Stuttgart-based Mackevision has posted a making of for the VFX they've created for the fantasy TV series Game of Thrones. Watch it on Vimeo.

NVidia ARC has posted information on the new GI GPU-accelerated engine prototype that comes in Mental Ray 3.12, the version that ships with Max 2015. The developers have made available a script for making it easier to enable the GI GPU mode and are looking for users' feedback. More on the Mental Ray developers' blog.

In what amounts to the second regrettable death of the Brazil renderer, Imagination Technologies announced the EOL of the Caustic Visualizer for Maya; development of the Max plugin was already on hold for approximately a year. The technology will only survive for the time being in the $19.99 SketchUp add-on and in Rhino's Neon renderer. The company also stopped selling their Caustic Series2 ray tracing accelerator cards and announced that it will remove most of the content of its Caustic.com website. Imagination Technologies had originally announced the acquisition of Caustic Graphics in December 2010. Read the official EOL message for more.

The Visual Effects Society has invited a group of major software vendors to create a working group to better align Linux support between them and eliminate incompatibilities between common dependencies of CG software. Though the initial effort is aimed at Linux, the Visual Effects Society expects to help create reference platforms for other operating systems in the future. More on the VFX Reference Platform's site.

Epic Games, developers of the Unreal Engine, have donated 10k euros to the Blender Development Fund to support the coding of a smoother FBX workflow between Blender and UE4, harmonize controls between both applications and help bring free 3D modeling tools to UE users. More on Unreal Engine's forum.

Inspired by Grant Warwick's V-Ray course, Bertrand Benoit has created a number of virtual 3D edibles. More on BBB3viz.

The Foundry has posted a teaser for a new color design software they'll be unveiling soon. Watch it on Vimeo.

In order to promote their plants library Xfrog are offering new free models for download. Also of note, they're having a 50% off sale until July 6. More on Xfrog's website.

Paris-based Cube Creative have posted online their latest reel. Watch it on Vimeo.

qp Nuclear LUT is a plugin for After Effects that applies log-to-lin functions to show log colour encoded footage properly in , while still retaining the over bright values, the same way Nuke does with its read/write nodes. You can find out more about qp Nuclear LUT on the aescripts website.