James Whiffin from Plugin Everything has released a tutorial explaining the basics of creating a plugin using the After Effects SDK. Watch it on Vimeo.

The Blender Foundation has released a new platform to collect and display the results of hardware and software performance tests. Like most similar endeavours it consists of two parts, a downloadable application which runs Blender and renders several scenes, and an Open Data portal on blender.org, where the user has the option to share the results.  View the benchmark site here and visit Blender.org to read more about the announcement.

Lovers of CG trees will enjoy the latest showreel by SpeedTree, featuring work from many prominent VFX studios. Watch it on YouTube.

Meshroom, an open-source photogrammetry application is now available to download as compiled binaries for Windows and Linux.  (more...)

NVIDIA has posted two tutorials to help developers get started with real-time ray tracing using Microsoft’s DXR ray tracing extension for DirectX 12. The first part goes over the fundamentals covering how to set up Windows 10 and the programming environment and creating a trial application based on an existing DirectX 12 example. The second part goes much further, building on the example from part 1 it adds the necessary frameworks to use ray tracing. It explains how to convert an application that uses rasterization into one that has the options for either rasterize or ray tracing. 

Chaos Group has released a video demonstrating a new real-time ray tracing technology in developed name Project Lavina. The technology uses the dedicated RT Core in NVIDIA’s Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs to produce "photorealistic real-time ray tracing. The forest demo shown in the video contains over 300 billion triangles rendered in HD at 24-30 frames per second. It was rendered on a Lenovo ThinkStation P920 workstation with a single Quadro RTX 6000 GPU (which at retail cost just over $6,000).

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Agisoft has written a tutorial explaining how a new "visibility consistent mesh generation" method and "strict volumetric masking" can be used to photoscan objects with a thin structure - the example used is a butterfly's wings. Read it on Agisoft's website.

A recording of two sessions from SIGGRAPH on deep learning has been made available on YouTube. The presentation examines how deep learning works and discusses the opportunities it presents for computer graphics. Watch it on YouTube (there's a gap in the middle of the video between sessions. The second lecture starts at 1:48).