CLO Virtual Fashion are inviting current owners of Marvelous Designer who've joined their forum to participate in beta testing to polish the new features of Marvelous Designer 5, which include Cut, Trace, 2D Pattern Tool Improvements, UV Guide, Performance Improvements, 3D Fold Arrangement and Direct Positioning. The final version is expected to be released on September 15. More on Marvelous Designer's website.

Autodesk's Steven Roselle has posted a video showing the new features brought by the free collection of scripts and plugins for Maya 2016, which was released a few months ago. Also of note, he has updated the "BonusTools Resource Page" with a number of new links to specific feature tutorials as well as updated links to installers, bug fixes, etc. Watch the video on YouTube and find out more on Autodesk's Area.

With version 2.0 on its way and a growing user base, the developers of the open source compositing software Natron have made available the video they used for presenting the software at SIGGRAPH. It was produced by Francois Grassard and showcases Blender and Natron integration. Watch it on YouTube.

The UK studio founded by Peter Guthrie and Henry Goss has opened a shop focused on architectural visualization. The artists have done this due to being advocates of sharing skills and in response to requests to make their scenes and models available for purchase, opening a window to their working process. The first item being sold is their Carey House Scene, with more complete scenes, models, textures and HDRI skies to be added soon. More on The Boundary Store and the related blog post.

The Mill+ team in London collaborated with Sky Creative, Disney, Lucasfilm and ILM to develop a CG 40-second ident to display at the beginning of every film on Sky Movies’ new dedicated channel Sky Movies Star Wars. Created with Cinema 4D, V-Ray and Octane. Watch the video on Vimeo.

LaubLab have announced that the latest version of their V-Ray integration plugin for Cinema 4D will be available for beta testing to all current VRAYforC4D users starting in September. VRAYforC4D v3.25 gives access to the new features introduced by Chaos Group's V-Ray 3.x core, bringing V-Ray in Cinema 4D up to par with Max and Maya implementations. According to the developers, the beta is already stable and usable. Watch a preview video on YouTube and find out more on 3D Tools' website.

Allegorithmic has released Substance Painter 1.5, which includes new export presets for V-Ray, Corona, Redshift, Arnold and Sketchfab, new smart materials, UI improvements and much more. To get all of the details on this latest release, watch a new features video on YouTube and check out the Allegorithmic website.

German artist Patrick Hecht is developing a tool to streamline the the exchange of textures and models between Maya and Mari. He is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project. More on Kickstarter.