For those who don’t know the tool: DaVinci Resolve is an NLE plus color grading plus compositing and audio in one app, with Fusion tools and a Studio tier called DaVinci Resolve Studio.

Resolve Stills stop skating around

Blackmagic Design pushed DaVinci Resolve 21 Public Beta 4 with a fairly specific mission: make small things stop being annoying. On the Photo page, Resolve FX behave more reliably when you transform still images. Resize or reposition a photo with an effect applied, and the overlays and on screen controls now stay aligned so you can keep adjusting instead of chasing UI handles.

The update also improves transparency handling for effects on stills, remembers effect favourites between launches, and fixes warper tool behaviour on photos for more accurate reshaping and manipulation. Also in the stills corner, Canon CR2 and CR3 highlights now render more accurately. Bright areas should keep a more natural look and no longer appear darker than expected when grading or compositing.

Fusion keyframes, meet the timeline

On the Edit and Cut pages, the keyframe editor now supports Fusion motion paths and other modifiers. That means you can tweak animation curves, motion paths, and linked parameters from Fusion titles, effects and macros right next to timeline keyframes, instead of bouncing between editors and hoping you clicked the same parameter twice. It is a fiine quality of life win for anyone who lives on the keyframe lane.

Resolve Studio AI gets a cosmetic touch up

For DaVinci Resolve Studio users, AI CineFocus has improved visual quality for shallow depth of field simulation. Better and Faster modes now handle subtle blur more cleanly, with reductions in edge shimmer, stair stepping and halos so subjects separate more naturally from backgrounds.

AI beauty tools also get refinement. The blemish removal tool allows greater precision for facial area so corrections stay focused where needed, and the face refinement tool now better supports alpha layer workflows, helping isolate and track facial adjustments with less manual masking.

Immersive and raw handling: small, useful plumbing

Beta 4 adds support for Insta360 native colorspace, plus improved DNG decode handling with color value and profile look table support for more consistent image reproduction. DaVinci Resolve 21 Public Beta 4 is available as a free download. As always, test any new beta build on a copy of a project before you let it anywhere near a real delivery.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com

The post DaVinci Resolve 21 Public Beta 4 is out first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The pack in one sentence

Berk Gedik has published Blender Light Texture Set 20 Pack, a free download that adds patterned emission to area lights instead of a perfectly flat rectangle.

What you actually get

The download includes 20 textures at 2048×2048 and a sample Blender file for setup and use. The intent is straightforward: slap a texture onto an area light so highlights, falloff, and reflections feel more like a real modifier than a perfect panel, which can read suspiciously CG in glossy shots. The set works with Cycles. Eevee does not support light textures natively, but you can still try the same images as a mask by putting a plane in front of the light and using the texture there. Expect that to behave differently than proper light texturing, because you now light with geometry, not with the light itself, so test in your own lighting rig before calling it done. Also, yes, lgiht artists will still argue about softboxes.

Pricing and access

Pricing is free. Access runs through a free Patreon signup to grab the attachment, listed as LightTexture_Set.zip, on the Blender Light Texture Set 20 Pack post. Even for free texutres, run a quick pipeline check: confirm license, color management, bit depth, and whether the patterns introduce unwanted banding or aliasing in animation before you let them anywhere near finals.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/blender-light-20-130264386

The post Free area light textures for Blender first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Levels is a free browser utility for quick grayscale map prep that can feed any DCC or engine, with code hosted on GitHub by artofpilgrim.

A small tool for the most common annoyance

Levels positions itself as a texture alpha studio in the browser. You drop in an image, dial in a black and white channel mix, adjust brightness and contrast, shape the result with a levels curve, then finish with a perspective or rectangular crop. After that, you copy to clipboard or download a PNG. This kind of workflow hits daily production reality, especially when you need a quick mask for foliage, decals, grime breakup, or anything else that starts life as a photo and ends up as a grayscale control map for shading. It also pairs neatly with a texture painting pass later, when a rough mask graduates into something worth polishing.

Channel mixing, then levels, then stop touching it

The channel mixer in Levels offers six color sliders: reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, and magentas. It includes presets for Default, High contrast, Dark sky, Infrared, Red filter, and Stark grunge. The goal stays simple: separate subject from background quickly, then lock in contrast.

Brightness and contrast sit as a linear legacy Photoshop pre-stage applied before Levels. The levels panel shows a histogram and gives input shadow, midtone, and highlight handles plus output black and white handles. Keyboard navigation covers Tab to focus a handle, arrow keys to nudge, and Shift plus arrow for bigger steps.

If you need to keep colour instead of converting to black and white, colour mode bypasses the conversion and applies Levels, brightness and contrast per channel. Invert sits there too, because every mask workflow eventually asks you to flip it and see if your brain calms down.

Crop tools that fix your reference photo lies

Rectangular crop supports free or locked aspect ratios: 1:1, 4:5, 5:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2, and 2:3. Holding Shift while dragging forces 1:1. Perspective crop lets you drag four corners of a quad to deskew a region into a rectangle. It uses bilinear sampling, includes a rule of thirds alignment grid, shows live output size, and supports 1 pixel and 10 pixel keyboard nudging. It also composes with rectangular crop, and Reset preserves the pre perspective crop.

That combination makes Levels useful beyond the obvious leaf cutout. It is a quick way to extract alhpa style grayscale sources from angled reference shots that you would otherwise fix in a heavier editor, then stash into a texture library for reuse.

Shortcuts and export that respect your time

Levels supports a real time preview. Hold Space to compare against the original image before processing, after any crop or perspective. Inputs can arrive via drag and drop, paste from clipboard, or open from disk. Exports can go straight to clipboard or to a PNG download. Exports render from the current settings even when the preview defers for responsiveness.

Shortcuts include Space for compare, I to toggle invert, Ctrl or Command plus C to copy, and Ctrl or Command plus S to download PNG. Enter and Escape apply or cancel inside crop or perspective mode. Double click resets a slider to default.

The repository also states that inputs over 4096 pixels on the long edge get downscaled with a toast notice. That limit matters if you expect full resolution scan handling, so treat it as a deliberate constraint, not a surprise feature.

Under the hood, it stays refreshingly unprecious

The GitHub repository describes a no-build step setup. It loads React 18 and ReactDOM from a CDN, and keeps the rest as plain JavaScript split into three ordered script tags.

The file layout is a index.html as shell that links CSS and the three JS files, styles.css for styles, image.js for image processing functions and presets, components.js for UI components, and app.js for the app component and DOM boot. The three JS files communicate via a window.Levels namespace with image.js populating math and data first, then components.js reading it and adding panels, then app.js rendering.

Running locally opens index.html in a modern browser, with the file protocol working for sibling script files. For touch pointer and clipboard testing, serving over HTTP using python -m http.server from the repo root is advisable

This is the part that makes it easier to keep a known good utility around. The tool does not demand a build chain just to exist, which is exactly what you want from a graysacle helper app that should still run when the rest of your stack changes.

Thomas Pilgrim Butters released Levels this week, and describes it as a simpler alternative to opening Adobe Photoshop for alpha textures, with support for alpha masks, height or roughness maps, and stylised monochrome plates from photo references. Thomas Pilgrim Butters is Lead Weapon and Prop Artist at Facepunch and an instructor at Gnomon.

https://artofpilgrim.github.io/levels/

https://github.com/artofpilgrim/levels

The post Levels cleans up alpha maps fast first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

TL;DR: meshController is a C++ plug-in for Autodesk Maya that adds surface pinning, mesh-driven controls, and VP2 viewport tooling for character and facial rigging.

What shipped, and what it targets

meshController is a free C++ plug-in for Autodesk Maya that focuses on surface pinning, mesh surface binding, and VP2 viewport controls for production facial and character rigs. It comes with six node types and five commands, plus an example Maya scene file with a face rig and textures. Pricing is simple: free in the sources.

The core idea borrows from the DreamWorks Animation Premo approach: controls that sit on the character surface instead of floating curve shapes. For artists, that means you interact directly with mesh-based controls that feel visually welded to the character, while still behaving like standard Maya controls for selection and manipulation.

If you live in the rigging trenches, the important part is not the concept. It is whether the nodes solve daily problems cleanly, evaluate fast, and fail predictably when you do something dumb at 3 a.m.

The plug-in in plain technical terms

The documentation calls meshController a “production-grade” toolset for Maya 2023 and later on Windows, with parallel evaluation via oneTBB and viewport interaction using Qt. The compiled plug-in registers as meshController.mll and loads through Maya Plug-in Manager or via a loadPlugin call.

First, Surface Pin. The surfacePin node binds rig controls to a deforming mesh so they track position, orientation, and twist. The workflow binds at a chosen pose, stores bind data, and then reads deformed mesh positions at runtime. surfacePinBind handles binding and supports undo and redo. A key feature is a localInverseMatrix input intended to solve double transforms inline when the pin drives offset controls in a facial hierarchy. The docs also state the node preserves the current transform offset at bind time so controls keep their authored pose.

There is also surfaceUVPin, a UV space variant. Pins store UV coordinates so they can survive topology changes as long as the UV layout stays stable. That is particularly relevant to facial rig work, where meshes evolve mid-show while UVs sometimes remain the one stable thing everyone agrees not to touch.

Second, vertexWrap. This is a lightweight deformer designed to snap split or matching topology meshes to a driver mesh via one-to-one vertex mapping. The docs describe it as avoiding proximity search at evaluation time. It computes a mapping at bind time, then directly copies driver vertex positions to the driven meshes at eval time. The intended use case is lots of small control shapes that must stick to a deforming face.

Sprinkled on top are viewport tools. The docs list shapeControl as a VP2 custom locator with mesh or curve display and hover highlighting. They also list meshControlOverlay, which draws an overlay and hover marker, and meshControlMode, an interactive placement mode that uses Qt mouse move hit testing and viewport overlay feedback. The docs include a comparison table explaining when to prefer shapeControl versus meshControlMode, including a warning to avoid large numbers of live shape controls and to use the overlay path for big sets.

Somewhere around here you will want to resist the urge to replace every curve controller with a mesh. The sources themselves recommend using these controls selectively for main controls rather than replacing everything. But where is the fun in that.

Requirements, downloads, and what you actually get

The download page lists meshController v1.0.0 for Windows and Maya 2023 or later. It also lists a Linux version as “not available yet”. It recommends an NVIDIA GPU for GPU override.

