Kent Trammell reviews V-Ray for Blender for CG Cookie: "... incredibly thorough implementation of V-Ray’s features". More on CG Cookie.

Kjartan Tysdal, student at Danish school The Animation Workshop, has made available a making of for a recent environment project he's been working on, with a great stylized aesthetic. Created with Blender, Fusion and 3D-Coat. Watch it on Vimeo.

A fun video by Dutch artist Shurly, showing an unusual RealFlow malfunction (seemingly related to the music being played). Watch it on Vimeo.

An interesting tool is being developed by Hans Godard, Character TD at Naughty Dog, for converting mesh sequences into bone-based skinned animations. The software calculates the bones, bone animations and skinning maps. Watch a video on Vimeo.

Side Effects announced that the Houdini Engine for Unreal Engine 4 is now available for public beta testing. The plugin allows to import Digital Assets created with Houdini into Unreal Engine. During beta testing the free Houdini Apprentice edition can be used to create assets. Once the plugin goes gold, an indie or commercial license will be required. More on .

New features in Rendering Systems' software for extracting various map types from photo textures, editing normal maps and converting existing maps to different formats include: ability to bake maps from 3D models, Map Filter Stack (each map node can now have a number of filters applied), new map types, support for EXR and HDR 16/32 bit images, floating point image generation, etc. Watch some new features videos on YouTube and find out more on ShaderMap's website.

Digital Domain's VFX Supervisor Aladino Debert has made available some great VFX breakdowns of shots created by Digital Domain for the adventure TV series Black Sails (season 2). Watch the video on Vimeo.

New features in Kolor's image stitching software for creating panoramas include: (more...)