The online school Animation Mentor recently released a new reel of student work. Watch it on YouTube.

Chaos Group has released a new showreel of architectural work rendered with V-Ray. Watch it on YouTube.

SideFX has published several hours of Houdini conferences that took place at this years GDC. Watch them on Vimeo or embedded below. (more...)

Vizrt, the creators of visual story telling tools for the broadcast sector has announced the acquisition of NewTek. NewTek are probably best known to readers of this site as the developers of Lightwave 3D, but they also publish several video products including live production systems, cameras, video replay systems, media distribution, control panels and more. With its video and broadcast focus, it is not clear at this point what this means for Lightwave 3D in the long term, but according to a post on the Lightwave blog "the most immediate change users of NewTek products can expect is that our development and marketing of NewTek products (including LightWave 3D) is not changed by this". You can read the full press release on Newtek's site.

Epic Games has announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.22 bringing a long list of improvement, most eye-catching of which is early access to real-time raytracing.  In this release you are able to test raytracing to generate soft shadows, reflections, translucency, AO, and GI.  (more...)

FTrack has released Ftrack Review, a new cloud-based collaborative media review and approval tool that allows users to upload media and share it anywhere in the world using a secure review link. Features include: (more...)

It's not an April Fool's day prank, Tyson Ibele today announced the open beta of TyFlow, his eagerly awaited unofficial PFlow replacement that aims to "bring Max back to the 21st century". (more...)

Dave Baker has recompiled most of the freeware plugins hosted on Maxplugins.de for 3DS Max 2020 - a total of over 160 free tools! Dave performs this formidable task annually in his spare time, so feel free to visit Maxplugins.de to see what's available and if you appreciate his effort, consider donating using the Paypal button on the bottom left of the site to help support the continuation of this indispensable resource.