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Taking advantage of the experience gained with the development of MaxToC4D, MaxToMaya has been designed to help transfer 3DS Max scenes to Maya with just 2 clicks, solving common problems between import/export automatically. It allows to transfer V-Ray materials, lights and settings, as well as skinned characters keeping skin, morphs, etc., to use Maya's character animation tools. The plugin is available at an introductory price of $29 ​​($49 is the regular price). More on MaxToMaya's website.

RealtimeUK's Will Eades and John Batchelor discuss the facial animation work they did for the recent Dropzone trailer. Watch the video on Vimeo.

Depthfields is a free resource site for heightmaps. Everyone can submit or download images. More on Depthfields.

Pixologic announced ZBrush Core, a version of ZBrush designed for artists who are new to 3D as well as illustrators, students and 3D printing enthusiasts. More on ZBrushCentral.

Render Legion has posted a video preview of the interactive LightMixer that will be introduced in Corona Renderer 1.5 (and is already available now in the daily builds for current customers). Watch it on YouTube.

New features in the latest version of Epic Games' game engine and development tools include: Sequencer has been updated with many cinematography-oriented features, new animation features (Alembic animation import, Pose Asset for blend space functionality for bone poses, Physical Animation Component), VR Editor support for mesh and foliage painting, VR template with settings optimized to run in VR at 90 FPS, platform SDK updates, etc. More on Unreal Engine's website.

A team of artists based in Barcelona has created an animated short about chance encounters, using Blender and Natron. The production has received the support of Martínez Lara's PepeSchoolLand. Watch the trailer on Vimeo and find out more on Darrel's website.

Mikros Image (Logorama) has created a CG cricket for a recent promotional video. Watch it on Vimeo.

A number of additional procedural noise textures have been written in OSL by Ivan Mavrov for use with VRayOSLTex texture: alligator noise, simplex noise, Perlin flow noise and simplex flow noise. More on Chaos Group's website.

A nice experiment by John Su, created with Houdini. Watch it on Vimeo.