Epic Games has acquired Cloudgine, a cloud-computing company whose development based around Unreal Engine 4 will specialise in providing massive computing power to drive advances in physics simulation and networking.  Read the announcement on the Unreal Engine blog.

Facebook's OculusVR has outlined a new unit for measuring time that is able to subdivide individual frames at common framerates into a fixed, integral number of subdivisions.  Of course this is common practice (Max uses 4800 ticks per second, and Maya 6000 for example) because the use of floating point representations of time will introduce inaccuracies over time. Flick though is an attempt to find the highest usable resolution of time that divides evenly into common film and media framerates. The OculusVR team's research found that 1/705,600,000 of a second divides evenly into single frame durations for 24hz, 25hz, 30hz, 48hz, 50hz, 60hz, 90hz, 100hz, 120hz and also 1/1000 divisions of each. You can read more about this and download a C++ library on Github.

Vlado has posted a video of a preview build for the new V-Ray Frame Buffer 2 for V-Ray Next, showing a new history list implementation plus several new compositing controls for render elements. Watch it on YouTube.

Allegorithmic has announced the addition of 15 detailed procedural ground materials to their subscriber-only Substance Source repository. The assets were created by Daniel Thiger in three categories: desert, jungle, and Iceland. They mark the start of a new signature range of substances that give respected artists permission to create small libraries of assets around a theme of their own choice. Find out more on the Allegorithmic blog.

Autodesk's Arnold in-house artist & documentation lead Lee Griggs has created a short tutorial demonstrating the techniques behind some of his experiments with Volume Displacement techniques with Maya and Arnold. You can read more and download scene files from Autodesk's website.

Chaos Group has announced an update to V-Ray Benchmark, its standalone app for testing the rendering capabilities of a user's hardware. The new version adds Linux and MacOS versions in additional to the existing windows release, and for testing render farms it now includes the ability to launch and control the programme using the command-line. Find out more on Chaos Group's website.

Vojtěch Čada AKA Swordslayer has released a handy looking script that allows the user to create a new NGon spline primitive by click and dragging to define the size of the first edge (similar to Rhino). There are controls to constrain to orthogonal angles and mirror over the axis. Find out more and download from ScriptSpot.