For those who don’t know the tool: Massive is a standalone crowd simulation app for building agent scenes, with Arnold rendering, and ties into wider Maya and USD pipelines via the commercial line.

Free, but not aimless

A free edition of Massive Crowd Sim is available for non-commercial use. The core promise is simple: crowd simulation with no limits on agent capabilities, and no limits on the number or complexity of agents in a scene. That makes it a legit learning build, not a teaser that stops when you finally get a crowd moving without looking like a synchronized swimming team. The catch sits where you would expect it: renders are watermarked, and the supported renderers list stays short at the moment, with Arnold plus the built-in Velocity renderer listed as supported.

What you actually get day one

The free edition ships with a complete set of video tutorials and a stack of demo scenes. The demos cover a wide range of setups, including quadrupeds, insects, rigid body dynamics, flying, and shooting. That mix matters, because crowd work rarely stays politely bipedal for long, except Military Propaganda Goosestepping, but the studios doing that don’t need free software and have ALL the budget.

Installation is refreshingly old-school

Setup reads like a throwback in a good way. Download the installer, unzip or untar, and run it. On Windows, you run the installer. On Linux, you drop the bin directory into /usr/local/massive/. The manual can be unzipped wherever you want.

After that, the only required step is to activate the license. Optional environment variables exist, with details documented in the manual. If your pipeline team loves containers, reproducible installs, and predictable paths, this is the rare vendor workflow that does not try to reinvent software deployment. The free edition still expects you to behave like a grown-up about where binaries live, especially on Linux.

Licensing: one machine, one account, bring patience

The first launch triggers a license activation window. You enter the same username and password you use for the Massive 101 forum login. If activation succeeds, the license file lands in the .massive directory in your home directory, then the app starts. After that first activation, the app starts immediately as long as the license remains valid.

There is also a hard limit: only one active license is allowed per account, and a six month delay applies before a new license can be issued. That detail matters for lab setups, shared training workstations, and anyone who reformats their OS the way some people change socks. Not judging, just sayin’.

This is also where a free edition stops being magic and becomes process. If you plan to teach a class or run a studio workshop, design around the one active license rule early, not five minutes before teh first session.

Support: community-first, by design

Because the edition is free and limited to non-commercial use, there is no formal support provided. Instead, the Massive 101 forum exists as the help channel, where users can share tips, ideas, and problem solving.

The forum post also says the team will keep an eye on it, and there might be some input from them. If you are used to commercial support tickets with response time targets, this is not that. If you are used to production artists helping other production artists with practical workarounds, this looks familiar, for better or worse.

Export and pipeline limits you should treat carefully

Massive 101 is almost completely fully functional, with the full simulation toolset and no limits on the number or complexity of agents. It also has specific pipeline restrictions, including that motion, cloth, and hair simulation files save in a Massive 101 file format that cannot be used in Massive Prime, plus that USD and geometry export are disabled.

That incompatibility for Massive 101 and the big one is that there isn’t a row of “Assistant stations” for setup, and only one license for the big Massive to bring it all together.

Those details are important if your goal is anything beyond learning and internal tests. Watermarked renders are an obvious non-starter for client finals, but disabled export can be a more subtle trap if you assume you can “just move it into the rest of the pipeline later”. If your studio pipeline leans on USD interchange, treat this as a training build unless you can independently confirm the exact export behavior in your own testing.

Compatibility and pricing, as stated

Compatibility is Windows 10 and Linux, and free for non-commercial use. For commercial pricing, a perpetual floating license of Massive Prime is at $3500, with rental at $2500 per year, and says Massive Prime includes Massive for Maya.

Where this fits with your current crowd toolbox

If you already live inside the Crowdsim-world, this release sits in a useful niche: training, R and D, seeing if Massive fits your needs, personal skill building, and previs-scale experiments where you want to learn behavior authoring without immediately paying for seats.

For teams already hooked on Maya, the commercial ecosystem includes a Maya-integrated edition, and the broader stack talks about rendering integration and pipeline hooks across supported renderers. That larger ecosystem matters, but the free edition itself focuses on learning and local runs, not studio deployment. Also, Maya, by now, has Golaem built in.

https://www.massivesoftware.com/massive101.html

https://www.massivesoftware.com/massive101/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2

The post Massive Crowd Sim gets a free 101-edition 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 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: 3ds Max is a DCC for modeling, animation, and rendering, often paired with Arnold and OpenUSD for lookdev and pipeline handoffs across VFX, broadcast, and realtime.