For installation, meshController loads through the plug-in manager or by loading the plug-in by name. Once loaded, all nodes and commands become available immediately.

Licensing, pricing, and the boring bits

meshController is free to download, with documentation and an example scene. They do not specify a commercial license in the sources provided here.

Versioning in the sources: the docs label meshController v1.0 and Maya 2023+, and the download page lists meshController v1.0.0.

If you want to test it properly, build a small facial sandbox scene, swap a couple of core controls to mesh-based shapes, and watch evaluation and selection behavior under your usual shot workflows. Do not start by rewiring the whole face. That is how you end up with a sufrace pin node you love and a manpiulators bug you cannot explain to production.

https://www.cgdzg.com/mesh-controls-for-maya/

The post DreamWorks style mesh controls land in Maya first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

What actually shipped

The project now includes an official add-on for Blender that connects to an external solver backend, rather than replacing Blender’s built-in simulation stack. The add-on acts as a client and runs anywhere Blender runs, including macOS, while the solver engine runs separately. And if you understand higher physics, here is an explainer. Fort the rest of us:

ZOZO’s Contact Solver codebase lives on GitHub, and the solver is a contact solver for physics-based simulations involving shells, solids, and rods. The project uses the Apache License 2.0, which you may use, modify, and redistribute the code in commercial products, including proprietary software, as long as you preserve the required notices.

A release tagged “Blender Add-on 1.0.6” has support for armature-driven deformable colliders and bug fixes related to paths containing empty spaces. That is a very production-shaped patch note, because file paths love whitespace even when pipelines do not.

The headline features, minus the marketing glitter

The add-on is exposing finite element deformable and penetration-free contacts, plus strictly strain-limited cloth intended not to stretch like rubber. That last bit aims at the old pain point where cltoh behaves like chewing gum under stress.

The tool targets cloud-deployed GPUs, with examples such as vast.ai and AWS, while still allowing local runs if you have a powerful NVIDIA GPU. It also states the workflow can run locally or remotely on Windows and Linux, with macOS supported via a remote solver engine because CUDA does not run there. Why would it.

The core technology is backed by a peer-reviewed publication in Transactions on Graphics for SIGGRAPH Asia 2024.

Hardware and deployment reality

The installation makes the split explicit: the add-on is just a client, but the solver backend requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA 12.x. That makes the tool’s core constraint very clear: your workstation can be lightweight, but your backend needs serious GPU muscle. There are multiple ways to connect to a backend, including running on the same machine, using an SSH-reachable Linux host, using a Docker container, or using a Windows workstation. In other words, it is built for the common studio pattern where artists drive a tool from a DCC while compute happens elsewhere.

The repository also includes a section on deploying on cloud services and includes example hourly costs for specific setups, such as approximately €0.76 per hour for a Scaleway setup and around $1 per hour for a described Amazon instance configuration. Those numbers relate to the referenced cloud configurations, not a license fee for the tool itself. And not the pricing when you did saomething a little bit wrong and are accumulating AWS-bills like a torado in a bank. You know what I am talking about.

https://github.com/st-tech/ppf-contact-solver

The post ZOZO Contact Solver gets Blender add-on first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

TL;DR: Node Ninja is a free plugin from School of Motion for Maxon Cinema 4D that builds Redshift materials from PBR texture folders.

The promise: stop wiring nodes, start rendering

Node Ninja targets a very specific kind of production friction: the endless, repetitive setup work that happens between downloading a texture set and having a usable Redshift material inside Cinema 4D.

A single PBR texture set can include 6 to 12 maps per material. The manual process is requiring a TextureSampler node per map, wiring each one to the right input on an RS Standard Material, and setting roughness, metalness, and normal maps to the correct color space so they render correctly. Also: the normal map format problem: if a texture set ships with a DirectX normal instead of an OpenGL normal, the mismatch can hide until the render looks wrong.

Node Ninja estimates that the manual approach takes about 4 minutes of node wiring per material and calls itself the one-click alternative. But, let’s be honest: 4 minutes is when you are quick. School of Motion offers Node Ninja as a free download, with no credit card, on Mac and Windows.

Install once, then find it where artists actually look

Installation follows the standard Cinema 4D plugin routine: open Preferences, jump to the Preferences folder, then drop the School of Motion folder into the plugins folder and restart Cinema 4D. After a correct install, Cinema 4D shows a School of Motion entry under Extensions, with Node Ninja and a companion tool called Node Surgeon available from the same menu.

Folder in, material out

Node Ninja works by pointing it at a texture folder, then building a full Redshift node graph based on filenames. It wires maps to expected inputs and sets color spaces. The plugin recognizes common PBR map naming patterns and can auto-handle albedo, roughness, metalness, normal, displacement, AO, emission, opacity, specular, and SSS, with a longer list in the manual. It also claims to composit AO into base color using a color layer and an appropriate blending mode. On normals, it states it can detect DirectX versus OpenGL normal maps and choose the correct type for Redshift, which it describes as using OpenGL normals.

Projection choices, plus an editor for after the fact

At import time, Node Ninja asks whether to use UV projection or world space Triplanar and wires the graph accordingly. If you change your mind later, the included Node Surgeon utility can edit existing materials to switch projection modes, and it can add or remove master controls for scale, offset, and rotation without rebuilding from scratch.

On newer Cinema 4D versions, Node Ninja uses the Redshift UV Context Projection node so tiling, offset, rotation, and pivot adjustments can happen in one place and propagate upstream through the graph.

Bulk import and duplicates, handled like an adult

Node Ninja includes a bulk import mode: point it at a parent folder and it can build one material per subfolder. When it detects a name collision, it offers three options: replace the existing material, duplicate with an auto-increment name, or skip it. That matters when you re-import a library mid-project and you want control over what gets overwritten.

A companion upgrade utility for existing materials

Node Ninja also ships with a second tool aimed at already built materials. The companion utility is included free with Node Ninja and targets existing Redshift materials built with standard PBR textures. There are three things the utility can do without starting over: switch projection modes, add or remove master controls, and upgrade legacy materials to Cinema 4D 2026’s modern UV Context format. It also scans the material first, pre-fills a dialogue to match what is already there, then rebuilds the graph with the requested changes. It CLAIMS it carries texture paths over automatically. There are limits – the utility is designed for standard PBR materials and is not a converter for complex procedural setups.

Cinema 4D versions, older graphs, and the practical bits

Node Ninja supports Cinema 4D 2024.5, 2025, and 2026 on Mac and Windows. If you run an older Cinema 4D version, Node Ninja uses an older style of control setup rather than the newer UV Context Projection workflow, and it can still build unified scale controls through value nodes.

Pricing is simple: free, with no license key and no trial. But nevertheless, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, ideally on a copy of a scene, because automation can propagate the same mistake across a whole library at the same speed it saves time.

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/node-ninja

The post Node Ninja builds Redshift materials from folders first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Evans Research Associates is running a study on the needs of german video software users. The survey takes about 12 to 15 minutes, depending on how you answer, and results get reported only in aggregate form. No need to hold back anything.

If you worked in german post long enough, you know how these surveys go. Someone somewhere tries to map real world workflows onto tidy multiple choice boxes, then discovers that editors, assistants, finishing artists, and producers all use the same words to mean different things. That mismatch is exactly why it helps when working pros fill these out.

Since this is a large multiyear survey, focused on German video pros, you might not fit the profile – I certainly don’t know how to match the target group. But after the introductory questions, you still take part in the prize drawing. Even when you are to CG for editing questions ;)

The survey (in German) starts here
https://asurveys.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/9d5/ado19011?list=31&LID=4

Money, vouchers, and who gets what

If you belong to the requested participant group and answer the questions, there is a Amazon gift voucher worth 15 euro for the first 250 people who complete the survey.

Also, the survey includes a separate prize draw list: one 500-euro voucher, two 200-euro vouchers, five 80-euro vouchers, and twenty-five 20-euro vouchers. If you already took part, the invitation asks you to ignore this – you already count for the draw. If the screening questions indicate you are not in the intended target group, you still enter the draw.

Confidentiality

Your answers remain strictly confidential, combined with other participants, and reported only as an overall result. If you have strong opinions about what slows you down, this is one of the rare moments where a checkbox might actually travel upward.

Rules link: https://www.evansresearch.net/NLE/rules2.php?list=31
Contact link: https://www.evansresearch.net/NLE/contact2.php?list=31
Privacy link: https://www.evansres.com/german

The post Click Here If You’re a German video editor and have yelled “Why? Why? Why?” at your NLE first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Remove goes local

Adobe Photoshop 27.7 adds an on-device AI model option for the Remove tool. After the model download, object removal can run locally without cloud processing. You can download, cancel, or remove the model whenever you want, and Photoshop checks hardware compatibility automatically before it starts. You can also switch between cloud and on-device processing.

In the on-device Remove workflow, Photoshop exposes a Device option for generative AI processing, and the model download is roughly 5 GB. If the Device option stays unavailable, the documented behavior is that the system does not meet the minimum requirements for the model. The net effect for artists is simple: you get a loacl option for Remove when you cannot, or do not want to, round-trip to the cloud.

So far no information if that still uses AI-credits in one way or another.

Boards, now with fewer copy-pastes

Photoshop 27.7 tightens integration with Firefly Boards in a few practical places. You can share any Photoshop document directly to Firefly Boards, either by creating a new board or adding to an existing one, from the Share panel and the Export menu.

Firefly Boards also appears as a destination inside the Variations panel for moodboarding and comparing AI-generated variations. When you generate image variations with Ideate in Firefly Boards, you can open those variations in a preconfigured Board layout for further exploration and iteration. New guided workflows target moodboards and visual concepts, branding and marketing assets, and social media content.

Credits and account controls move into the room

Photoshop 27.7 expands access to premium generative AI features for eligible subscribers. Existing generative credits can now be used across both standard and premium generative AI features. Photoshop also adds a Unified Account Menu in the Edit workspace, where you can view and manage account and subscription details, plus generative credits.

Small workflow fixes that add up

Save for Web gets a modernized interface intended to match the rest of Photoshop more closely. File handling and preferences get two quality-of-life toggles. You can open JPEG files as a regular layer instead of a locked background layer. You can also create new documents without a default background layer, starting with a transparent canvas.

