ActionVFX has released 20 CG generated clips of lightning strikes and bursts. The footage is available in 2K and 4K resolution with a pre-keyed alpha channel. Find out more on the ActionVFX website. 

Adobe has announced the addition of 658 atlases and 85 procedural ground scans in 3 categories: Forest, mountain/volcano and urban ground. (more...)

Levente Magony has started a new repository of 2D cutout treelines for populating the background of renders. The assets are free but Levente has a Patreon page where users can support his work. Find out more on backdroptreelines.com.

NVIDIA has published research that allows AI to infer a 3D model from a single 2D image. Learn more on NVIDIA's blog.

Autodesk has announced the release of Mudbox 2020, adding the ability to exchange model information with Autodesk Flame.  Once a data link is created, it supports an iterative, round-tripping workflow between the two applications. A couple of bug fixes for Mac are also included. Find out more on the Mudbox documentation site. 

Epic Games has released Unreal 4.24. Main changes in the version include the retirement of Unreal Studio. (more...)

Autodesk has announced the release of Arnold 6, bringing GPU production rendering out of beta. Arnold 6 allows the user to switch between CPU and GPU rendering while maintaining the same settings. The new GPU mode is based on NVIDIA’s OptiX framework and optimized to take advantage of NVIDIA RTX technology. Headline features include:  (more...)