The newsroom tries to explain Max to itself

Over in the Digital Production newsroom, there is a special kind of silence that happens whenever I say the words modifier stack. Half the team nods like they understand. The other half quietly searches for a button called “Make It Pretty”. So here is the deal. 3ds Max 2027 lands with new modeling tools, new deformation noise, selection upgrades, performance work, viewport cleanup, and a few foundation updates that matter to pipeline folks who like their tools modern and their crashes vintage.

Smart Bevel: post Boolean intersections, less cleanup

Boolean modeling can be fast, brutal, and wonderfully irresponsible. The new Smart Bevel feature targets post Boolean intersections and focuses on creating cleaner bevels with less fuss. Smart Bevel is designed for post Boolean intersections and is presented as a way to create cleaner and more intricate bevels with ease. It is framed as a dedicated approach to getting better looking edges after Boolean work, aimed at reducing the need for manual cleanup.

This fits neatly into the hard surface rhythm a lot of artists know too well: cut the shape, stare at the resulting edge spaghetti, then spend quality time repairing the part that was supposed to be the fast part. Smart Bevel tries to make that edge repair step less of a ritual. And yes, Bela asked if this means booleans are finally safe. The answer is still no. But fewer sharp edges turning into a bveel shaped tragedy is a welcome upgrade.

Extrude and Spline Chamfer: splines get better directions

The Extrude modifier now supports a custom direction workflow. Splines can extrude with orientation and direction rather than only local Z. For spline driven workflows, that is a practical change, because it reduces the need to pivot objects around just to make an extrusion behave.

Spline Chamfer also gets updates, including the ability to use a fixed radius for consistent circular corners. This focuses on predictability, which matters when spline corners must stay consistent across revisions, instancing, or exported geometry. If you have ever watched a single inconsistent corner ripple into five downstream fixes, you already know why this is worth caring about.

Noise Plus: more fractals, animation, tiling controls

A new Noise Plus modifier arrives with new fractal types, animation ability, and tiling controls. It is positioned as a more capable procedural noise option for pushing results further. The legacy Noise modifier also gets updates. It now uses a modern Qt interface and supports Paramblock2 for user-defined defaults. The animated Phase parameter now uses linear interpolation rather than ease in and out, for more predictable animation behaviour. For deformation work, predictable interpolation is the unglamorous hero. It keeps animation curves from feeling like they are fighting you.

Field Helper: more precise component selections

A new Field Helper is introduced for more precise component selections for manipulating items, including driving selections.

This is paired with a performance note elsewhere in the release that Volume Select soft selection performance has been improved for polys. The stated goal is smoother, more responsive soft selection performance on high poly objects. In practical terms, selection quality and selection speed both matter. Selection is not just a click. It is the start of most modeling and deformation decisions, and it tends to multiply into every other step you do.

Viewport grid and display improvements: cleaner and less annoying

Viewport grid and background display have been refreshed to provide a cleaner, more focused environment. This is the part where the newsroom says, “Cool, so the background looks nicer!”, and searches for snacks.. Then a Max user quietly smiles, because they live in the viewport. The viewport is where time goes, and small friction reductions add up quickly.

Arnold for 3ds Max: MaxtoA updates

The included Arnold for 3ds Max plug-in is version 5.9.0. Updates since 3ds Max 2026.3 include lightweight OpenUSD instancing, a new hair scattering mode, more flexible light sampling, plus other enhancements and bug fixes. If your pipeline touches Arnold, these plugin updates matter because they affect how features show up inside the host.

Retopology and Shape Map: faster processing, better targets

Flow Retopology has been relocated to Tools and is now under Tools > Flow Retopology to make it easier to find and access as part of core modelling workflow. Retopology performance is described as improved via faster ReForm processing. It is presented as providing quicker results and improved support for meeting quad target goals, with more reliable and consistent outputs.

Shape Map performance is also described as much faster, reducing wait times when working with shape keys and morph targets. This is a more responsive shape-based workflow, especially with complex character rigs or detailed morphing operations.

Colour management: sampling and OCIO

Colour management gets updates. You can sample underlying colours from the scene space in windows that support it, including viewports and the Rendered Frame Window. The Colour Selector eyedropper includes options to sample display colour or sample scene colour. The software also uses the latest version of the OpenColorIO library (OCIO v2.5.1).

Autodesk Assistant: tech preview help inside the app

A tech preview called Autodesk Assistant is included. It is described as an AI-powered tool / LLM that helps you quickly find information about features and workflows directly within the product. This might be cool for beginners, or if you are looking for that feature you know is in there, but can’t find. Only time will tell if it works.

