The update is free for current owners of the software. More on Blackmagic Design's website. (more...)

Epic Games has made available a video showing features that will be making their way into their game engine and development tools. The video also shows presentations from various companies that are developing interesting projects with Unreal. Watch it on YouTube.

Unity Technologies has disclosed the features that will be available in the upcoming 5.6 version of its multiplatform engine and development tools. The company has also made available a video of the recent Game Developers Conference presentation in which they go over their plans for the upcoming Unity 5.6 release, and their vision for the future of Unity 2017. More on Unity Technologies' website.

The latest version of Mir Vadim's destruction kit plugin for 3DS Max brings RayFire Shatter, a tetrahedron based damaging and fragmentation modifier. (more...)

Norwegian artist Rune Spaans has directed a video for a track from John Kaada and Mike Patton's recent collaborative music work. The video uses footage from Rune Spaans' short film, "The Absence Of Eddy", which is based on a story by Canadian cartoonist and illustrator Dave Cooper. According to Rune, the film is "a genre-bending horror romance". Watch the Red Rainbow video on Vimeo. (Mature content)

Pixar has made available a library with 130 tileable textures that were created for classic Pixar films. The textures have been updated and now include 16-bit bump and normal maps. They are released under a Creative Commons attribution license. More on Pixar's website.

RE:Vision Effects announced that its set of tools for projection conversion and lens distortion correction is now available for the Foundry's Nuke and Blackmagic Design's Fusion Studio. RE:Lens straightens curved video captured with wide-angle and fisheye lenses, and includes spherical stabilization to address problems with shaky camera motion. The software is compatible with Nuke 7.0 and up and Fusion Studio 8.0 and up (as well as AE and Premiere), and is priced at $189.95 for a node-locked license and $284.93 for a floating one. (more...)