Under the hood, the internal Metrics module is refactored to focus on heavy-use metrics, with the stated goal of reducing telemetry overhead and improving responsiveness during normal operation. Canvas HUD diagnostics move out of the canvas context area and into the View menu.

Fix-wise, Photoshop addresses a customer-reported issue where Hue and Saturation ranges did not update when selecting a prominent color preset from the Properties panel. On Windows, it also fixes an inability to launch versions 26.2 and 25.12.1 simultaneously. The Open JPEG without Background layer preference now defaults to off to avoid confusing existing users, and the Learn More URL in the generative credits quota exhausted notification is updated.

What to test before you bet a deadline on it

On-device Remove changes performance, storage, and review habits in a way that only shows up in your own shot types, textures, and delivery constraints. Test new builds and new AI paths before you roll them into production, especially if you need strict repeatability across machines and artists.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/desktop/whats-new/photoshop-on-desktop-release-notes.html

The post Adobe Photoshop 27.7 runs Remove on device first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Foundry has launched the Mari Texture Library, a free online asset library for Mari, its 3D texture painting software, and for wider DCC workflows where the file formats allow it. At launch, the library contains more than 120 assets, including Smart Materials, Smart Masks, Smart Utilities, general-purpose textures, brush textures and HDRIs. So yes, even texture artists get a free shelf of useful things once in a while, presumably by accident.

The library is hosted through Foundry’s Community site and is intended as a shared resource for Mari users. According to CG Channel, users can also upload their own files to share with the Mari community, which turns the library into more than a static download page, provided everyone behaves like adults, an ambitious premise on the internet.

Smart Materials, masks, textures and HDRIs

The Mari-specific assets include Smart Materials, Smart Masks and Smart Utilities in Mari’s MMA and MPC formats. These are designed for use inside Mari and cover a range of surface types, including wood, metal, plastic and creature-style materials such as lizard skin.

Not everything in the library is Mari-only. The general texture assets are provided in JPEG format at resolutions up to 8K, brush textures are supplied as PNG files, and HDRIs are provided as 2K EXR files. That makes part of the library useful beyond Mari, including for look development, surfacing, lighting tests and general production noodling in other DCC applications. “Noodling” remains a technical term until someone from pipeline management enters the room.

License and access

The assets are available under the open-source 3-Clause BSD License, which allows commercial use, subject to the license terms. A free Foundry account is required to download the files. Assets in MMA and MPC format require Mari, while JPEG, PNG and EXR assets should be usable in most DCC applications that support those formats.

For Mari users, the main value is the ready-made Smart Material and Smart Mask content. For everyone else, the texture, brush and HDRI files may still be useful as free production assets, reference material or test content. As usual, “free” does not mean “review nothing and throw it into production blind,” because that is how render farms learn new swear words.

Availability

The Mari Texture Library is available now through Foundry Community. Downloads require a free Foundry account. The library is accessible from the Mari Texture Library section of Foundry’s Community Asset Hub.

Foundry Community: Mari Texture Library

The post Foundry launches free Mari Texture Library with 120+ assets first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the movie: Chrysalis is a surreal short film by Robin Lochmann blending live action with CG, built in Cinema 4D, rendered in Octane Render, and finished in After Effects, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve.

Who, what, and why this fog would not quit

DP: For the people in the back row exporting the wrong folder, who are you and what do you make?

Robin Lochmann: I am a Berlin-based filmmaker and 3D artist from Ireland. My work ranges from commercials to concert visuals, trailers and art projects and anything in between. My latest short film Chrysalis blends live action footage with digitally created characters and environments. You can find me at robinlochmann.com and linktr.ee/robin_lochmann.

DP: How did Chrysalis start, script first or vibes first?

Robin Lochmann: The film grew out of a series of visual experiments where I started to create characters and see what they looked like when integrated into real landscape footage that I shot. This is obviously the opposite of starting with a script and then creating the visuals. I was very motivated by combining the different techniques that I had learned and the resources that I had to create something on my own and push myself to make it look as seamless as possible.

DP: Where did you grab the real world plates, and what kicked it off on location?

Robin Lochmann: I was in the south of France with my Blackmagic Design camera and I just started shooting landscape shots. I find that being in a new place with a camera just creates options all of a sudden and is great for inspiration. The characters were the next step but the starting point was definitely the landscape. The project started in France back in 2023. I got a bunch of usable material before proper winter settled in. I came back about six months later, in the summertime, and did another round of shooting, this time with the drone. I chucked it into DaVinci Resolve for editing and colour correction, started organising everything by what might make sense together, and did a first pass at matching the colours of the two different cameras and seasons with very different lighting conditions.

Scope, time, and the luxury budget known as free time

DP: How long did you live with this project, and did you ever ghost it for a while?

Robin Lochmann: The project spanned over 3 years, but I did not work on it consistently. I still had to manage client work and regular life. At one point, there were about 10 months in a row where I did not open the project at all because I did not have any time. After taking longer breaks from it, it was always hard to pick it back up again, but I am stuck with it.

DP: Before the plot showed up, what did you actually know? Any hard rules, or just “please look slightly holy and slightly terrifying”?

Robin Lochmann: I did not have a script at this point, just a visual direction. I knew I wanted to integrate animated characters into the landscape, that they would be doing this ritual, and that there would be a procession.

DP: Where did the costume language come from?

Robin Lochmann: I started collecting images of religious and ceremonial robes and headpieces with a similar vibe. I wanted to contrast the religious feeling with leather straps and mix those opposing aesthetics.

DP: The main head shape feels oddly familiar, in a good way. What fed that silhouette?

Robin Lochmann: I love the look of the alchemist character in The Holy Mountain. That and a Catholic bishop’s hat, a miter, were the original inspiration for the main character’s head design. I wanted the shape to feel somewhat familiar but still unique, with a strong profile where the front is much longer than the back, almost like a shield.

DP: Any research rabbit holes you wish you could bill to a client?

Robin Lochmann: I looked at a bunch of other different religious practices, which was not particularly useful for the project in the end.

DP: What kept you from quietly deleting the folder and moving on?

Robin Lochmann: Honestly, I did not know it would take this long when I started. At some point, I had invested enough time into it that I thought I could not give up now. Maybe if I had really known how much was still ahead of me I would have given up. But I would always get motivated when I saw a new shot come together, and that would sustain me for a while.

DP: Money question, was there a budget, or just stubbornness?

Robin Lochmann: I did not have a budget, just my free time.

Tools, tracking, and the pipeline

DP: Give us the big picture workflow, from camera to final file, without pretending it was always tidy.

Robin Lochmann: Shoot real footage, first edit, 3D-track selected shots, build characters and environments in 3D, animate characters and simulate clothing, integrate 3D elements into tracked footage, render, and composite CGI with real footage.

DP: What apps did the heavy lifting, and which ones did you bounce between when nobody was watching?

Robin Lochmann: Cinema 4D was the main hub for everything, Octane Render handled all rendering, ZBrush sculpted the dog and bug characters, iClone handled base character animation and motion capture clean up, Rokoko provided motion capture, Marvelous Designer handled cloth simulation, and Substance 3D Painter handled texturing. I composited in After Effects, then finished editorial, colour grading and final delivery in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

DP: Motion wise, how much was keyframed suffering versus mocap suffering?

Robin Lochmann: About half of the film is animated by hand in iClone. That was probably the most time consuming part of the whole project. About halfway through I got a Rokoko smart suit. It lets you record body movement and transfer it to any 3D character. It still needs a lot of cleanup, but it provides a great base and definitely speeds up the process.

DP: Clothing question for anyone who has ever rage-quit a sim cache. How did you build the garments?

Robin Lochmann: I used Marvelous Designer. I started by drawing the pattern in 2D and found it helpful to look at actual tailor patterns for reference. Then I positioned the pieces around the character, sewed it together, and ran the simulation. In some cases I added top stitching lines and simulated again so the garment movement followed the character animation. Different fabric types like canvas or silk drape very differently and give different results.

Rigging: stilts, metal, and non standard creature logic

DP: The creatures look like they refuse to behave in a normal rig. How did you build and rig them without losing your mind?

Robin Lochmann: Both the dog and the bug characters are built from scratch through a combo of modelling in Cinema 4D and sculpting in ZBrush. The bug was actually pretty easy to rig, but maybe not really a standard way of doing it. I am no expert and do not have a sculpting background, so I was winging it and pushing and scraping until it took shape. I painted it in Substance Painter, which feels similar to Photoshop with layers and masks. I added wings, bones for the legs, head sculpt variations to blend between, and a joint chain through the center of the head to make it wiggly. I animated the wings and added slight bends to the body. A shot with the bug trapped inside the jar ended up being one of my favorites.

For the dog, I used the quadruped rig in Cinema 4D as a starting point, but it was a little tricky because the dog is on stilts. Also, some of the metal bodies needed to stay rigid, so I constrained that separately.

DP: The robot dog is doing a lot. Where did that idea come from, and why the wonderfully impractical stilts?

Robin Lochmann: The initial inspiration came from a sculpture I saw in the Louvre in Paris. I liked the idea of a robot animal wearing a mask and the odd, impractical idea of having it on stilts. I wanted it to look cobbled together from scrap metal and discarded parts, barely held together by a rusty frame. I made a rig for it in Cinema 4D so I could animate it. I wanted the movement to feel janky and strenuous, like the rustiness holds it back a little bit.

World building, forests, and staying sane

DP: How much is plate based, and how much is full CG?

Robin Lochmann: Roughly half of Chrysalis uses real background footage and the other half is fully CG.

DP: When you go full CG, what does a scene build look like?

Robin Lochmann: I built the environments in Cinema 4D and made two main forest sets. Once they were finished, I could move a virtual camera around and frame like in the real world. I would do a previs first as a basic render for timing and camera movement, then refine and add details before final rendering with Octane.

DP: Lighting-wise, how did you get the France vibe into the CG shots?

Robin Lochmann: I made 360-degree HDRI images in France as a starting point to light the scene. That was rarely enough by itself, so I added extra area lights and a fog volume, basically a big box of fog that sits on top of the scene and breaks up how light particles shine through it.

DP: Any survival tips for reopening giant environment files without screaming?

