Dublin-based Screen Scene have posted online their latest showreel. Watch it on Vimeo.

New features in Chaos Group's and Asynthetic's sequence player include: EXR and DPX export, support for RGBA .vrimg channels generated by V-Ray 3.0, support for deep OpenEXR images and improved dynamic range of EXR, .vrimg, IEEE float TIFF images. More on Chaos Group's website.

A great intro video for the FMX 2014 conference, created by students from the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg. Watch it on Vimeo.

ICube has released a collection of 10 detailed 3D models of electric cars, from the years 2012-2014. The models are fully rigged and ready to use with the MadCar plugin or on their own. More on ICube's site.

Populate your virtual wardrobe. 3D Fabrics is a collection of 80 detailed 3D models of textiles in various forms. It includes jackets, shirts, trousers, shoes, cushions, beds, curtains, draperies and towels. See a PDF catalog of the models and find out more on Viz-People's website.

At the recent NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference Otoy previewed version 2 of their unbiased GPU renderer, expected to be released in April. Also announced was application support for After Effects that enables users to import, edit and render 3d scenes in real-time, due later this year. Features of version 2 include: (more...)

NVidia announced the Iray Visual Computing Appliance (VCA), a GPU rendering system that combines hardware and software to accelerate Iray rendering. The Iray VCA uses eight of NVidia's top of the line GPUs, each with 12GB of graphics memory. It offers both 10GigE and InfiniBand connections, allowing rendering clusters of multiple VCAs to be easily built up over time. More on NVidia's website. (more...)

A video by Jasper Brekelmans has been posted publicizing this year's EUE, to be held June 5-6 in Utrecht. A great list of speakers and masterclasses is taking shape. Watch the video on YouTube and find out more on EUE's website.

According to a post on the SI mailing list by Chris Vienneau, Director of Media and Entertainment at Autodesk, "Toxik and Matchmover will be available on Autodesk Exchange in a week or two with no eula. You won’t need a license to use them anymore." Read the full thread on the Softimage Mailing List.

CaptiveMotion have released a Max plugin designed for retargeting facial mocap animation to any character (even 2D ones). Embody Animation allows to retarget facial mocap data to a bone rig or directly to a mesh and supports industry standard facial mocap formats, including C3D and TRC. The software provides additional tools for noise reduction, importing, exporting and batch processing. A free trial is available. Read the list of features (PDF) and find out more on CaptiveMotion's site.