CGAxis has announced the release of its first collection of PBR Textures. PBR Textures Volume 1 contains 100 PBR materials for stones, walls, pavements and concrete in 4096x4096 resolution. The collection costs $99.00. More on CGAxis' website.

Anastasiy Safari, the creator of MagicPicker and ColorPicker, has released MagicRefs , a new plugin for Photoshop to organise references images. Using the tools the user is able to group multiple references from disk or from a URL and display them in a dedicated side panel. The images can be manipulated in various including the ability to mirror images, pick colours using an eyedropper, playback gifs frame by frame an more.  The tool costs $19 and a free trial is available. Find out more on the Anastasiy website. 

Blackmagic design has announced the latest release of DaVinci Resolve. Version 15.2 includes improvements to the UI including better responsiveness by drawing the editing timeline at a higher framerate,  and new animations so that clips slide in and out of position, making it easier to see exactly how different edits affect other clips in the timeline. Visual signposting of duplicates allows the user to see when a clip has been used more than once, and clips in the bin now display usage indicators for the current active timeline. White vertical lines highlight the currently marked portion of a clip, while red horizontal lines show which frames are used. The timeline can also be cleaned up by flattening down unused clips, and timecode entry has been improved throughout the application.

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Quadspinner, the creators of standalone terrain modelling tool Gaea and Geoglyph for World Machine, has announced it is to open source all its legacy Vue projects. This will include unlocked premium materials, MetaNodes, functions, and in-house production libraries in addition to the Realism in Vue book, masterclasses and other training videos. This announcement is part of a wider initiative by Quadspinner to create various open-source projects and training.  Find out more on Medium.

Open Data Zurich has made 3d models of nearly the entire city - in the region of 50,000 buildings - available to download under a public domain license meaning it is free to use and share, even commercially. The data is available in 3 LOD levels: LOD0 includes a LIDAR-derived digital terrain model; LOD1 is a 3D block model based on building footprint and height, and LOD2 includes more detailed information including roof structures and outer shells. You can download the datasets in a variety of formats from the Open Data Zurich website and see an interactive map here.

New features in the latest version of the low-cost painting and VFX software includes brush stroke preview, a rewritten text tool, a visual recently used documents list, the ability to save frame sequences from Puppyray, and several GUI improvements, including mip map scaling and refinements. Howler is currently on sale for $38.50. More on Howler’s website.

The 140 employees of Aardman Animation have been given a 75% stake in the business by founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton because. Aardman, of course, is best known for its stop-motion franchises Shaun the Sheep, Wallace and Gromit and Morph but also augments stop-motion with CG as in The Pirates! Band of Misfits! as well as producing full CG productions like Arthur Christmas and Flushed Away.  According to Sproxton, the reason for the move is because" [...] we love the company and because we love it we think this will be the best things for it. This is not about David and I leaving. It is a continuity deal." He continues, "if we sold Aardman it would just become an asset on the balance sheet to be traded. They could say, let’s turn it all over to CGI and shoot it in Singapore". Read more about the story in The Guardian.