Neat Video is a GPU-accelerated denoising plug-in for NLEs, compositors and grading systems, including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion and Baselight. It builds device specific noise profiles and applies spatial and temporal filtering inside the host application.

OFX plug in across Windows, macOS and Linux

Neat Video v6 is available as a plug in for OpenFX hosts on Windows, macOS and Linux. Version 6.1 of the Neat Video v6 plug in for OFX hosts adds support for Baselight 7. This extends compatibility for grading workflows using OpenFX on macOS and Linux in that host.

Expanded support in other hosts

According to the vendor, version 6.1 adds compatibility with the latest versions of several major host applications. These include Premiere Pro 2026 on Windows and macOS and After Effects 2026 on Windows and macOS. On macOS, version 6.1 supports Final Cut Pro 12 and Motion 6 from Apple. The plug-in is compatible with standalone versions purchased from the App Store as well as bundled versions of Final Cut Pro 12 and Motion 6 included in Apple Creator Studio. The vendor states that the Neat Video 6.1 plug in functions identically in both cases, allowing users to switch between those versions if required. Support for Baselight 7 has also been added, as noted above, via the OFX plug in.

Default Noise Profile and Filter Preset controls

A key update in version 6.1 is the introduction of new controls to simplify using a fixed noise profile and filter preset when working with a series of clips with the same noise. The stated aim is to speed up the overall setup process when applying multiple instances of the noise-reduction effect to similar materials.

Users can now set the Default Noise Profile using the current noise profile. This is implemented through a new button with a popup menu in the Device Noise Profile panel and through new commands in the main menu under Profile.

Similarly, users can set the Default Filter Preset using the current filter settings. This is available via a new button with a popup menu in the Filter Settings panel and through new commands in the main menu under Filter. When the filter is applied to additional clips in the same series, new instances automatically load the Default Noise Profile and Default Filter Preset.

The improved representation of the names of the current noise profile and current filter preset makes it clear when defaults are in use. Their names are displayed in the Device Noise Profile and Filter Settings panels.

The Input Data Gain section in Preferences is disabled when the Default Noise Profile is used. The vendor states that this is because the actually applied gain is determined by the Default Noise Profile in that case.

Reset controls and minor fixes

Version 6.1 adds a new Reset button in the Device Noise Profile panel and a corresponding command in the main menu under Profile to reset the current noise profile. A new Reset button with a popup menu has also been added to the Preferences dialog. This allows users to reset settings on the current page, reset settings on all pages, or re enable all optional messages and dialogs that were previously disabled.

Neat Video 6.1 is available as a free update for licensed users of version 6. Users of earlier major versions can upgrade with a discount. Demo editions are available for evaluation. As always, new tools and updates should be tested in a controlled environment before deployment in production.

// https://www.neatvideo.com/blog/post/neat-video-61-host-support-better-workflow
// https://www.neatvideo.com/download/history/ofx-plugin

The post Neat Video 6.1 updates OFX and host support first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Ten years after its first brushstroke, Escape Motions’ Rebelle 8 lands like a fully matured art studio in silicon form complete with oil stains, brush hairs, and physics. The Slovak studio’s flagship natural-media painting software takes realism seriously: it’s the kind of update that makes you want to buy more RAM just because it deserves it. This is not a “version bump.” This is a full-fledged leap in how pigment, canvas, and light interact. So let’s walk through it from the core physics to the small workflow miracles that make digital painting feel handcrafted again.

The Bristle Revolution

At the heart of Rebelle 8 lies its biggest technical jump yet: the Bristle Brush Engine. Unlike traditional digital brushes, which smear pixels based on a flat mask, this new system models each individual bristle as a particle. Hundreds of micro-strands bend, twist, and separate depending on your pen pressure, tilt, and angle.

Each stroke now contains physical depth and randomness: when you press harder, the brush fans out; when you ease off, it narrows and curls. It’s a small detail, but it changes everything: edges gain life, mid-tones gain subtle vibration, and the simple act of dry-brushing suddenly behaves like the real thing. Artists who work with natural gesture and layered colour will find this feature alone worth the upgrade.

Combined with stylus rotation support, the Bristle system is ideal for expressive portraitists, plein-air painters, or anyone who enjoys visible brushwork. You can even feel the drag of paint across the virtual canvas, as if the stylus itself were dipped in physical pigment. It’s equal parts uncanny and addictive.

RealShader and the Return of Light

Rebelle 8 Pro introduces RealShader, a rendering engine that adds physically accurate lighting to the thick, impasto layers of digital oil paint. Traditional painting software often treats brushstrokes as colour data; RealShader treats them as geometry. Every ridge, lump, and valley now catches highlights and shadows based on a 3D environment map.

Load an HDRI light source and your oils suddenly glow differently under morning light versus studio tungsten. The effect is subtle yet startling, you can literally “move the lamp” and watch your painting respond.

For artists who work with realism, this means previewing how your painting might look under gallery lighting. For illustrators, it means you can fake tactile brush depth without compositing tricks. RealShader turns Rebelle from a simulation tool into a proper visual medium, one where light itself becomes part of the brushstroke.

