HQ Grass 1 is a collection of over 180 models of different plants, grass and flowers for 3DS Max 9 and above (and Cinema 4D). It offers fast render times, V-Ray and Mental Ray support, realistic textures, optimized materials, light rig and render settings. Check out the list of included models (PDF) and find out more at HQPlants.com.

A great trailer with in-game video footage of the upcoming L.A. Noire game, developed by Sydney-based Team Bondi. The trailer shows some fine facial motion capture created with MotionScan, a system by Australian company Depth Capture.

French artist Matt Guetta is holding a contest at his site with some good prizes: "I invite you to render « La Gare des chemins de fer de Provence de la Ville de Nice ». The model will be provided to you and you have to create and submit at least one image. You are free to do what you want, you can edit/move/delete some parts of the train station… Just have fun!" (more...)

The3dStudio.com, one of the oldest running resource sites on the net, celebrates its 14th anniversary and has reached over 1.3 million free and priced resources. President Matt Anderson says: "As a family-owned and operated business, The3dStudio.com follows the Golden Rule: we treat all our members as we want to be treated." Sellers are paid high royalties (60-70%) for their 3D models, textures, tutorials, and stock photos / images. Expert custom model work and free file conversion are available. We saw their birth in 1996, our best wishes to them on their 14th anniversary. More at The3dStudio.com.

Karl Hodge reviews BenVista's PhotoZoom 3 image enlargement tool for Digital Arts: "... results using the software's S-Spline Max setting were fast and impressive."

Samsung is showing an 800x480 pixels flexible display prototype. More at OLED-Info.com.

France-based Isotropix are developing a new 3D software that provides a unified workflow letting users create images mixing 2D and 3D assets easily. It allows for painting textures affecting global illumination, displacement or reflection, while you interactively see the result with full compositing on. Clarisse offers on-demand data loading, with images and geometries being dynamically loaded during evaluation. As a result, typical production scenes that took several minutes to load can now be loaded in seconds. (more...)

New features in the latest version of Tree C's software for creating real-time virtual reality environments with Max models include: improved support for Arch & Design, Architectural, Mental Ray and V-Ray materials, Max 2011 compatibility, enhanced multi-threading render engine, rstart utility to start Extreme server and clients from a script, new BSP Tree optimizer in VR4MAX Navigator Pro, etc. Read the release notes (PDF) and visit VR4MAX.com for more.