Ziva Dynamics has announced the latest release of Ziva VFX,  its Maya plug-in with an offline FEM anatomy simulator for the physical simulation of anatomical elements like muscles and skin. Ziva follows an alternating development cycle with feature releases followed by optimisation releases. The previous version was a feature release, and so the latest version 1.5 adds several incremental changes including improved secondary animations without increasing simulation time or memory. To learn more about this release, visit the Ziva Dynamics website or watch a preview on Vimeo.

Jesse Pitela has released a tutorial for Phoenix FD in 3DS Max demonstrating how to create a large scale water simulation of an emergency airplane water landing including all of the splash, foam, and mist parameters, setting up an infinite ocean, the ocean shader, lighting, rendering and finally post production using After Effects. Watch it on Vimeo.

Update A blog post has been published on Autodesk area with many more details and videos about this release.

Autodesk has updated the documentation for the forthcoming 3DS Max 2019.3 release, giving us a preview of the latest changes. Highlights include: (more...)

The International Animated Film Society has announced that Ton Roosendaal and the Blender Open Source Software will receive the Ub Iwerks award. The award is intended to recognise technical advancements that make a significant impact on the art or industry of animation and this is the first time the award has been granted to a free open source software project. Read more on Blender's website and see the nominees for all categories on the 46th Annie Awards page. 

The team at 3DS London has shared a short video showcasing some of the many speakers that presented during 2018. Run by volunteers, 3DS London is a monthly get-together of 3D artists from the UK (and beyond's) advertising, architectural, visual effects, games, animation and interactive industries. Meetings are on the first Wednesday of every month where users are invited to share presentations, ideas, jobs, tech and projects in a friendly, relaxed setting. To get a taste, here are some of 2018's presenters: (more...)

Google has announced Google Earth Studio, a new browser-based animation tool that allows the user to keyframe the position and field of view of cameras, the sun's position and more in Google Earth. Camera data can then be exported for post-work in After Effects. A Google account and Chrome is required to sign up for the beta. Find out more on the new Studio website and watch sample output on YouTube.  

Grant Wilk from Remington Graphics has released D-NOISE, an implementation of NVIDIA's the Optix denoiser for Blender. It isn't limited to Cycles, the denoise operation can run on any image loaded into the UV/Image Editor including texture bakes and even photos. At present it is compatible with Blender 2.79 or 2.79.6 on Windows but support for 2.8 and other platforms is expected soon. Find out more on Remington's website.