Robin Lochmann: Try to stay organised in big environment scenes, so when you open the project again, you do not completely lose your mind.

DP: When it was time to hit render, what did you spit out for comp, and what passes mattered?

Robin Lochmann: I rendered everything in Octane. I used EXRs with beauty, cryptomate, volume, and Z-depth passes for each shot. That was usually enough for compositing. Because I was rendering locally on a 2080 and a 3090, I would usually just render overnight but at the very end I had about one week of nonstop rendering.

Then, everything came together for compositing and final adjustments in After Effects. Because I had the cryptomasks, I could select every object separately for small color or brightness tweaks and add CG elements to real footage. Edges are a dead giveaway, so I used light wrap to bleed background light into the foreground edges. I also added haze and sometimes more fog, took down digital sharpness, and added a bit of film grain while obsessing over small details to balance the image.

DP: What did you deliver in the end, and how wild were the render times shot to shot?

Robin Lochmann: 4k 24fps. Render times varied a lot. Some shots, where it was just one character that would later be composited onto real footage, rendered quickly while the fullCG scenes took much longer. Because I was rendering on the go, at night, it is really hard to say how long the total render times were.

Sound: music first, then realism on top

DP: Who made it sound expensive, and how did you brief them without writing a novel?

Robin Lochmann: Music by Robot Koch and sound design and mixing by Philippe Glandien. Throughout working on the project, I would listen to Robot Koch’s music while watching playbacks and I knew that I wanted him to do the music for the film. I sent him a locked edit and gave him some guidelines, but I already trusted his taste and style.

After just two revisions teh music was locked down. For the sound design, I gave Philippe Glandien the film with the final music. I wanted to aim for realism. The sound design should just support the visuals and make the film feel more tactile, while the music was the emotional heartbeat.

Updates mid project: the good, the bad, and the crashy

DP: Over three years, updates happen. Which upgrades were helpful, and which ones tried to eat your project?

Robin Lochmann: Because the project went on so long, I did have to update most tools along the way. The worst was After Effects. The number of crashes kept increasing, and by the end I could not even close the project without it crashing. Some updates in Cinema 4D were really useful, like their particle system and the updated cloth simulations.

I used these cloth simulations to tear the cocoon and the main character’s wings directly inside Cinema 4D. To control where cloth breaks, you can paint a vertex map, allowing tearing to occur precisely. For the cocoon emergence, I layered different versions so they pushed up from underneath and broke at various points, with layers reacting to each other and different physical properties.

DP: And the white webbing lines that creep over things? How did you do that?

Robin Lochmann: I shot particles at the object and traced the particle path to form a line. The particles split and form new particles. I used the same technique in a couple of shots where white webbing covers everything.

DP: If you rebuilt the character pipeline today, what would you streamline first?

Robin Lochmann: Some of the workflows were also not the most efficient *cough* in terms of bouncing between the different tools, especially for the characters. Bringing them from motion capture to cleanup, clothing, and then back into C4D to remove the base and attach the head involved too many steps. I am not a coder, so I had to do it all manually, but I think now I would try to use AI to write a script to automate it.

DP: Any deleted scenes you still mourn, or are they safely buried in a folder called OLD_FINAL_FOR_REAL_THIS_TIME?

Robin Lochmann: I made early test shots to see how the parts combined. None of those shots ended up in the film. In earlier versions there were other characters I built and then cut out, like a giant baby statue, an awful kid, and a mask. I even finished a couple of scenes with one character, then went to the cinema to see Dune 2 and saw characters so similar that I decided to remove that character completely.

DP: You skipped the festival waiting game at first. What was the thinking, and what happened after you hit publish?

Robin Lochmann: I decided to skip festivals at first and go straight online, mainly because I did not want to wait so long to share it. I am really glad I made that decision. Even with a decent festival run, you are lucky to have a couple of thousand people see your film. Two weeks after release, we had already gotten over 100k views on YouTube just organically. That was way more than I expected, since not many people want to watch short films. The feedback has been great. I am also submitting it to some smaller festivals now that do not disqualify films that are already publicly available.

DP: Last one. When did you stop tweaking and let it leave the nest, or the render farm, whichever hurts more?

Robin Lochmann: Sometimes all you need is a deadline. Right up until it was being screened, I was still tweaking details that nobody else would ever notice. Then, when the time was up, I was happy to let it go. I think only you can decide for yourself when it is finished; nobody else can make that decision for you.

https://www.robinlochmann.com/

The post Chrysalis first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: 3ds Max is a Windows DCC for modeling, animation, and rendering, commonly paired with Arnold and add-ons like tyFlow for archviz, motion graphics, and VFX handoffs.

What 2027.1 actually changes

3ds Max 2027.1 ships as a minor update focused on tightening outputs and expanding a couple of procedural building blocks rather than adding a brand-new workflow. The headline is Smart Bevel output quality. The update targets artifacts that show up on more complex geometry.

The other modeling-side change lands in the Data Channel modifier. Three new operators join the stack for converting data between formats, which matters when a setup depends on passing values through different data types without writing external scripts.

This is the kind of update that can quietly fix daily annoyances. It is also the kind that can quietly break a toolchain if you rely on exact behavior in procedural stacks, so test it on real scenes before you let it anywhere near teh shot schedule.

Smart Bevel: fewer ugly surprises

Smart Bevel arrived in the base 2027 release as a bevel-generation system aimed at post-Boolean intersections. In 2027.1, the focus stays on the output itself. The update wants to lessen the amount of artifacts that appear when Smart Bevel runs across more complex intersections and topology, with the stated goal (! Not tested) of reducing those artifacts rather than expanding the tool with new controls.

If your scenes lean on Boolean-heavy hard surface work, this kind of quality pass can mean less time hunting for shading glitches and less manual cleanup after the fact. If your pipeline bakes normals or exports to realtime, it can also mean more stable downstream results, since bevel quality tends to leak into everything from edge highlights to tangent space shading.

Data Channel: three new converters

The Data Channel modifier is the procedural playground for people who like building their own operators instead of clicking the same menu five hundred times. In 3ds Max 2027.1, it gains three new operators described as “converters” between data formats.

They are:; Float_to_Point3, FloatOP and PointOP, and to quote Adsk itself: “Float_to_Point3 converts a float channel into a Point3 channel. FloatOp and PointOp (a point 3 operation) let you drive changes to float and Point3 data through the DCM.”

In practice, Data Channel setups often hit friction when one part of the stack expects a different data type than the previous node outputs. Conversions sound boring until you are stuck doing workarounds for something as simple as routing a float into a vector-like structure or adapting a value for a later operator. These new operators are supposed to be a way to move data between formats inside the modifier stack.

Arnold integration: new core, plus a cloud experiment

Arnold for 3ds Max updates to MAXtoA 5.9.2.0, a feature release built on Arnold 7.5.1.1. It includes a Tech Preview of Flow Render, described as an Arnold cloud-rendering solution, plus support for tyFlow volumes. It includes a Tech Preview of Flow Render, described as an Arnold cloud-rendering solution, plus support for tyFlow volumes.

Here is the Tutorial for the Maya-Version of Flow Renderer:

Flow Render comes with 2400 minutes per user per month of render time for testing and evaluation, with feedback routed to the Arnold feedback forums.

MAXtoA also adds tyFlow volume support via a new tyFlow rollout that lets you assign an Arnold volume shader. The default uses a standard Blackbody setup driven by the tyFlow temperature channel, and there are presets that either bake an approximation of tyFlow ramps into editable Arnold ramps or generate a non-editable OSL shader to more closely match tyFlow’s look.

On the rendering side, the aov_write_rgb, aov_write_float, and aov_write_rgba shader nodes now work inside volume shader networks, with the volume raymarcher collecting and integrating AOV closures using Beer-Lambert weighting. Flat outputs like EXR and TIFF and deep EXR are supported, and Arnold logs a warning if conflicting blend_opacity settings write to the same AOV name from both surface and volume shaders. The notes also call out about a 16 percent overhead with two active volume AOVs at fine step sizes.

Normal_map gains a tangent_space_type option that adds MIKKTSpace normal mapping support, with a standard mode preserving prior behavior and a mikk mode evaluating normal maps using MIKKTSpace data for consistent shading across applications. CPU renders on Windows are also optimized, with most scenes showing faster render times.

Flow Render comes with 2400 minutes per user per month of render time for testing and evaluation, with feedback routed to the Arnold feedback forums.

On the rendering side, the aov_write_rgb, aov_write_float, and aov_write_rgba shader nodes now work inside volume shader networks, with the volume raymarcher collecting and integrating AOV closures using Beer-Lambert weighting. Flat outputs like EXR and TIFF and deep EXR are supported, and Arnold logs a warning if conflicting blend_opacity settings write to the same AOV name from both surface and volume shaders. The notes also call out about a 16 percent overhead with two active volume AOVs at fine step sizes.

Normal_map gains a tangent_space_type option that adds MIKKTSpace normal mapping support, with a standard mode preserving prior behavior and a mikk mode evaluating normal maps using MIKKTSpace data for consistent shading across applications. CPU renders on Windows are also optimized, with most scenes showing faster render times.

tyFlow volumes get a nod

One extra detail in the Arnold integration update is support for tyFlow volumes, enabling rendering of smoke and fire simulated with tyFlow’s sparse fluid engine.

For anyone doing effects lookdev directly in Max, volume compatibility is not glamorous, but it is the difference between a nice sim preview and an actual final render path. If you rely on tyFlow for quick-turn sims, this is worth a controlled test with your typical render settings and AOV requirements.

Availability, licensing, and the fine print you still have to read

3ds Max 2027.1 is compatible with Windows 11, and offered as rental-only. Subscriptions start at $255 per month or $2,010 per year. An Indie subscription option is available at $330 per year for qualifying artists under the stated income and project value thresholds.

None of this changes the basic rule for production: new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, ideally with representative scenes, caches, and handoffs across your full pipeline.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-D500E31E-76EF-4C46-B856-7673A5488199
https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-C70039CE-C982-4CE0-B1AE-A7432D6FE563
https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-E0761A92-60BC-4ECE-BA54-BB7D87775039
https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-37C6EC5F-8025-4A11-A36F-EF3B285B35A5
https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-7CC2F041-F797-4DB9-B2F9-326AAB994F37

The post Autodesk updates 3ds Max to 2027.1 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Maya is a core DCC from Autodesk for modeling, rigging, animation, and FX, with lookdev via LookdevX and node FX via Bifrost, plus pipeline handoff through USD.