Bela asked if it can also explain why someone would stack twelve modifiers and still sleep at night. No promises were made.

Autodesk prices Subscriptions are at 255 USD per month or 2,010 US Dollars a year. In many countries, artists earning under 100,000/year and/or working on projects valued at under 100,000 Dollars per year can get the Indie subscription, which now cost 330 US Dollars a year. Before you roll this into a pipeline, do the boring but essential checks. Open hero scenes, validate modifier stacks, confirm export paths, and compare renders. New tools and innovations should be tested before use in production.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2027/ENU/?guid=GUID-7CC2F041-F797-4DB9-B2F9-326AAB994F37

P.S. If you are asking yourself, “Where does he get the cat pictures?” Be in a chat with Bela for any amount of time, and you’ll have them, too.

The post 3ds Max 2027 is here. first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mike Kuhn.

For those who don’t know the tool: Maya is a core DCC for modeling, rigging, animation, FX, and rendering, with Maya Creative as a leaner sibling. It plugs into USD workflows, Arnold rendering, and FX via Bifrost, with a shortcut out to Flow Studio when you need the cloud.

The 2027 drop hits modeling, animation, FX, and pipeline

Autodesk has released Maya 2027 and Maya Creative 2027, with updates spanning modeling, character work, animation, simulation, rendering, and interoperability. Maya Creative gets the same new features as Maya except for Bifrost 3.0. A tech preview of an in-product help chatbot called Autodesk Assistant ships in this release. It searches product documentation and answers workflow questions inside the app.

Smart Bevel wants your Booleans to calm down

A new modeling feature called Smart Bevel (Also available in 3ds Max) generates bevels by following the surface shape rather than the underlying topology. That matters most when topology gets uneven, especially after Boolean modeling. The tool is positioned as producing more predictable results on irregular meshes, including at Boolean intersections, where classic bevel workflows often demand extra cleanup.

It is also non-destructive, keeping construction history so you can continue to refine the result. That makes it easier to treat beveling as part of the modeling flow, not a final bake-and-pray step.

MotionMaker teaches horses new tricks

A new horse archetype lands in MotionMaker, aimed at one of animation’s oldest time sinks: believable quadruped locomotion. The horse archetype can generate a believable base motion for horses in seconds. It covers core gait work, including trots and gallops, and it can generate transitions between them. The point is not just getting a loop, but getting the in-between that usually eats hours of tweaking, like moving from trot to catner without the rhythm falling apart. And since we only heard the phrase, but don’t know what it is: The special island Pony gait of “Tölt” isn’t covered, as far as we can see. But considering we all don’t know what that exactly is, we shouldn’t be too annoyed.

The horse joins existing motion styles for bipeds and canines inside the growing MotionMaker library. The workflow framing stays consistent: generate a base, then push performance choices yourself, like changing speed while keeping a natural gait, or adjusting action beats without rebuilding the whole setup from scratch.

If you have ever watched a horse walk cycle drift into floating-hoof limbo, you already know why this matters. Still, treat it like any new tool: test thier output on real shots before you bet a delivery on it.

Sequencer gets rebuilt for shot work, not nostalgia

The Sequencer has been modernized, with changes aimed at previs and layout artists cutting multi-shot sequences. Shot trimming and time scaling are now edge-driven interactions. You drag a shot edge to trim, and you use a time scale mode to scale by dragging the edge. The interface adds custom labels, color coding, automatic thumbnails, and smarter grouping behavior.

Playblasting gets its own menu and supports playblasting selected shots, all shots on a track, or the entire sequence. There is also a re-playblast option for a selected shot. File naming templates add support for a Scene keyword, and unsupported filename characters get replaced with underscores. A dedicated Sequencer workspace ships as well, and playblast output is described as improved with viewport-matching results, scene names, and full audio.

Bifrost 3.0 adds surface tension and scalable destruction tooling

Bifrost 3.0 introduces surface tension settings for liquid simulations, aimed at more realistic droplets and splashes at high resolution. Rigid Body Dynamics workflows also get attention, with performance improvements and a push toward procedural iteration. The destruction workflow is described as fully procedural, with the ability to adjust physics, tweak constraints, refine fractures, and re-simulate without rebuilding the setup. There is also a cloud option called Flow Wedging that can generate multiple variations in parallel directly from Bifrost.

OpenUSD authoring gets more guided inside the DCC

The release adds tools intended to simplify asset authoring for OpenUSD pipelines, where correctness and consistency matter as much as creativity. A guided workflow called Component Creator can build USD components through an interface designed to help structure assets properly from the start. A related Variant Manager helps define and manage asset variations.

