At GDC Epic took the opportunity to demonstrate Chaos, Unreal's new real-time physics and destruction system expected to be available for early access in Unreal Engine 4.23. Watch a demo on YouTube.  (more...)

Render Legion has released a Development Insights video demonstrating some of the features coming to Corona Renderer 4. (more...)

Update: Allegorithmic has announced at GDC that the Project Alchemist Beta is now available for subscribers. Also revealed was a new Substance Launcher designed to make it easier to manage Substance tools, materials, and Substance Source and some of the upcoming features for Painter. Read more about the announcements on Allegorithmic's website. 

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VFX journalist Ian Failes has announced a new visual effects website called Befores & Afters that will publish interviews and articles related to the industry. 

Patreon has announced a new pricing structure to be introduced this spring. 3 tiers are proposed: a limited lite version for 5% of a customers income, a Pro version which is analogous to the current offering for 8% (with a few more features included), or a premium service for 12% that adds team accounts, a partner manager and "Merch for Membership". If you're a Patreon Creator before the plans kick in, you'll be moved to the Pro plan retaining the old rate of 5% of earnings. Find out more on the Patreon website. 

NVIDIA has announced Omniverse, a new open collaboration platform that allows for multiple live connection between applications like Maya, Photoshop and  Unreal Engine. It will allow artists to see live updates made by other artists working in different applications, for example "an artist using Maya with a portal to Omniverse can collaborate with another artist using UE4 and both will see live updates of each others’ changes in their application."  (more...)

Roper Technologies has announced 410 million pound agreement  to buy Foundry, the publishers of Nuke, Modo, Mari and Katana. This acquisition is the most recent of several takeovers that took place in 2011 and 2015. Read the announcement on Foundry's website. 

Autodesk has announced the Arnold 5.3 beta which brings long awaited GPU rendering to the renderer. Other features include improvements to quality and performance for adaptive sampling, improved version of Randomwalk SSS mode, enhanced usability for Standard Surface, improvements to the Operator framework, better sampling of Skydome lights, and finally updates to support for MaterialX, allowing users to save a shading network as a MaterialX look, Find out more on Autodesk's website.