Texturing XYZ has updated its library with over 300 new human and creature packages, including more than 55 new cross polarised packs for human skin in different ethnicities and ages. Packs can include pre-made alphas, raw scans, seamless textures and in some cases mutations. Find out more on Texturing XYZ's website.

Happy Valentine’s Day is an award winning CGI short film written and directed by The Neymarc Brothers. The story unfolds in slow motion and reverse, showing "how the downfall of a couple triggers the birth of a new love between two strangers".  Watch it on Vimeo.

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.