A day to celebrate, thanks to Serif and its permanent licensing policy, artists using Windows have once again the choice to purchase and own one of the main tools they use in their daily work: a quality image editor with professional features. After going through open beta testing, the Windows version of Serif's photo editing software has now been officially released. Affinity Photo is being offered through permanent licensing and is currently available with a 25% launch discount at an introductory price of $39.99 / £29.99 / 39.99€ until December 22. As an extra bonus a pack of macros is offered for free to all users who purchase during the promo period. More information on Affinity's website. (more...)

The GPU unbiased renderer developed by Andrey Kozlov is now officially out. FStormRender features include improved tone mapping, light sampling, a native BRDF model, glare effects, improved raytracer, optimized QMC sampler and a fast displacement implementation that's light on memory and can be applied to unlimited surfaces. The 3DS Max plugin is integrated with the Max environment and supports all necessary features. A built-in scene converter helps transfer scenes from Corona, V-Ray and Octane renderers.

The software is available through rental licensing at €20.00 / month. Support for other 3D applications is already planned. Check out the image gallery and find out more on FStormRender's website.

X-Muscle System is a new commercial Blender add-on designed for rapid muscular system, tissue and other organic and non-organic object creation and physical simulation. More on Blender Market.

UK based AxisVFX has released a new reel of work for TV and cinema. Watch it on Vimeo.

Chaos Group announced that v3.0 of its fluid dynamics software has entered open beta testing for Maya. More on Chaos Group's website.

Unity Labs has released some free image sequences created in Houdini, including smoke, fire, and clouds, that can be used in your Unity projects. You can download the full set of elements via the Unity website.

Co-produced by ARTE France, Rosebud Productions and Les Monstres, The Great Greek Myths is a TV series that retells ancient stories from Greek mythology using animation created by Paris-based Les Monstres, and artworks chosen from the entire history of art. The animations were produced using Flash, Cinema 4D and After Effects. Watch a video on Vimeo and find out more on ARTE's website. (French)

Germany-based 3d-io, developers of quality software such as BonesPro and Unwrella, have announced "Exr-IO", a free OpenEXR reader / writer for Adobe Photoshop. Exr-IO is a robust solution for dealing with complex multi-layer pictures, it loads all image channels from OpenEXR files into separate Photoshop layers while preserving exact values, transparencies and dimensions. Exr-IO supports all OpenEXR features and provides workflow optimizations for Photoshop: (more...)