Michael Balthazart shares impressive work in his 2012 demo reel. Watch it on Vimeo.

The VRayEmbree helper is a V-Ray implementation of Intel's Embree raycaster, courtesy of Chaos Group. It is specifically optimized for ray-tracing on Intel CPUs and can reduce render times with V-Ray. Speed-ups of up to 30% have been observed in some scenes. Check out the readme.txt in the RAR file for instructions. More at V-Ray tools. (Note: look for VRayEmbree at the bottom of the page)

New features in the latest version of Act-3D's real-time architectural visualization software include: (more...)

CG Arena has posted a short interview with David Lesperance, senior environment artist at Microsoft's 343 Industries and currently working on the Halo franchise. More on CG Arena.

The teaser and full trailer for Spanish director Enrique Gato's upcoming animated feature are now available. Watch the teaser on YouTube (English version) and full trailer on Vimeo (Spanish version). (Note: the film is also known in English as "Tad, the lost explorer")

Pittsburgh-based motion designer and director Samm Hodges has posted online a reel with some very creative work. Watch it on Vimeo.

OpenGameArt.org is a site that provides a growing variety of freely licensed art, including images, textures, 3D models, music and sound effects, so that free/open source game developers can use it in their games. More at OpenGameArt.org.

Pixomondo VFX Supervisor, Bryan Hirota, was recently interviewed by The Art of VFX on the work Pixomondo recently completed for the film, Snow White & The Huntsman. You can read the full interview on The Art of VFX website.

Blur FX artist, Brandon Riza, unleashes his latest demo reel showcasing some of the projects he has worked on while at Blur. You can check it out on Brandon's YouTube page.

New features in Rendering Systems' software for extracting various map types from photo textures, editing normal maps and converting existing maps to different formats include: (more...)