Sweden-based Milford Creative Studio has released a new showreel of their recent animations. Watch it on Vimeo.

GDC continues to release older presentations from behind its paywall, this time it's the turn of "Rendering the world of Far Cry 4", a talk from 2015 by Ubisoft Montreal's Stephen McAuley. During the 45 minute presentation, he explains how creating the environments of Far Cry 4 inspired the development of several new (at the time) features. 

Watch it on YouTube.

Unity Technologies technical art director Yibing Jiang has released a preview of a soon-to-be-released short film Windup, rendered using Unity engine. According to Yibling, the demo is intended as a "proof point to show that we can achieve animated feature quality and rendered real-time in Unity engine. Rather than using methods seen in VFX, we take techniques from the AAA game production that push the visual bar while being real-time". Watch it on YouTube.

The latest version of the open source painting and animation software brings a significant update, including improved vector tools, SVG support, a new text tool, Python scripting a new Colourise Mask tool for the easy colouring of line-art, the ability to add a mask to a brush tip to create several new effects, an overhauled brush set for Krita 4, and much more. Find out more on Krita's website and see a video preview on YouTube. 

AXYZ Design has released a new commercial training course for , its artist-friendly crowd animation tool compatible with Unreal Engine, 3DS Max and Cinema 4D. Spread over 31 lessons totalling over 7 hours of training the course covers nearly every aspect of the tool including how to import the resultant animations to Unreal and 3DS Max. The course costs € 29, you can see more and watch an introduction on the . 

Chaos Group has published its first video of V-Ray Cloud, showing a preview of the interface and workflow inside Sketchup. Watch it on YouTube. (more...)

After a week of whiz-bang technology demos coming from GDC, it's interesting to step back in time and admire the work of 81 year old Samia Halaby, a painter who started creating Kinetic Paintings on the Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985. As this short documentary by Youtube channel The Guru Meditation shows, Samia continues to produce artworks using the same tools, which have been exhibited in The Guggenheim Museum, The British Museum, Lincoln Center, The Chicago Institute of Art and many more. Watch it on YouTube.

More news from Epic who have released two technology previews focused on real-time representations of motion-captured digital humans.  (more...)