Barcelona-based Norte studio has made available a great making of video for its recent "Ferro" internal project. Watch it on Vimeo.

AMD announced that it's open sourcing FireRays 2.0, its ray intersection acceleration library that makes the most of the company's hardware. FireRays 2.0 brings support for Windows, OS X, Linux, AMD, NV, Intel GPUs and CPUs with many back-ends. More on GPUOpen's website.

New features in the open source software for modeling 3D humanoid characters include: completely new skeleton and posing system (with support for pose loading from BVH, custom weights and proxies), new pose system with auto-rigging, skin library with age variation, expression system now based on face bone rig, improved topologies/proxies, FBX export now supports binary FBX and should work for most third-party applications, etc. More on MakeHuman project's website.

Version 1.6 of the unbiased, production-oriented open source renderer has been officially released. New features include: major improvements to the LuxCore render engine, shadow catcher objects, sky ground color, new image pipeline, much better support for nodes in Blender, automatic Blender materials conversion from Cycles, etc. The 3DS Max plugin has also been reworked and is now much better integrated. Check out an overview of the new features and find out more on LuxRender's Website.

Blizzard Entertainment has made available a new promotional video for its upcoming multiplayer team-based shooter that uses a cast of various "heroes". Watch it on YouTube.

The video trailer for the papers that will be presented at this year's SIGGRAPH is now available. Watch it on YouTube.

New features in the latest version of Render Legion's Corona Renderer include: (more...)

Antonio Vázquez has posted a video showing the useful improvements he is developing for Blender's Grease Pencil tool, in collaboration with Daniel Martínez Lara. The new version has a new system of layers, palettes, colors and drawing brushes, like other 2D animation tools. Martínez Lara is dedicated to finding the best workflow to improve 2D animation production with the tool. Watch the video on YouTube.