Eisko has announced Rig on Demand, a new online service that allows the user to upload a head model and receive a fully rigged head setup featuring 120 expressions. The rig is compatible with Maya 2016 and features blendshapes, side panel sliders and on-mesh controllers. Find out more on Eisko's website.

New features in Corel's computer-aided design software include: (more...)

Since the 2.1 version released a few months ago, the cross-platform open source compositing software has been incorporating a good number of features through plugins, including: Sharpen & Soften, EdgeExtend: fill a matte (i.e. a non-opaque color image with an alpha channel) by extending the edges of the matte, ErodeBlur: erode or dilate a mask by smoothing, HueCorrect: apply hue-dependent color adjustments using lookup curves, etc. More on GitHub and Natron's website.

Mechanical Color has released Tabby Cat, a simple but handy Modo Kit that changes the default Tab key behaviour so that Catmull-Clark subdivisions are used, entire polygon islands are either smoothed or unsmoothed, all component selection modes can be used, flipped polys are aligned and mixed unsmoothed/subdivided meshes fixed. The kit is free on Mechanical Color's website along with a number of other useful scripts.

Kinematiclab has released Pflow Labyrinth for 3DS Max, which is a free pflow script that generates a random growing labyrinth effect. You can download the script from the Kinematiclab website.

Animation World Network has posted Part 2 of their feature article on the visual effects work completed by ILM, for Captain America: Civil War. You can read both Part 1 and Part 2 via the AWN website.

Cartoon Brew speaks with veteran artists and former ILM'ers, Mark Dippé and Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, regarding the state of the VFX industry. You can read the full interview on the Cartoon Brew website.

Two Pixar animators have created and released a short film titled Borrowed Time. Co-directors Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj spent five years developing the short film, which tells the story of a weathered sheriff, who returns to the remains of an accident he has spent a lifetime trying to forget. Watch it on Vimeo.