SoftShadows: Let There Be Depth

Light naturally implies shadow, and Rebelle 8 answers with SoftShadows, a system that lets your brushwork interact dynamically with neighbouring layers. As paint thickens, it casts micro-shadows and occlusion into crevices. The more layers of pigment you stack, the more dimensional your canvas becomes. This is particularly powerful for mixed-media artists who combine ink lines, pastel texture, and heavy acrylics. The interplay of shadow between materials makes compositions feel spatially convincing. For the first time, you can model form with light rather than with simulated bump maps. The result is not photorealism, but material realism: paintings that feel lit, rather than just coloured.

NanoPixel 2: Detail Without Limits

Resolution matters when your brush physics get this real. The updated NanoPixel 2 engine now allows you to scale artwork up to 32 K (or 20× its original dimensions) without visible quality loss. Strokes retain their natural edges, and watercolour diffusion remains physically accurate even at gigantic scales.

For production artists printing large-format illustrations or preparing concept art at billboard resolutions, this is pure freedom. NanoPixel 2 also brings smoother scaling in-app, zooming in 800 % no longer breaks the illusion of texture. Pair that with the new Smooth Scaling algorithm, and you can paint fine eyelashes or metre-wide washes without distortion. Rebelle 8 effectively removes the digital ceiling: it’s as big as your hardware can handle and then some.

Brushes That Breathe

Beyond Bristles, Rebelle 8 increases the maximum brush size to a hefty 3000 pixels. This is four times larger than before and surprisingly efficient, thanks to engine-level optimisations. Massive dry-brush gestures, cloud scumbles, or background washes now feel effortless. A new Recent Brushes tab remembers your last used tools, a tiny addition that quietly saves hours over long sessions. And for those who like symmetry (or who design icons and creatures with mirrored anatomy), there’s finally a Symmetry Tool. It works live, not post-process, meaning every mirrored stroke reacts in real time.

Layers, Light, and Reflectivity

Every serious painter knows the surface matters as much as the stroke. Rebelle 8 introduces layer-specific visual settings for impasto, metallicity, and colour blending. You can now control reflectivity per layer, useful for hybrid works that mix matte gouache with shiny acrylic highlights.

Even more powerful is the ability to load custom reflectivity and granulation textures. Want your “paper” to behave like rough handmade cotton? Import your own granulation map. Want to simulate pearlescent paint? Add a reflectivity map that catches light like mica.

These parameters make Rebelle feel like a laboratory for materials. Digital doesn’t have to mean uniform anymore — every layer can have its own tactile DNA.

Colour Harmony and Control

Painters live and die by palette, so the colour system received serious attention. The new RYB Color Wheel follows the traditional pigment logic (Red-Yellow-Blue), rather than RGB’s monitor-based primaries. Mixing colours now behaves the way your art teacher intended: yellow and blue really do make green.

Colour harmonies can be visualised and locked, ensuring consistency across complex compositions. The Gradient Slider allows smoother transitions, while Undo/Redo now applies to the Mixing Palette. A small mercy for those of us who “accidentally overmixed” that perfect ochre. Together, these refinements shift Rebelle from a tool that simulates paint into one that teaches it, not by tutorial, but by behaving as expected.

Selection, Transform, and Pixel Discipline

Artists who manipulate layers frequently will notice the revamped Selection Menu. It consolidates freehand, rectangular, and lasso selections into one streamlined system. You can transform selections with improved anchor-point control and, crucially, maintain opacity when cutting and pasting, meaning no more accidental transparency loss in composite workflows.

Grid and guide snapping now include pixel-perfect alignment, essential for precision illustrators or those designing UI assets within Rebelle. Resizing canvases introduces less distortion thanks to an improved scaling algorithm. Even the Lock Transparency (alpha lock) behaves more predictably when used with blending brushes.

Filters, Curves, and Layer-Based Effects

Filters in Rebelle 8 have grown up. You can now apply filters per layer, not globally, and stack them like adjustment layers in compositing tools. The addition of Curves Control gives fine tonal precision without exporting to another application. This opens the door for entirely in-app finishing: fine-tuning contrast, colour balance, or paper tone directly on top of the painting.

WebSocket Control and Real-Time Interaction

One of the more technical upgrades and a hidden gift to tinkerers is WebSocket Support. Artists can connect Rebelle 8 to external devices or scripts for live interaction: think physical sliders that control brush size, or a tablet displaying secondary palettes. For educators and streamers, this means real-time teaching overlays or collaborative painting sessions. For studio integration, it’s an open API door: if you can code it, you can connect it. Rebelle quietly steps into automation territory, without turning into a software engineer’s toy.

Interface and Usability Upgrades

Many of the most satisfying changes are those you don’t notice right away. There’s now a custom user folder option, perfect for artists with shared NAS setups or backup scripts. The Assets Panel centralises brushes, papers, and presets. A Cursor Preferences section allows visual feedback adjustments, crucial for stylus calibration. The Line Smoothing Indicator provides live feedback on stabilisation levels. Even the REB File Loader has been rewritten to open large projects faster. The UI feels familiar but sharper, like someone cleaned the studio overnight and reorganised the brushes without moving your chair.

