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The Foundry announced the upcoming release of Modo 10.0v1, an update to its flagship 3D application. The new version improves creation of real-time content for games and virtual reality. New features include: assets created in Modo will look virtually the same in Unity or Unreal Engine, ability to get realistic detail into real-time assets more easily through a streamlined texture baking workflow and new ways to export to popular engines featuring simple automated steps. Modo 10.0v1 will be available in the second quarter of 2016 and will be followed by the releases of Modo 10.1 and Modo 10.2. More on The Foundry's website.

Keeping their commitment to offering permanent licenses, Maxon announced the availability of short-term licenses for Cinema 4D Studio as a supplement to the existing line-up of perpetual licenses. The new licenses are valid for three or six months and are designed to meet the challenges of production environments. They can also be upgraded to a permanent license at a discounted price.

According to Maxon's Uwe Bärtels, the company "continues to believe strongly that perpetual licenses offer owners of these licenses a high degree of security and peace of mind. However, we also understand that offering subscription models for software make it easier for both individual users and large companies to quickly adapt their license requirements to their individual production needs." (more...)

Game developer Mariano Merchante has updated his useful Instance Along Curve plugin for Maya that simplifies the process of instancing various objects along a curve. New features include: rotation manipulators, ability to instance objects based on their pivots, curve start and end values, a ramp repeat value, UI annotations, and translate, rotate and scale offsets, both local and global. More on GitHub and the author's blog.

New features in v2.0 of the open source game engine include: (more...)

Tachyon Render is a new realtime renderer for Cinema 4D developed by Österreich-based Uppercut group that fully integrates into C4D's rendering pipeline. Using physical based shading, Tachyon Render focuses on high quality rendering. Users can scale from realtime feedback to high quality multi-sampling that trades realtime render times for better quality. The developers have released a preview video of the renderer. More on the official website.

Paris-based Unit Image has produced a trailer for the latest adventure game developed by Frogwares (the eighth installment in the Sherlock Holmes series), which is based on Conan Doyle's renowned detective character. Watch it on Vimeo.

FX artist Alejandro Echeverry shows the latest developments of his pipeline for creating small scale fluid simulations in Houdini. All the sheets and tendrils are created in a natural fashion, so there are no "hole filling" tricks. Watch the video on Vimeo.

New features in Cinnafilm's video denoising, film texture simulation and quality image scaling software include: frozen pixel healer, improvements to RGB box rendering, input accelerators, etc. More one Cinnafilm's website.

Ephere has updated its multi-physics plugin that integrates NVidia's Flex technology into Max. Changes include: Voxel occlusion, particle trails and smoothing. Watch a video on Vimeo and find out more on Ephere's site.

A bridge plugin that allows to render scenes from Max using the Cycles ray tracing renderer that comes with Blender is being developed by Jeffrey Witthuhn. Two videos are available on YouTube: video 1-video 2.