CG news

CityEngine is a procedural tool for creating 3D city models. The software generates detailed city models based on simple procedural rules, importing data in standard file formats such as OBJ and DXF and exporting to formats such as FBX, Alembic and USD. Although designed for architects and urban planners, the software integrates with the ESRI ArcGIS platform - the software is also designed for entertainment content

It has been reported that Autodesk has renamed Shotgun to ShotGrid. Shotgun is a project management software for animation, VFX and gamedev studios, combining planning, tracking and review tools on one platform. Autodesk has also dropped the old "Awesome" and "Super Awesome" subscriptions in favor of a single $40/month subscription and moved Shotgun to standard product licensing and support systems. The company acquired Shotgun in 2014

Multiverse | USD 6.7 received support for blend shapes in USD format, which in turn allows you to write assemblies that are used by the Maya Blend Shape deformer as blend shapes in USD, with support for multiple targeting, intermediate elements and skeleton animations. The update also expanded support for working with USD (Universal Scene Description), a 3D scene description file format developed by Pixar. There

Blender 2.93 LTS has an updated workspace and table editor for geometric nodes. More than 20 new nodes have been added, including nodes for creating 2D and 3D primitives. Mesh parameters such as vertex colour data, some of the UV properties and material assignment can now be accessed. The update also added a default workspace for geometry nodes, including a new spreadsheet editor to display attribute

Dimension 5's D5 Render 1.9 features a new physical sky system, Geo & Sky, allowing scenes to be automatically lit according to a given latitude and time of day in the real world. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=KnHofPuKPgk&feature=emb_logo[/embed] The update also includes new double-sided foliage material and the ability to customise the colours of the three-dimensional plants. More than 412 plants have now been added to the accompanying resource libraries.

Chaos, the company formerly known as Chaos Group, has released V-Ray glTF, a free collection of Python scripts for rendering models in glTF format using its V-Ray rendering module. glTF is a lightweight file format for 3D resources in real-time applications and is now supported in DCC software, including Blender and Nvidia's Omniverse. While there are a number of online glTF viewers available - the new

The software, formerly known as Project Lavina, now known as Chaos Vantage, uses the RT cores in current generation Nvidia RTX graphics cards to create an interactive image of an environment with full ray tracing in real time. Vantage 1.3 gained support for VRay2SidedMtl, a two-way V-Ray material and animated camera parameters from an imported .vrscene file. Also, Vantage now includes the Nvidia GPU-based OptiX noise

ZBRushCoreMini 2021 is a free, stripped-down version of ZBrush, providing "artists of all ages" with an introduction to the popular digital sulpting software. The update adds support for the ZBrush Vector Displacement Mesh (VDM) system, allowing complex 3D elements, including entire body parts, to be added to a model in a few clicks. Other changes include a new real-time occlusion system, designed to bring out finer

Pulldownit 5.0 has got new visual workflows for controlling where the mesh fractures and also new parameters for keeping the fragments formed by cracks on the surface within the boundaries, so that multiple delaminations from the surface can be controlled. The performance of the plug-in has been improved: the crack solver is now "at least twice as fast" and fracture operations create lighter meshes for modelling.