The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announced a call for participation in a new initiative to define a cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard for access to modern VR devices. Key components of the new standard will include APIs for tracking of headsets, controllers and other objects, and for easily integrating devices into a VR runtime. This will enable applications to be portable to any VR system that conforms to the Khronos standard. More on The Khronos Group's website.

Facebook-owned Oculus has released the Touch handheld controllers for use with its VR platform. Free software available with Touch that may be of interest to CG artists include Medium, a VR 3D sculpting tool, and Quill, a VR painting tool. More on Oculus' website.

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.