New great shorts created by Gobelins students for the Annecy animation festival are being posted online. Check them out on Filmnosis.

François Gastaldo, a French teacher specializing in lighting, shading and texturing, has recreated the Amiga Juggler animation using Blender and the Open Shading Language (OSL) implementation for the Cycles renderer. The Amiga Juggler is a historic ray-traced one second looping animation of a juggler made of spheres originally created by Eric Graham back in 1986 with the Commodore Amiga computer. The animation showcased the 3D computing capabilities ushered by desktop computers of the mid-1980s and became an iconic image for CG graphics at the time. (more...)

Lyon-based Nukeygara announced that a beta of its software dedicated solely to character animation and rigging will be be available on June 30. The beta will be available for purchase at a significant discount. Also of note, the company has switched its licensing model from rental to permanent. A number of new tutorials showing the software's features have been posted. More on Nukeygara's website.

Fractals archaeologist Julius Horsthuis has made available his latest 3D fractals video. Watch it on Vimeo.

New features in the latest version of Render Legion's Corona Renderer include 3DS Max 2016 support, a Corona Bitmap shader that speeds up rendering, much faster Particle Flow without memory limitations (support for instancing) and with better motion blur, plus other minor enhancements and bug fixes. (more...)

The latest version of the Rayfire destruction kit plugin for 3DS Max has been released. Version 1.66 includes the new Bricks modifier, which gives users the ability to fragment geometry into bricks, and provides a wide variety of options to control layout of the bricks. For full details on this latest release, you can visit the Rayfire Studios website.

Blur Studio recently delivered the incredible new 'Sacrifice' trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. You can watch the full 4 minute trailer on the Stars Wars Old Republic Youtube channel.

Adobe has released the latest version of Creative Cloud, which includes an update of its compositing toolset, After Effects CC 2015. This latest release of After Effects includes face tracking abilities, character animator, uninterrupted preview which gives users the ability to adjust composition properties, resize panels without impacting playback, and much more. For the full details on this latest release of After Effects you can visit the Adobe website.