Adobe has announced a new feature coming soon to Premiere Pro that "intelligently reframes and reformats video content for different aspect ratios, from square to vertical to cinematic 16:9 versions". See a sneak peek on YouTube. 

Chaos Group has released a new Beta for Phoenix FD4, codenamed 3.99. (more...)

A new version of Appleseed, the open-source renderer aimed at animation and VFX, is out now. Version 2.1 includes support for Cryptomatte AOVs, render checkpointing for resuming mult-pass renders, support for OSL shaders, a fisheye camera, the ability to control samples using a black and white mask, filter importance sampling, and more. Appleseed plugins are available for Blender, 3DS Max and Maya.  For more information and to download visit GitHub, to find out more about the project you can visit the Appleseed website.

Quixel has announced that the points cost of assets in its Megascans library of 3D scanned textures and models have been reduced. All surfaces now cost 2 points, 3d asset 4 points, and everything else is 1 point. Existing subscribers have also been given an additional 100 points. to give you an idea of a dollar-cost for those points, the lowest subscription tier starts at $19 a month for 60 points. At this level, a 3D asset costs $1.27, a surface $0.63 and everything else is $0.32. Find out more on the Quixel blog. 

Kamil Wacławiak has released GroomBear, a toolkit for Houdini that allows you to create and modify guides or cards. It comprises a Groom node that contains a number of grooming tools for short and long hair. Designed to use with a radial menu for faster workflow, several brushes, and a cards node that allows you to convert guides to template geometry. The Tool is available from Gumroad for $59. 

HDRMaps has added free 2K samples for its entire library of HDRI environments and skies. These are meant as samples of the full high-resolution versions, in addition, a further 100 free 10k x 5k HDRIS have been added to the library of free assets. Find out more on the HDRMaps website. 

The Blender Foundation has announced the results of this year's Google Summer of Code. This year 7 projects were completed including Outliner improvements, the improvement of Cycles and EEVEE for Procedural Content Creation, Core support of VR headsets through OpenXR, Bevel Custom Profiles, Intel Embree BVH for GPU, Cloth Simulator improvements, and continued Development on the LANPR Engine. Read more about these on the Blender Developer blog.

Adobe has announced that it's 3D character creation tool Fuse will no longer be developed and will stop working on Mac OS 10.15 when it is released later this year. (more...)