The headline feature is editorial glue

Maya 2027.1 adds support for OpenTimelineIO in the Sequencer, enabling interchange of editorial cut data between DCC and timeline tools.

Sequencer gets editorial glue, not just buttons

Maya 2027.1 adds import and export support for OpenTimelineIO, with OTIO data being a standardised equivalent to XML for supported sequence, track, shot, audio, and file reference information. OTIO import preserves camera assignments and camera attributes, and reconstructs tracks from stored track information. The same workflow includes additional shot-level data such as labels, colors, thumbnails, and frame range information.

Sequencer also gets a round of editorial workflow updates beyond OTIO. Autodesk claims improvements to timeline exchange, shot editing, audio handling, playblast output controls, and scripting access. Shot creation now works directly on a selected track, or from a selected Time Slider range. Shot editing includes an updated hold workflow where hold frames come from a dedicated Hold mode while you drag shot edges. That sounds small until you try it on a cut with a dozen micro-trims and discover you do not need to invent a new swearing dialect.

Audio behavior becomes stricter. Sequencer uses only audio associated with the sequence. Audio not linked to Sequencer gets ignored, and Sequencer audio does not mix with Trax audio. A new Time Slider audio menu option called Use Sequencer Sounds controls that behavior. Playblast Shot Options adds Display Size controls for output resolution, with options listed as From Window, From Render Settings, Custom, and From Image Attributes. Output resolution depends on the chosen Display Size and Scale settings. Zooming in Sequencer now centers on the cursor when you use the mouse wheel, which helps the tiemline stop teleporting away from the thing you actually meant to inspect.

As always, new interchange formats look great in demos and get weird at 2 a.m. Test OTIO import and export on your real sequences before you bet a delivery on it.

MotionMaker focuses on editing clarity

Autodesk positions 2027.1 as a release with AI-powered tools and everyday workflow updates, and MotionMaker gets the everyday part this time. MotionMaker now shows frame ranges directly on clips and active windows. The stated goal is clearer timing feedback and behavior aligned with Sequencer.

Character naming gets a cleanup. Autodesk standard characters display simplified names in the UI, dropping the adsk_ prefix while keeping internal identifiers for compatibility. Character definitions also support a display name attribute used in the Create menu and character creation options.

New keyboard shortcuts navigate to the adjacent start frame before or after the current action clip in the timeline, aimed at faster clip-to-clip movement while editing. Updates to character registry handling also reduce redundant processing when creating MotionMaker registries.

Smart Bevel keeps hunting the ugly edge cases

Smart Bevel receives quality updates described as handling more complex geometry with fewer errors, with the practical promise of less manual cleanup on geometry with many intersecting edges.

Cutback relaxation improves to help prevent straight-edge segments from shifting, aimed at hard-surface models that mix linear and smooth forms. Smart Bevel also reduces spikes and jagged sawtooth corners in certain edge cases. Limiting works better across intersection types, with improvements intended to stop bevel results from crossing. Intersections previously missed are now detected.

Arc welding of new junctions becomes more thorough, and isolated arc removal becomes more reliable. Smart Bevel also improves handling of edge sequences that previously failed to bevel, with the result described as proper beveling and prevention of holes or missing faces at junctions along the sequence. Preset support expands so Smart Bevel presets can now save the Remove Isolated Arcs state.

Bifrost adds a search box and more sim and rig polish

Bifrost 3.1.0.8 adds a way to find where specific nodes are used in the graph, plus other new features and improvements. The same version lists updates for rigid body simulation, including per-instance colors, plus performance improvements for rigging and viewport drawing. New high-level compounds include deform_onto_mesh_UVs, wrap_deform_by_mesh, and wrap_deform_by_points. Rigs built with Bifrost now support Maya Cached Playback for improved performance, with a stated limitation that Cached Playback only works if the rig uses no feedback ports.

USD for Maya targets variants, and pins the manager

The USD plugin update listed as USD for Maya 0.36 adds support for targeting specific variants to receive edits, including changes to geometry and materials. The USD Variant Manager can now be pinned to its current display to prevent it from updating when you change selection. That is the kind of feature you only notice after it saves you from editing the wrong thing during a review.

LookdevX projects textures, searches graphs, and stays Arnold-friendly

LookdevX 2.1.0 adds texture projection nodes for mapping textures without UV coordinates. The workflow described uses the Node Library under Autodesk to add a projection node into the graph, connect a texture input, then connect the output to a material. Eight projection types are available: Planar, Spherical, Cylindrical, Ball, Cubic, Tri-Planar, Concentric, and Perspective. A Projection node combines all types into one node, with switching done inside the node so the texture updates on the object.

LookdevX also adds Graph Editor search to find nodes by name, aiming to reduce scrolling in larger graphs. Universal SRT manipulator support lands for the first matrix44 input port on LookdevX nodes, letting you edit that transform directly in the viewport via the usual manipulator workflow.

Arnold and Substance updates ride along

Autodesk lists Arnold for Maya 5.6.1.1 as part of the update, with changes since 2027 including a tech preview of Flow Render, custom AOVs for volume shaders, MIKKTSpace normal mapping support, and additional updates. Maya 2027.1 also includes Substance 3D 3.0.6.

Treat both as pipeline changes, even if you never touch a shader graph. Renderer and material tooling changes can break assumptions in templated scenes, and reliabel output beats exciting output when a client stares at a schedule.

Platforms and pricing

Maya 2027.1 is available for Windows 11, RHEL, and Rocky Linux 8.10 and 9.7, plus macOS 14.0 and later. The software is rental-only, with subscriptions listed as US$255 per month or US$2,010 per year. In many countries, artists earning under US$100,000 per year and working on projects valued under US$100,000 per year qualify for Maya Indie subscriptions, listed as US$330 per year. Maya Creative 2027.1 is also available, listed as pay-as-you-go with prices starting at US$3 per day and a minimum spend of US$300 per year. It has the same new features as Maya 2027.1, except for Bifrost.

New tools and innovations should always be tested before use in production, ideally on real shots and real assets, not a perfect demo cube that never gets a change request.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-F923AA68-6CE5-4292-88EA-292F5A786BA2

The post Maya 2027.1 adds OTIO to Sequencer first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the studio: Lux Aeterna delivers documentary and natural history VFX including CG environments, FX, and compositing, and it mixes scanned data with CG for shows made with broadcasters and streamers.

History likes receipts

Historical reconstruction only works when the images carry the same authority as the research. The studio leans on archaeological reference, field documentation, and specialist feedback to keep reconstructions grounded, especially when the brief asks for ancient humans that look plausible in stills and in sequence work.

Two recent projects show how far that approach goes. Secrets of the Neanderthals needed a cave interior rebuild and physical remains that read like real bones. Human pushed further, asking for early human avatars built from actor scans and refined against scientific consultation, plus maps and timelines driven by datasets.

Bones first, drama second

For the Neanderthal work, the team recreated the interior of Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq, the site of one of the largest ever discoveries of Neanderthal remains. It used a mix of reference drawings, photographs, and expert advice from professors at the University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University to guide accuracy, including cases where remains had been damaged or moved from their original positions.

Skeleton placement used inverse kinematics so the bones could interact with the ground in a natural way. The pipeline also dealt with scan data arriving as a 3D point cloud, then converting it into polygons that could support a usable cave reconstruction. That conversion problem tends to separate demo reels from production, because bad meshing reads instantly, even when the camera does not linger.

Point clouds, polygons, and the cave that ate your schedule

The cave build started with LiDAR scans that came in as a 3D point cloud. The team developed algorithms to convert the points into polygons for the reconstruction, then used Houdini to isolate areas of scan data so the mesh could be assembled and recombined like a 3D jigsaw. That kind of procedure-heavy work sits squarely in the Houdini mindset: build repeatable ops, then iterate until the scan stops looking like scan data and starts looking like a place.

The result aims for a CG environment that matches the real location closely enough that it can carry the weight of the story, while also supporting the additional CG work needed for the remains and the shot context. In a documentary pipeline, that matters because the images often sit right next to photography, maps, and archive material, with no cinematic lighting trickery to hide behind.

Lux Aeterna delivered 60 shots for a single series, and that number matters because it hints at the production scale when planning resources. WE might e talking about geological and evolutionary tiespans in the story, but delivery is far more rapid.

Full bodies: photogrammetry, casting, and millimetre arguments

The later project asked for historically accurate avatars built from scans of real performers, refined with skeletal research and scientific input. It was a five-part series produced by BBC Studios Science Unit for the BBC and PBS NOVA, hosted by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, and it frames visual effects as a way to tell a story spanning hundreds of thousands of years without a written record.

The workflow combined ultra-high-resolution body scans with iterative model refinements guided by BBC Studios and scientific advisors. It worked with London-based scanning studio Sample & Hold, which describes custom head and body photogrammetry systems and a photogrammetry robot for objects. In practice, that puts photogrammetry into the same category as any other acquisition step: controlled capture, predictable output, and a pipeline that can survive the boring parts like data cleanup and repeat scans.

The stated goal was four historically accurate avatars representing Jebel Irhoud, Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, and Homo erectus, based on scientific data and real-world actors. Alongside the character work, the project also required prehistoric environments and landscapes to show migration and later disappearance of early human life across the globe. The work targets ancient humans, but it does not tolerate ancient guesswork.

Maps, timelines, and the part nobody notices until it breaks

A second strand of the work focused on animated maps and timelines that visualised migration, development, and disappearance across millennia. The graphics are being built using datasets provided by BBC Studios Science Unit researchers and scientific consultants, and not as speculative graphics.

One specific challenge involved changing coastlines and submerged landmasses, where the team created transitions and overlays to keep the visuals clear while staying scientifically accurate. That is the kind of “small” work that carries a lot of editorial risk: the map has to be readable, the timing has to serve the cut, and the choices have to stay consistent across episodes.

On the delivery scale, the project description states sixty crafted shots across five hour-long episodes, and it frames the approach as avoiding prosthetics and overly stylised effects while using a hybrid of photogrammetry, consultation, and minimalist Compositing.

