RealtimeUK has published a VFX breakdown for its World of Tanks: War Stories cinematic. Watch it on Vimeo.

New features in VideoLAN's open source media player include: default hardware decoding  for 4K and 8K playback, support for 10bits and HDR, support for 360° video and 3D audio, audio passthrough for HD audio codecs, the ability to stream to Chromecast devices (even in formats not natively supported), support for Blu-Ray Java menus, the ability to browse local network drives and NAS, plus much more. See the full list of new features on VideoLAN's website.

A new real-time project starts with a difficult question: which 3D engine to use? There are the usual candidates, Unreal and Unity; perhaps Lumberyard and Cryengine deserve another look? or how about ... Excel? Inspired by a computer science teacher who once said that "a given computation can be achieved with any programming language, even spreadsheet formula" that's just what C Bel has done. Doom.xls is a 3D game created using only Excel formulae that is capable of generating an infinite number of procedural mazes with real time ray-traced rendering, occlusion calculation and more.  You can read more about this unusual project on Gamasutra's website where you'll also find the source files and an example video.

Ephere has released a new 4 part tutorial by Michael McCarthy on how to create procedural trees and foliage using Ornatrix, which is more commonly used for hair, fur and feathers. Although 3DS Max is used in the demo, the same principles should work with Maya version. Watch the series on Vimeo. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Final.

Quixel has released a new tutorial by Wiktor Öhman demonstrating how to use its assets to create photorealistic grass with procedural colour variation in Unreal Engine. Watch it on YouTube.

Troll VFX has shared a breakdown video in which they replace their actor's caged head with that of a giant squirrel's in an ad for Metsä Tissue. Watch it on Vimeo.

Chaos Group has released V-Ray 3.6 for Revit, bringing its latest build to the BIM package. New features include improvements to the speed of scene exports, a new asset browser, a streamlined UI, the ability to use RPC objects as stand-ins for V-Ray proxy objects to enable the rendering of many high-poly objects, V-Ray grass and Fur tools, Hybrid rendering and more. Find out about the release on Chaos Group's website and see a demo video on YouTube.

Facebook has updated Quill, its VR drawing tool designed to work with Oculus headsets and controllers. Version 1.4 adds several new animation tools and improvements, including animated paint layers, an animation clip panel and animated brush settings to control how strokes are drawn while clips are playing. This makes several workflows for traditional frame-by-frame animation possible, including the ability to duplicate and manipulate previous frames instead of having to start each one from scratch. The release also adds the ability to export animated layers to alembic format for editing in other software. You can see a demonstration of the new tools by Oculus artist Goro Fujita on YouTube and read more about Quill and see a full list of the new improvements in version 1.4 on Facebook's dedicated website.