Cube Creative has posted online its latest reel, featuring CG animals aplenty. Watch it on Vimeo.

Cryptomatte is a tool created at Psyop by Jonah Friedman and Andy Jones. It creates ID mattes automatically with support for motion blur, transparency and depth of field using organizational information already available at render time. In addition to the decoder available for The Foundry's Nuke, an implementation is now available for Blackmagic Design's Fusion, courtesy of the artists from Grid VFX. The Fusion integration (currently in alpha) has been written as a Fuse and Lua scripts, which means it should work with the free version of the compositing software. Watch a video on Vimeo and find out more on the Fusion users' unofficial forum (a.k.a. "We Suck Less") and Github.

Norway-based Storm Studios have posted online their latest reel. Watch it on Vimeo.

Kdenlive features include support for numerous audio and video formats (Prores, H.264, DNxHD, etc.), dozens of video effects, color correction, audio adjustments, audio and video scopes, proxy editing, etc. The software is available for Linux and Mac, and it has now been ported to Windows. Read the list of features and find out more on Kdenlive's website.

FXGuide has published an article that showcases the technology used by PIXAR to create their latest short, Piper. You can read the full article on the FXGuide website.

New features in Renderking's HDR lighting toolset for Cinema 4D include: realtime HDRI Painter allows to paint your own map directly in the viewport, HDRI tone mapping, new floor system (rounded, infinite, matte), ability to save and load lighting presets, etc. More on the Renderking website.

Check out the latest impressive work coming from French animation school Gobelins, created by the 2nd year students of its Character Animation and Animated Filmmaking program. The videos have been produced as trailers for films that won't be made (regrettably). Watch the videos on Filmnosis. (Mature content)

(Updated) The binary files for Natron 2.2 are available for download. (more...)