Apple has announced that its Developer Program will now be free for non-profit organisations, accredited educational institutions and government departments based in the US who plan to distribute free apps. This change could be interesting for educators teaching 3D for mobile applications such as games, VR, AR, and more whose student's work could now reach a wider audience via the iOS app store. A footnote mentions that fee waivers for other countries will be announced as they become available. Read the announcement on the Apple developer website.

Richard Rosenman has released a new collection of 162 edge burn image light leaks in 4K resolution. The library costs $29.99, you can find out more on Richard's website.

Exotools has released ExoSwitch Constraint, a new plugin for Maya that adds the ability to use bi-directional constraint systems to create animation rigs. The tools costs $120 and a 30 day trial is available. Read more on Exotool's website.  

The Blender Foundation has published an article highlighting some of the developments to look forward to in 2018 including improvements to Eevee, Grease Pencil, usability, Cycles, modifiers and physics plus much much more. You can see the full list on Blender.org.

Motiva has released a preview video of Unknit, a new automatic UVW unwrapping tool that minimises the number of UV islands while maximising the usage of UV space. The application is designed for for workflows where the manipulation of textures in 2D space is less important, such as lightmap baking and texturing using apps like Substance Painter or Mari. Versions will be available for Unreal Engine and 3DS Max. Watch it on YouTube.

The Geometry Collective at Carnegie Melon University has released a free open source application called Boundary First Flattening (BFF) that allows for UV mapping with free-form editing of the flattened mesh. Based on a paper by Rohan Sawhney and Keenan Crane, BFF gives users "direct control over the shape of the flattened domain—rather than being stuck with whatever the software provides. The initial flattening is fully automatic, with distortion mathematically guaranteed to be as low or lower than any other conformal mapping tool". BFF also employs cone singularities for flattening which the authors claim can dramatically reduce area distortion, and facilitate the creation of seamless maps. Learn more about Boundary First Flattening on the Geometry Collective website and download or fork the project on GitHub.

Just before Christmas Autodesk released Maya 2018.2, a small update that added new settings in the Render attribute group for Bifröst nodes to control how the shape is rendered, how it is clipped, several new controls to determine how surfaces are processed, and new tools for ocean blending.  In addition, improvements have been made for exporting animations curves with "long tangents" via FBX. Read more about this release on the Maya Documentation website.