Printing, Viewing, and Scale

The new View at Print Size option is a deceptively powerful addition. It shows exactly how your artwork will look in physical dimensions, taking monitor DPI into account. For illustrators preparing prints or book covers, this eliminates scale guessing. Complementing that, the NanoPixel Export Dialog has been redesigned to make high-resolution exports easier to manage. Combined with the Advanced PSD Import/Export, Rebelle 8 is fully production-ready for artists delivering print and digital work interchangeably.

Small Tools, Big Comfort

Several small upgrades improve the painting feel itself:

• Blow Tool Strength Slider: more precise control of how far paint spreads.
• Ruler with Perpendicular Lines: helps with architectural drawing or cross-hatching alignment.
• Grid Locking and Pixel Snap: improves geometric accuracy.
• Reference Image Adjustments: better contrast and positioning control for pinned references.

They’re quiet features, but collectively they make the program behave less like an app and more like a studio assistant who anticipates your next move.

Performance and Platform

All of this runs smoother thanks to major performance optimisation. Rebelle 8 supports native Apple Silicon. Large brush strokes feel instant, not buffered. File loading is quicker, and the UI scales properly on high-DPI displays. Behind the scenes, Escape Motions also added a custom WebSocket bridge that will likely enable future companion apps or remote control surfaces. In short: the technical foundation is ready for another decade.

Licensing and Support

Rebelle 8 remains a perpetual license product, not a subscription. Buyers receive one year of free updates, including all new features and fixes within that cycle. After that, the license continues working indefinitely; extended updates are optional. The company also guarantees two years of long-term support (LTS) under EU consumer-protection rules, meaning maintenance and bug fixes are ensured through that period.

Pricing at the time of release:

• Rebelle 8 Standard – USD 89.99
• Rebelle 8 Pro – USD 149.99

Educational and volume licenses receive discounts up to 40 %.

For Artists, Not Engineers

What makes Rebelle 8 special is not the checklist of features, but their coherence. Every new addition serves the same goal: to make painting feel natural again. There’s no feature bloat, no 3D detour, no pivot to subscription ecosystems. It’s unapologetically about the brush, the surface, and the moment between them.

Artists who live by gesture will find physical nuance. Technical illustrators will find predictable precision. And those who straddle both worlds, who love oil texture but also digital undo, will find a tool that finally respects both instincts.

The post Rebelle 8: Digital Painting’s Physical Upgrade first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Retopology

Updates to Maya’s Retopology toolset include Retopologise with Symmetry, which creates an even edge structure on both sides of a mesh. Other changes include the ability to selectively preserve features in areas of meshes, including options to preserve edges according to their angle or component tags. There is also the ability to scan the mesh for potential issues such as non-manifold geometry before running Retopologise and retain the original mesh in the scene graph. For manual retopologisation, Make Live now also supports multiple objects.

3D modelling

With Maya 2024, modellers also receive the Unsmooth command to reset Catmull-Clark-subdivided meshes to a lower resolution. Other changes include support for the MikkTSpace standard for tangent space when baking normal maps, improved performance in the UV editor and new tool shelves for UV editing, curve and surface tools.

Materials

Look Development Artists receive LookdevX, a new toolset for creating USD shading graphs in Maya. Unlike materials created with the existing Hypershade Editor, materials created with LookdevX can be used in an entire USD-based pipeline without the need for conversion.

Character animation

Character riggers and animators also receive some specific changes, including the ability to display skin weights created with the Paint Skin Weights tool as numerical values in the viewport. In addition, multiple skin clusters can now be used on a single geometry. There are also 36 new math nodes for creating more complex rigs.

Simulation

Are you looking for a new way to simulate realistic icing, ketchup or melted chocolate? Then you’ll love the Bifrost 2.7 update for Maya! With the new source_mpm_gel node, you can now also simulate gel materials such as soft ice cream. NanoVTT is now used as the default renderer for volumes in the preview, which significantly improves the preview in the viewport.

Plugins: Updates for USD for Maya, MtoA and Substance in Maya

Maya’s other plugins have also received an update: USD for Maya 0.22 now supports relative paths for USD files in Maya scenes and improves the display of layers. MtoA 5.3, which integrates Maya with the Arnold renderer, updates the physical sky to separate light contributions from the sun and sky. The Substance plugin for editing materials in Substance format within Maya has also been updated. With Substance 2.3.2 there is now native support for Apple Silicon.

Price and system requirements

Maya 2024 is available for Windows 10 , RHEL and Rocky Linux 8.6 and macOS 11 and can only be rented. Subscriptions cost $235 USD per month, an increase of $10 USD over the previous release, or $1,875 USD per year, an increase of $90 USD over the previous release. In many countries, artists earning less than $100,000 per year and working on projects worth less than $100,000 per year can purchase Maya Indie subscriptions at a price of $305 per year.

Click here for the documentary with all the new features

The post Autodesk releases Maya 2024 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.