SideFX has released a new reel of work created using Houdini by artists from game studios. Watch it on Vimeo.

Christopher Nichols talks to Blur  VFX supervisor Jerome Denjean discuss Love, Death & Robots and more in the latest CG Garage podcast. Listen to it on the Chaos Group blog.

Crytek has posted Neon Noir, a demo recorded in Cryengine that shows real-time raytracing effects that are not dependent on a particular API or hardware. The scenes were rendered in real-time in-editor on an AMD Vega 56 GPU using an experimental ray tracing feature based on Cryengine’s Total Illumination technology, expected to be released later this year. Despite being hardware agnostic, the technology will benefit from performance enhancements of the new generation of graphics cards and APIs like Vulkan and DX12. Watch it on YouTube.

Paul Caggegi has released a new version of Manga Shader , his NPR rendering add on for Blender. The new release adds the ability to render output with both Cycles and EEVEE. Find out more on Gumroad. 

Quixel has released an update to Mixer, its tool for blending,painting and creating tileable PBR materials. (more...)

Not strictly speaking 3D news, but Mozilla's new Firefox Send might be handy for anyone who has to send large files. The new service offers a simplified approach to sending files of up to 1gb without a login, or up to 2.5gb with a free account. The free account also allows you to choose to expire links based on on whichever comes first, a countdown of 7 days or less, or a set number of downloads. Links can also be password protected. Find out more on the service's website.

A new version of the open source game engine Godot is now available. Version 3.1 sees a redesign of the 2D editor and the animation tools, adds a new tileset editor, improves kinematicbody2D and 3D, includes the ability to create 2D skeletons and adds support for 2D meshes, supports softbodies, ragdolls and skeleton IK, adds new CSG tools for fast level prototyping, and much more. See the full list on Godot's website.