(Updated) Jon A. Bell has posted more information on the features brought by Max 2018. Read his comment.
Today Autodesk released the next major version of 3DS Max to customers on rental or maintenance. Some of the new features include OpenVDB support, Arnold proxy objects that work with all platforms Arnold is available on, new VR camera, user interface improvements, MCG improvements, motion paths and more. Read the what's new section of the 3DS Max 2018 help file for more.

AWN speaks to MPC's VFX supervisor Axel Bonami regarding the work MPC did for the film, Ghost in the Shell. You can read the full interview on the AWN website.

Arman Yahin has posted a breakdown of Main Road Post's work for the film, Night Guards. Watch it on Vimeo.

Cebas have released Drop 5 for ThinkingParticles, new features in the rule-based particle system for procedural creation of VFX include VolumeBreaker Clustering, ShapeNoise, FlowEmitter and more. The software is available through rental-only licensing at $660 per year. For full details you can visit the Cebas website. Watch the new features video on YouTube.

The team at Next Limit have posted a new showreel featuring recent work created using Realflow. Watch it on Vimeo.

The Mill has posted a behind the scenes look at the work they did for Under Armour Rule Yourself. Watch it on Vimeo.

Erik Wernquist was commissioned by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to produce a video portraying the ending of the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Watch it on Vimeo.

SceneTerrain is a landscape creation and population plugin for Blender developed by Arnaud Couturier. It allows to generate terrain meshes from preset shapes or from a heightmap. Scattering tools allow to populate terrains easily with forests, rocks and grass clumps. A library of ground textures and high-poly trees are included. Terrains can be exported to Unity and Unreal Engine in RAW format. More on SceneTerrain's release notes.