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New features in the latest version of the UV mapping tool include: (more...)

Polish artist Kaczorefx has posted a video with VFX breakdowns of shots he created for the second season of "Firefighters". The work was done under very tight deadlines, some episodes had about 6 days of post, with quite ambitious ideas. A total of 350 shots were completed in 12 weeks by a very small team. Everything was done in 3DS Max and After Effects. All the shots in the video were done by Kaczorefx. Watch it on YouTube.

3dmentor has released two new collections of plant models that offer together a total of 209 different plants with 646 color variations, plus integration with Forest Pack, support for Corona, Mental Ray and V-Ray. More on 3dmentor.

Autodesk has released Service Pack 1 for 3DS Max 2017, which addresses a number of bugs. More on the MaxStation blog.

Evotis is the first sub-pixel sample compositing system. Developed by Go Ghost, it enables control in a VFX pipeline that was previously impossible or impractical. Currently, processors spend a ton of time calculating renders of rays & samples, but the result is a filtered pixel image. What if you could make use of these rays instead of discarding them every time you render? The manipulation of samples rather than pixels allows for an entirely object-aware pipeline from start to finish, providing accurate post-render mattes, higher quality image resizing, render accurate relighting and more. The software's lossless & GPU streamable reduction methods ensure files are much smaller than deep compositing images, making the format usable for more than just a few select shots. (more...)

Paris-based Gobelins, one of the best animation schools in the world, is organizing for the tenth time an International Summer School from July 4-15 to enable students and professionals from around the world to gain a better understanding of character animation techniques. The program offers master classes and workshops, which are taught in English. More on Gobelins' website.

Krita's Kickstarter campaign to support the development of quality text and vector tools has been funded. The amount raised will allow the developers to also implement Python scripting and SVG import/export, according to preliminary results from contributors' votes. More on Krita's website.

Lumière is a Blender add-on by Cédric Brandin for speeding up the creation of lighting setups. It allows to position and adjust lights with the mouse directly on your model, as well as tweak the energy and scale interactively. You can use Blender lamps, panel lights, HDRIs and background skies. You can also add gradient textures to mimic a professional light panel. Watch a video on YouTube and find out more on GitHub.

FuseFX has posted a new reel showing the studio's recent matte painting work. Watch it on Vimeo.

With more than 1000 enhancements and 250 new features, DaVinci Resolve 12.5 is a significant update to the editing, color correction and finishing tool. The new version offers additions to the editing toolset, new and enhanced color features including improved HDR support, new media management and organization functions, new retiming effects, improved keyframe controls, on-screen text editing, new ResolveFX plugins, Fusion Connect for round tripping shots between Resolve and Fusion, etc. (more...)