Isotropix has disclosed information on some of the new features that will be available in v3.0 of its software that blends compositing, layout, animation and rendering functionality into a single application. Clarisse 3.0 will bring a new physically-based shading model that consists of a Path Tracer renderer and a set of materials, volumes and lights. More on Isotropix's blog.

'Pearl' is the latest from Google's Spotlight Stories - short interactive films made to be viewed using VR technology. This animated film tells the story of a father and daughter through the eyes of their hatchback car and was directed by Patrick Osborne who has previous won an best animation short film Oscar for Feast, produced by Disney. You can watch the film using your mobile in the Spotlight Stories app or preview it on YouTube.

Emanuele Lecchi has posted an article on the upcoming denoiser which will be part of the new service pack for V-Ray. The new denoiser will offer per-element denoising: the ability to operate with different heuristics on each of the generated effect (Direct Lighting, GI, Reflections, Refractions, and so on.), plus many other features which are aimed at improving image quality, and reducing render times. You can read the full article on LinkedIn.

New features in Basefount Technology's crowd simulation software for Maya include: (more...)

An interesting WIP project by David Fuhrer for procedural creation and animation of buildings, created with Houdini.

Allegorithmic has released a free plugin that allows Houdini to read Substances in the form of .sbsar files, enabling the use of procedural textures created with Substance Designer. More on Allegorithmic's website.

Is your 3D application acting up again? Check out this brief fun short by MOPA students Eva Corniou, Marion Coumenges, Chloé Masure and Camille Roux. Watch it on Filmnosis.

Fabric Software has announced a beta version that brings OpenNurbs and Alembic support to Unreal. This removes the unwieldy one way export/import process in favour of a loop from the content creation application through to Unreal Engine and then back again to allow you propagate changes for faster iteration. Find out More on Fabric Software's blog.