What to take away if you do this for a living

If your job involves building reconstructions that sit next to real-world evidence, the takeaway is simple: acquisition quality and reference discipline decide how much time you spend “fixing” later. Scan data arrives noisy, research notes arrive detailed, and schedules arrive optimistic. The pipeline has to translate all three into images that read as plausible without distracting from the content. And as always, test any new workflow, plugin, or automation step on a throwaway shot before you bet a delivery on it. Just like with rare fossils, you don’t want to play loose with the materials.

https://www.lavfx.com/
https://www.lavfx.com/secrets-of-the-neanderthals
https://www.lavfx.com/blog/human

P.S. You have NO idea how big the challenge was not to replace “Ancient Humans” and “Prehistoric” with the users of one ore more DCC-packages….

The post Lux Aeterna rebuilds ancient humans first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Stylized Tree Asset Generator is a Blender Geometry Nodes based tree builder for stylized environments, with Eevee focused shading and toolsets that also run in Cycles.

Pines, at last, for people who hate needles

Stylized Tree Asset Generator now includes a dedicated Stylized Pine Tree Asset Generator as part of its 2.0 update. The new pine toolset comes with new assets, textures, shaders, and materials, and keeps the same general workflow as the original tree generator to stay consistent.

The update also targets speed and housekeeping. Version 2.0 replaces deprecated nodes from Blender 4.2, optimizes UV storage, and cleans up and optimizes the Geometry Nodes setup. It also adds directional control to the wind feature and ships an updated user guide.

If you were already using the original generator for quick background dressing, the pine addition is welcome because it expands the library beyond broadleaf shapes and lets you cover the classic stylized use case: conifers in midground forests, mountain ranges, and gamey dioramas without modeling individual branches by hand.

Painterly Trees for Blender: ShapeScape Studio Blooms

What it actually builds and how far you can push it

The core promise is a Geometry Nodes setup that lets you shape trees quickly, then dial resolution up or down depending on what you need. You can go from low poly silhouettes to more detailed results by adjusting resolution and density inputs, keeping a tighter leash on polygon count.

The tool generates automatic UVs so you can bake textures. That makes it easier to take a procedural look, commit it, and move on, whether you need a static asset for a library or a one-off hero tree that still has to survive export.

It also supports using your own mesh to shape the leaves. That is the escape hatch for people who like procedural trunks but want art-directed foliage shapes, or who already have leaf cards and want the generator to place them. There is also a Random Generator input intended to produce infinite variations with similar characteristics. In practice, that is the difference between a forest and a cloning accident, especially when you need dozens of trees that read as a family but do not look copied.

Some of the shading work targets Eevee. The product notes say the shading was designed in Eevee and may not work as intended in Cycles by default, while the rest of the tools work in both render engines. So if your pipeline leans on Cycles, expect to tweak materials rather than treating the lookdev as drop-in.

Painterly Garden: 200+ Ghibli-Style Foliage Assets for Blender

Presets, shaders, normals, and the parts you will actually notice

Stylized Tree Asset Generator includes preset textures and materials aimed at getting you to a usable look quickly. It lists 10 leaf texture presets, 16 trunk presets, and 12 hand-painted procedural leaf textures. Those sit alongside procedural textures that remain adjustable, so you can keep the preset as a starting point rather than a locked style.

For shading, it includes a custom toon shader for the trunk and two shading groups for leaves, one designed for simpler use and one offering deeper controls. It also includes four sets of custom normals meant to help you land the shading style you want and to keep shading stable when you animate wind and use the scatter tool.

The update also keeps the wind feature in the toolbox, and adds direction control. That matters because wind without direction tends to look like your trees are trying to shake off a bad rig. Directional control lets you line up motion with camera moves or scene beats, instead of getting random flapping.

This is also where teh usual production advice applies: test it in a real shot, with your real render settings, before you roll it into a template file and wonder why the farm hates you.

Compatibility and versions

The newest versions of the tool are made for Blender 4.2 and newer, while still including older versions of the tools as far back as Blender 3.3. If your studio sits on a locked version for a show, that matters, because it suggests you can still run a supported variant without forcing an upgrade mid-production. The 2.0 update specifically calls out node maintenance aligned with Blender 4.2, including replacing deprecated nodes and cleaning up the node graphs. That kind of update tends to be invisible until it is missing, at which point your node tree becomes an archeological dig.

V2.0 Update
Huge update of my Stylized Tree Asset Generator, you can now make Stylized Pine Trees!
And it's 25% off right now on @superhivemarket https://t.co/noDDhYwniC https://t.co/AlV1OYbOUM pic.twitter.com/tWZSN5v4fK

— Rei (@Reipart_) May 6, 2026

Pricing and the temporary deal situation

Pricing is tiered on Superhive Market. A Standard License is listed at $12.50 and includes textures, shading nodes, geometry nodes, and tools. An Asset Pack Standard License is listed at $16.50 and adds the full asset pack. A Commercial Use option is listed at $42 and includes the asset pack while allowing commercial use.

If you are evaluating it for production, the practical move is to grab it, build a handful of trees that match your show style, bake what you need, and push them through your actual export and render path. Then decide whether it becomes a staple, a one-off, or a neat toy that lives in a personal toolkit.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/stylized-tree-generator

The post If you yearn for the pines, go Blender first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Motion designer Mike Gaynor built Caddis over four months in nights and weekends, and pitched it as the layer timeline you already know paired with a node graph inside every single layer.

Work starts in a familiar stack of layers, with keyframes and timing edits on a timeline. Select a layer and its node contents appear in a graph panel beside the timeline and viewport. The idea is to avoid choosing a single paradigm when motion work often lives between both. Inside that per-layer grahp, the beta already includes more than 100 nodes to wire together. Nodes can drive parameters directly, with examples like linking rotation to scale, scale to audio, and audio to color.

Caddis Layers can stay simple, or turn fully procedural

A layer can stay as basic as one line of text, or expand into a fully procedural build with fields, shapes, video, and audio flowing through it. The demo frames it like patching a modular synth, with links between values, movement, and math. The product site leans into the same concept with a promise of visual logic in place of expressions, and a workflow where every parameter becomes something you can wire, modulate, or replace. It also positions the node graph as the home for compositing work like blending, masking, and mattes. Color tokens appear in the demo as a way to recolor a whole project in one click. The demo also shows saving subgraphs as recipes, then reusing or sharing them as a single file.

Responsive comps, plus GPU-native rendering

The demo says designs can be responsive, showing a resize from 16 by 9 to 9 by 16 with the layout adapting on its own. Caddis describes itself as a native desktop app on a modern GPU pipeline. The website calls out GPU-native rendering, aiming for a responsive viewport while iterating, and exports without leaving the tool. Treat that as a marketing claim until your own workstation agrees. Either way, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, ideally on real shots, real deadlines, and at least one truly cursed client change request. Beta is coming, so we obviously haven’t tried it yet – sign up as well, we’ll learn together what actually appears when Caddis comes out.

Import and export reality check

Caddis positions itself as an alternative rather than a drop-in replacement for After Effects and does not import After Effects projects. Instead, it works by importing media and rebuilding comps inside the app. On export, the product site lists standard formats including Apple ProRes, MP4, and image sequences including H.264 and ProRes, plus PNG and OpenEXR image sequences, and standard web formats. The demo additionally names WebM and GIF, plus PNG sequences, as native.

Caddis Pricing, beta status, and platform notes

Caddis is free during beta. The product site lists a $99 launch price for early adopters and $129 regular pricing, positioned as a one-time purchase with no subscription. The software should be compatible with macOS 12.0 or later, with a Windows version due shortly after launch. If you plan to roll it into a pipeline, assume the usual early-tool homework: bake out deliverables, double-check colour management expectations, and confirm the layer graph behaviour does not change between beta waves.

https://www.caddis.app/

The post Caddis mixes layers with nodes per layer first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Boris FX Sapphire is a multi host VFX plug-in suite for editors and compositors, used in After Effects, Premiere, Media Composer, and OpenFX hosts like Resolve, Flame, and Nuke.

Defocus that tries to behave like glass

Boris FX ships Sapphire 2026.5 with a new effect called Advanced Defocus, built to recreate lens blur character rather than just blur pixels. In Sapphire, artists can start from presets, including ones built from real-world lens references and more stylised options, then dial in Defocus Width plus relative width and height for anamorphic style stretching.

Advanced Defocus focuses on the lens kernel, where artists shape bokeh as circles, polygons with adjustable sides and roundness, or custom shapes. It also includes controls to introduce imperfections tied to aperture blades, such as adjustable blade notches, as well as options for colour fringing and noise. The tool targets everything from cheap, dirty glass to high-end primes, depending on how far you push those controls.

The lens vignette section adds classic edge darkening, but also an optcial vignette control that changes distortion toward the frame edges. A Matte Box control goes past soft cropping by simulating uneven light entry, slightly darkening one side while also clipping individual defocused highlights.

From grungy to clean

Advanced Defocus also includes lens textures that break up overly uniform bokeh, with parameters that range from subtle variation to grungy lens looks. Extra controls include highlight boosting, chromatic-style fringing, and grain management to match the foreground and background.

In Adobe After Effects, Advanced Defocus appears under Effect in the Sapphire Blur plus Sharpen category. The effect can work as a straight lens emulation pass, a stylised motion graphics treatment, or a transition building block. A workflow shown in Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Fusion uses Advanced Defocus to soften a keyed background for more believable depth, then adds sensor-style grain to help match elements. Another workflow in After Effects links defocus controls across layers, uses Affect Alpha to defocus type with the background, and offsets values to keep the illusion that typography sits closer to camera.

For edits, Advanced Defocus can also drive transitions inside VEGAS Pro by building an S Transition in the Sapphire Builder variant designed for transitions. That approach ties animation to the transition length on the timeline rather than keyframing, and then applies the same peak values to both incoming and outgoing clips.

Glare gets a rebuild, and flares get louder

Sapphire 2026.5 reworks S_Glare with smoother rendering, richer spectral color, and updated parameters including highlight isolation, cleaner rays, and more natural falloff, plus new styles that widen the look range beyond traditional glare.

In Adobe After Effects, S_Glare sits under the Lighting category and behaves the same across Sapphire hosts. The first control to touch is Threshold: raise it for fewer glares, lower it for more, and expect wildly different results depending on the footage. Sapphire 2026.5 also changes what the defaults look like compared with older versions, so the same effect can start from a different baseline than legacy installs.

