FX Guide have published a thorough and fascinating interview with Ed Catmull to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the release of RenderMan. Read it on FX Guide.

Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic have released a new version of their open-source project that facilitates the sharing of animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. Highlights include: (more...)

Planetside has released a free, limited version of Terragen that can be used for non-commercial purposes or for testing the software. The official release of the full version is expected on July 29th. More on Planetside's website.

The Cara system brings a custom made head rig and four cameras for recording 3D data, and is composed of two pieces of software: (more...)

ChronoSculpt is a stand-alone tool developed by the LightWave 3D Group designed for working with animation and dynamic simulation cache files from any application, allowing you to use sculpting and transformation tools over time. It could potentially save hours of work by allowing to quickly make changes to the baked dynamic simulation cache files to address simulation jitter, soft body penetrations, or to remove stray simulation pieces. (more...)

FBX Review is a free, lightweight utility for reviewing 3D assets and animations. It supports a number of formats including .fbx, .3ds and .obj, and offers the ability to switch between different shading modes, toggle scene lights, shadows, and tessellation, and features various display capabilities. More on Autodesk's site.

Chaos Group has established a partnership with GreenButton to provide a joint enabled application for on-demand rendering. V-Ray for Max users will be able to access cloud-based computing resources by using the V-Ray GreenButton plugin. More on Chaos Group's site.

Maxon announced a new version of its 3D application. Highlights include: new beveling and typographic tools, improved dynamic sculpting, a camera crane rig and numerous rendering enhancements. More on Maxon's website.