Presets matter a lot for S_Glare, but the preview can mislead. Results change with viewer zoom level, so checking at 100 percent gives a more reliable read before you commit. Presets also store Threshold, so loading a preset often means rebalancing Threshold right away to avoid either nothing happening or everything exploding.

If glares drift or slip onto areas you do not want, Threshold Blur becomes the other big lever. Lowering Threshold Blur picks up many more points of interest, which can reduce slippage but may add jitter. A practical balancing rule shown here is: when Blur comes down, Threshold goes up, then you fine-tune from there.

Sapphire includes integrated Mocha inside the effect for masking control. A workflow shown here uses an object brush and Mask ML to generate a mask, then inverts the Mocha mask so glare stays in the scene but stops emanating from a subject.

S_Glare also appears as an embedded component in S_NightSky, where you can open the glare editor, load glare presets, and adjust glare size to customise the look directly within the NightSky effect.

Procedural ridges, more presets, faster stacking

A new Texture Ridges effect generates ridge-like patterns from noise, with controls for octave scaling, speed, frequency, contrast, and layering to build animated surface detail and abstract motion design textures. Sapphire 2026.5 also adds more than 100 new and improved presets, including anime, sci-fi, and abstract fractal motion graphics looks.

Effect Builder gets an interface update aimed at faster custom effect and transition creation, plus new built-in Dots and Noise tools. If you build stacks for repeatable looks, this is the part worth a quiet test session before you let it touch client shots.

Pricing and updates

Sapphire ships as a plug-in collection with subscriptions, upgrade and support plans, and perpetual licenses. Subscriptions start at 545 US dollars per year or 80 US dollars per month. Customers with current Sapphire or Boris FX Suite subscriptions, or with Sapphire upgrade and support plans, get the 2026.5 release obviously as a free update. If you aren’t sure: get the free Trialversion. As always, test new tools and presets in your own pipeline before you rely on them in production.

https://borisfx.com/products/sapphire/#whats-new

The post Boris FX Sapphire 2026.5 adds Advanced Defocus first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: The Pixel Farm makes PFTrack, a node based matchmove and reconstruction tool that exports to DCCs like Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, SideFX Houdini, Blender and Unreal Engine, with improved dense point clouds via OpenUSD.

Hero Cloud is a new reconstruction node

PFTrack Build 26.05.19 adds Hero Cloud, a node that generates a measured dense 3D point cloud from a single tracked plate. It sits in the Geometry category and runs downstream of a solved camera, turning an ordinary camera solve into spatial data you can actually measure against. Hero Cloud claims to be through-the-lens reconstruction, meaning it extracts depth from the camera movement in the shot rather than relying on a separate photogrammetry set or a LiDAR scan.

The node targets a familiar production reality: you get a brief that needs measured 3D, but the the on-set… people…. said “Fix it in Post, heheeheeh” and did not capture the extra data for cases like set extension, CG integration, lighting reference, forensic analysis, architectural measurement, and archival footage where you cannot go back and reshoot reference. If the plate is all you have, Hero Cloud aims to make that plate pull double duty.

Hero Cloud works on plates PFTrack can track and solve, and works footage sources that include cinema cameras, drones, body cams, dash cams, action cameras, mirrorless and DSLR cameras, CCTV, and archival film. Basically, every type of video. Camera metadata can help but it is not required, and the Camera Sensor Database can cover common cameras automatically, with the Camera Solver able to estimate parameters when metadata is missing.

There is a catch, and it is the same catch as every method that tries to infer depth from motion: the shot needs parallax. Locked off shots or shots with very little movement can produce sparse or unreliable results. Most production footage, including handheld stationary shots, can still have enough movement to produce usable reconstruction, while deliberate camera motion tends to produce richer results.

A cleaner route into splat training

PFTrack 26.05.19 adds a Postshot export option that writes Hero Cloud point clouds and associated tracked cameras in COLMAP format. In other words, matchmove and reconstruction can stay in the same app up to the point where you hand off to splat training.

If you already live in the Gaussian Splatting world, COLMAP is a common interchange format and COLMAP itself has both GUI and command line workflows. The practical value here is that you do not have to glue together separate tracking, reconstruction, and export steps before you ever open Jawset Postshot. You track the plate, generate the cloud, export in COLMAP format, then train the splat.

This is an artist friendly route into a workflow that has historically leaned on command line tooling. That is a reasonable and recommendable goal, but it still deserves the usual pipeline skepticism: try it on a real shot and verify your coordinate frames, scaling, and camera consistency before you let it anywhere near a deliverable.

USD point clouds now carry more than positions

The same build extends USD export to support dense point clouds with per point normal and colour data, because a point cloud that only carries XYZ positions often becomes a dumb scaffold the moment it leaves its origin app. Normals and colour help downstream tools treat the cloud as more than a vague spatial fog, and can make it easier to use for measurement, placement, modelling reference, and lookdev decisions.

Improved integration with USD aware tools including Unreal Engine, Maya, and Houdini. It also claims (!) improved FBX export reliability for very large dense point clouds, aimed at users who previously hit issues exporting big clouds via FBX.

If your pipeline already standardises on USD, this is the kind of unglamorous export detail that can decide whether a new feature becomes a daily tool or a demo-only party trick. Still, test it on your actual asset scale and on your actual DCC import settings. Export support is never a substitute for shot-based validation, and you only find the sharp edges when production hits them, much like furniture at night can only be found with toes and shins.

Photo Mesh gets a single shot input path

Studio and Enterprise editions receive an update to Photo Mesh that enables it to consume Hero Cloud point clouds as input. That creates an internal single-shot path from tracked plate to dense cloud to surfaced textured mesh, without leaving PFTrack. The Pixel Farm describes Photo Mesh as the highest fidelity route when you have a planned photo set, while Hero Cloud covers the case where you only have the hero plate.

In practical terms, this puts a reconstruction option closer to matchmove, and it reduces the number of handoffs in the middle of a cmaera tracking job. Whether it replaces any external reconstruction tooling depends on what you already trust for meshing, texturing, and scale fidelity, but the internal integration is at least a coherent story: generate the cloud, feed it into Photo Mesh, then export into the rest of your pipeline.

The viewport tweak you will actually use

26.05.19 also adds an Active Camera viewport option in viewer windows, with a snap to active clip toggle. It sounds minor, and it is, which is why it will get used: quick visual verification against the source plate tends to catch mistakes faster than hunting through node outputs. The release notes pitch it as useful for checking Hero Cloud reconstruction, but the feature applies anywhere you want a fast way to see what the tracked camera saw.

Trial and licensing notes

Solo trial mode now enables full export functionality for seven days. The release notes describe this as enough time to take a plate from track through Hero Cloud and out to Postshot or USD, rather than being limited to evaluating the toolset without export.

For Studio, the release notes state it is available on rent to buy for 5 or 30 days, or as a perpetual purchase. The PFTrack Creator Program page states PFTrack Solo licenses sell for £699. Treat that as a price reference for Solo licensing, not a promise of regional pricing or bundles.

What this changes in real work

Hero Cloud aims to shift PFTrack from a pure matchmove and survey friendly reconstruction hub toward a single shot scene reconstruction step that can be used even when the onset data plan fell apart. The strongest parts of the release are not flashy, they are connective tissue: COLMAP export for Postshot, denser USD point cloud payloads, and a meshing path that stays inside the same graph.

It is also a reminder that the industry has started to treat point clouds as a first class asset, not only a temporary byproduct. When point clouds export with colour and normals and survive the trip into USD aware DCCs, they become reusable poitn based reference that can support layout, set extension decisions, and reconstruction driven previs.

https://www.pftrack.com/post/pftrack-build-26-05-19-is-now-live

https://www.pftrack.com/post/hero-cloud-tutorial

The post PFTrack gets Hero Cloud first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Clip Studio Paint does illustration, comics, and 2D animation on desktop and mobile, and sits alongside the wider Clip Studio app and its cloud and asset ecosystem.

Version 5.0 is about speed and control

Celsys puts Clip Studio Paint 5.0 on iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows, and macOS as a new major release, updating drawing performance and workflow comfort, with new tools aimed at getting cleaner results without constantly switching modes.

If you spend your day in line work, the headline feature is Smart Shape. You draw with any pen or brush, then long press to tidy a line, curve, or shape without jumping to a separate figure tool. That idea reads small, but it targets the exact kind of micro friction that adds up over a hundred panels or a long day of design passes. It is also the kind of feature that can change muscle memory, so plan a short retraining window before you bet client work on it.

The 5.0 feature list also calls out faster rendering with large brushes using a new setting that trades quality for speed, and improved rendering speed for thick watercolor edge settings. Stroke previews can help reduce brush lag when you draw with high stabilization. The blur tool and brushes with Running Color also change blending behavior, so colors outside the brush cursor or selection stop blending in that mode.

Smart Shape wants cleaner lines without a new tool

Smart Shape lives in the same place as your usual brushes, and it tries to keep you there. Instead of switching away from your current drawing tool, you trigger the cleanup by holding your stylus down at the end of a storke, then let the app resolve it into a cleaner result. That matters most when you bounce between sketchy exploration and precise technical marks, where changing tools can feel like slamming the brakes every few seconds.

On the settings side, Smart Shape can be toggled in Preferences under Tool. That makes it easy to turn on for inking sessions and turn off when you want raw, messy exploration, without building separate workspaces just to keep it from interfering.

The update also introduces velocity as a new brush dynamic, with a velocity graph added to Pen Pressure Settings and Tilt Settings as an option for brush size and opacity input dynamics. In plain terms, you can push values higher the faster you draw, which is useful when you want quick flicks to behave differently from slow, controlled marks.

3D gets hands, fog, and more paintable surfaces

On the 3D side, Clip Studio Paint 5.0 adds a hand model to the 3D materials, positioned as a reference tool for drawing hands. The tool includes adjustable hand shapes, and it works with hand pose materials and a Hand Scanner for quick posing. That puts a dedicated hand reference directly in the same scene where you already stage characters and props, instead of forcing a second app or a browser tab for reference.

The 3D feature list also expands where you can draw directly on 3D objects, including UV mapped vertices plus 3D primitives and 3D drawing figures. It also adds the ability to group multiple 3D models into a folder and move or rotate them as one, which fits the way artists actually block scenes, especially when you want to keep a kitbash cluster behaving like a single prop.

Fog gets a specific upgrade too. You can set Fog type to Height on a 3D layer and define fog based on the height of the 3D space, including whether it starts from above or below. It is a simple knob, but it can help with depth cues in backgrounds, quick lighting mood boards, and concept paintovers.

For internal workflows, the EX edition gets batch export textures on 3D layers when you select them with the Object tool. That lets you export all textures of a custom material or model at once, which sounds mundane until you are the person who keeps getting asked to deliver “all the textures, please” five minutes before a handoff.

If you follow concept art workflows, the net effect is less time fighting reference and more time iterating on design.

Layer ops and UI cleanup aim at real work

A production painting app lives or dies by small operations, and 5.0 targets a few that show up constantly. Tonal correction commands can now apply to multiple layers at once, applying color corrections to each selected layer. That is useful when you keep values separated by material, pass, or shot element, but still need consistent global tweaks without flattening.

The Fill tool also gets a speed and accuracy improvement, pitched as faster processing with more accurate results. If your pipeline includes lots of flat color blocking for comics, animation layouts, or stylized game art, faster fill behavior is the kind of quiet win that saves real time.

Interface changes focus on reducing terminology and palette friction. Sub Tools get merged into Tools, and tool icons can pop up with related palettes. The Material palette gets a new History folder to show recently used materials, plus easier search and sorting.

In 5.0.4, image materials and template materials, including 3D hand model materials, can sync to the Clip Studio cloud and publish to Clip Studio Assets. That is a practical detail for teams, classrooms, or anyone jumping between machines, as long as you are comfortable with the asset management implications and you test your sync behavior before relying on it in a deadline week.

Licensing and

Celsys lays out multiple ways to get 5.0, depending on whether you subscribe or buy perpetual on Windows and macOS.

New perpetual licenses list at 63 Dollars for Clip Studio Paint PRO 5.0 and 277 Dollars for Clip Studio Paint EX 5.0 on Windows and macOS. Discounted perpetual upgrades from 4.0 to 5.0 list at 29 USD for PRO and 83 $ for EX, with a PRO to EX discounted upgrade to 5.0 listed at 243$

Update Pass pricing for 12 months on Windows and macOS lists at 11$ for PRO and 32$ for EX. Active subscribers and Update Pass users can update to 5.0 as part of their plan.

If your daily setup includes a pen display, a few of these changes will feel less like “new features” and more like fewer tiny interruptions between you and the canvas. Test Smart Shape with your usual brush presets, stabilization settings, and tablet drivers. Test the new blur behavior on the exact kind of painterly blends you rely on. Test 3D grouping and paint on model workflows with the kinds of assets you actually use, especially if you share files across machines or collaborators. New tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, even when the change looks small.

https://www.clipstudio.net/en/dl/release_note/latest/

https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202603/11_01/

The post Clip Studio Paint 5.0 with 3D hands first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: DroneSiteBuilder is a script for Autodesk 3ds Max that reads drone photo metadata to assemble terrain, map context, and matched cameras, bundling GeoBuild and CameraMatch and supporting handoff to Blender, SketchUp, and Autodesk Maya.

What DroneSiteBuilder is trying to fix

DroneSiteBuilder Enterprise turns a folder of drone photos into a full site context scene inside the 3ds Max ecosystem: terrain, aerial drape, buildings, roads, land cover features, points of interest, and one matched camera per photo.

The pipeline reads XMP metadata per image and uses it to place helpers at ground level and flight altitude, then creates a renderer-aware camera per photo and refines orientation using vanishing point detection. The tool targets 3ds Max 2020 or newer on Windows and uses Python 3.9 through 3.12 with NumPy and OpenCV, plus optional modules for the Google path.

First use, abbreviated

Install a standalone Python build and make sure Add Python to PATH is enabled during install, because the tool does not rely on the 3ds Max built-in Python. Place DroneSiteBuilder_Enterprise.ms and vp_detector.py in the same folder and do not install under Program Files, since Windows blocks writes there.

Launch 3ds Max and load the script via drag-and-drop into a viewport or via Scripting > Run Script. Paste your licence key into the activation dialogue and activate, with support for an Enterprise key format and existing CameraMatch Studio keys. After activation the key caches locally for thirty days and the rollout opens.

For the first build, keep original DNG or JPEG drone files in a single folder, keep filenames ending in digits, and keep an internet connection available for the auto fetch steps. Pick a terrain DEM source, keep NOAA GEOID18 enabled for continental US sites and disabled outside the US, then run Process Folder of Drone Photos and accept the summary dialogue. Inspect the result by comparing a matched camera view against the source photo.

The new checkbox: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles

Enterprise v1.2 adds an opt in mode that fetches Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and imports them into 3ds Max as a single merged glb, covering the photo bounding box. The intention is simple: pull a photogrammetric backdrop mesh with terrain, textures, and buildings baked into one continuous model, using the same dataset shown in Google Earth.

The Google path requires a Google Maps Platform project with billing enabled and the Map Tiles API enabled, plus a saved API key in the rollout. The manual describes 1,000 root tileset requests per month free and a per 1,000 price after that, with one DroneSiteBuilder run treated as one root tileset request. If the fetch fails, the tool reports common causes like missing API enablement, low coverage, EEA billed accounts being blocked for this endpoint, missing Python modules, and older 3ds Max builds needing a glTF importer.

This is also where the gaudrrails get real: the Google import produces mesh only content with baked textures, so you do not get separate terrain, buildings, roads, and features objects to isolate, re material, or hide by category.

The standard path is still the controllable one

If you leave the Google option off, the pipeline builds a layered context using public services. Terrain comes from USGS 3DEP in the US or OpenTopography worldwide, aerial imagery comes from Esri World Imagery as a single bounding box JPEG, and vector context comes from OpenStreetMap via Overpass.

The scene builds under a single root helper so you can move, rotate, or scale the entire site as one unit, while cameras intentionally sit outside that parent chain to support camera transplant between scenes. If buildings and roads fail to appear on a run, the manual provides a manual Overpass refetch button that rebuilds buildings, roads, and land features without disturbing terrain, drape, helpers, or cameras.

OpenStreetMap accuracy varies by location and that the resulting geometry accuracy for this context layer sits in the one to six meter range. It contrasts that with paid city model providers such as AccuCities when millimeter level detail matters.

Export and handoff from 3ds Max

DroneSiteBuilder does not change how 3ds Max exports, but it does influence what you export. The standard path creates distinct terrain, buildings, roads, and feature objects you can selectively include in deliverables, while the Google path imports a tile based mesh group that is already baked.

For broad DCC and engine handoffs, 3ds Max includes a built in exporter for glTF and supports export workflows for USD, with export options available through File export and USD and USDZ format selection when the USD tooling is installed. For USD pipelines, the official OpenUSD plugin for 3ds Max is published on GitHub, and Autodesk documentation describes supported USD content types including meshes and cameras.

If your downstream is realtime, glTF targets web and interactive use cases, and you can also push common interchange paths like FBX into engines such as Unity and Epic Unreal Engine, depending on your studio conventions. For camera and layout continuity between scenes, the bundle includes a camera transplant workflow that exports camera data to JSON and recreates it with full precision in another scene.

Practical reality check

This toolkit aims to comperss a traditional drone to 3D context workflow into a short unattended run. The promise stands or falls on your input photos keeping XMP metadata intact, on your site area having decent public map coverage, and on you verifying the result against the plate before trusting it.

We don’t know the price yet, but if you already own the camera match tool in the Studio version, you get it for free, apparently. Quoting: Existing CameraMatch Studio licence keys activate the full DroneSiteBuilder bundle. Studio holders do not pay twice. 

Try both context modes on a test job: the standard layered build when you need controllable components and re-lighting freedom, the Google mesh mode when you need a fast photogrammetry backdrop and can live with mesh-only content and licensing constraints.

https://jamiecardoso-mentalray.blogspot.com/2026/03/dronesitebuilder-enterprise-v12-one.html

https://jamiecardoso.gumroad.com/

The post DroneSiteBuilder adds Google 3D Tiles option first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: MoonRay is a production path tracer with a USD Hydra render delegate for tools using OpenUSD, positioned in rendering and lookdev next to ASWF staples like OpenColorIO.

The Academy Software Foundation has added MoonRay as a hosted project, keeping the renderer under foundation governance while opening contributions to a broader community. DreamWorks Animation developed MoonRay as an open source production path tracing renderer and has used it on every one of its feature films since 2019, including The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2. The project uses the Apache 2.0 license and is developed in C++.

MoonRay includes support for distributed rendering and a pixel matching XPU mode that processes bundles of rays on the GPU as well as the CPU. It also includes bundled path tracing and a USD Hydra render delegate for integration into content creation tools that support the OpenUSD standard, which should make interactive preview workflows less of a custom science project in teh average pipeline.

The ASWF angle

MoonRay now sits alongside other hosted efforts in the ASWF roster, including OpenEXR, OpenVDB, OpenTimelineIO, and Open Shading Language. If your facility already treats OpenColorIO as plumbing, this is the same neighborhood.

For contributors, the project points developers to openmoonray.org and to the ASWF Slack workspace for a MoonRay channel at slack.aswf.io. Documentation is published at docs.openmoonray.org, and the source repository lives under the OpenMoonRay organization on GitHub.

Keynote season meets SIGGRAPH season

ASWF Open Source Days runs in Los Angeles on July 19 to 20, 2026, and the schedule aligns with SIGGRAPH 2026 timing. The keynote comes from DreamWorks Animation CTO Bill Ballew, with a talk titled How to Train Your Renderer: MoonRay’s Journey from DreamWorks’ Dragons to the ASWF.

The event listing describes July 19 as the main program day in Los Angeles, followed by July 20 as a full day of open source Birds of a Feather sessions within SIGGRAPH. The Call for Proposals remains open through May 24, 2026, via the Open Source Days event site.

As always, test new tools and new governance setups before you bet a production schedule on them, even when the feautres list looks exactly like what your render wranglers asked for.

https://openmoonray.org/

https://www.aswf.io/

The post MoonRay Renderer joins ASWF as hosted project first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.