On the 3ds Max side, an Asset Resolver is described as helping keep asset resolution stable by giving more control and visibility over how assets resolve and how paths map. It is framed as a way to reduce guesswork when something fails to load or appears changed. But more on Max tomorrow, it’s late.

Rendering and lookdev: speed, style, and portable graphs

Rendering updates focus on speed and creative control in Arnold, with improvements described for complex scenes and volumes like smoke or clouds, including GPU and volume rendering areas.

New shading tools include a stylised line option and a nearest points shader for point-based effects and data-driven shading. Hair is described as looking more natural in close-ups, and bloom rendering is described as more refined for realistic and stylised lens effects.

On the lookdev side, there is support for plugging third-party solutions into LookdevX for AI-driven generative texturing. This is presented as a workflow connection rather than a single locked-in generator. For interchange and portability, MaterialX workflows in LookdevX add support for relative paths in documents, with options to make paths relative to the scene file or workspace, and tools to toggle between relative and absolute paths.

Flow Studio gets a front door inside Maya

A new button in the Status Line can open Flow Studio directly from inside Maya. The release notes also call out Wonder 3D in Flow Studio, described as a generative AI model that can quickly generate 3D characters or objects from a text prompt or reference image, with export paths to Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, and Unreal Engine.

Pricing and system requirements

Maya is rental-only, with subscriptions listed at US$255 per month or US$2,010 per year. Maya Indie is listed as priced at US$330 per year for qualifying artists earning under US$100,000 per year and working on projects valued under US$100,000 per year. Maya Creative is pay-as-you-go, with pricing starting at US$3 per day and a minimum spend of US$300 per year.

Maya 2027.0 is available for Windows 11, macOS 14.0 or later, and Linux distributions including RHEL and Rocky Linux. Whatever part of the pipeline you touch, put the new features through your usual validation before they enter production, especially anything that changes core geometry, rig weighting, USD structure, or render outputs.

https://blogs.autodesk.com/media-and-entertainment/2026/03/25/whats-new-in-maya-and-3ds-max/

The post Autodesk ships Maya 2027 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The free Blood Hit 3D Asset lands as an Alembic animation, pre-simmed and intended to drop straight into a project. That matters because it keeps the asset squarely in the world of import, shade, light, render, comp, rather than asking you to set up a fluid sim, cache it, and hope your deadline shows mercy.

The asset targets broad compatibility by leaning on Alembic, a format widely used for baked geometry animation interchange. The file is positioned as something you can use in almost any render engine or 3D app, as long as your toolchain can ingest Alembic and you can assign materials the way you like.

This is very much a VFX elemnet style freebie in spirit, but it ships as 3D animation rather than a 2D flipbook or a stock plate. You get geometry motion you can place in space, aim at camera, frame with lens choices, and match to lighting cues. The messy bit becomes a scene object, not a comp sticker.

Two quality tiers, one timeline, and a choice of speed

The download includes two quality versions: a lower-quality option for faster renders and a high-quality option for hero shots. The animation runs at 24 fps, keeping it aligned with common editorial timelines and shot contexts.

There are also two speed options: a base speed described as slow motion and a fast speed option. Practically, that gives you two starting points for timing without forcing you to retime a single cache into wildly different beats right away. If the shot needs a long, readable splatter moment, the base speed exists. If you need a sharper hit that sells impact and gets out of the way, the fast option exists.

Because this is a pre-simmed Alembic cache, your artistic control flows through placement, scale, camera distance, shading, motion blur choices, and render settings. Your control does not flow through sim parameters, since the simulation work is already baked.

Where it plugs in across engines and DCCs

The broader compatibility pitch comes with specific examples of tools and engines that can be used with the paid pack the freebie points toward. The supported examples include Blender, Houdini, Unreal Engine, Arnold, V-Ray, OctaneRender, Redshift, and Cycles.

That list spans both DCC hosts and renderers, which is a useful reminder of how Alembic assets tend to travel in real productions. Sometimes you import into a DCC and render there. Sometimes you import into a DCC and export again into another context. Sometimes you bring it straight into a real-time environment like Unreal Engine for previs, cinematics, or interactive content, then either render there or use it to inform final lighting and comp decisions elsewhere.

If your pipeline already handles Alembic caches for crowds, cloth, or destruction, this should feel familiar: it is another baked motion asset you treat like a shot-specific prop. If you are new to geometry caches, the main idea remains simple. Import the cache, scrub it, and make sure it lines up with your timeline and scale before you start shading and lighting.

How you actually get it

Access to the free Blood Hit 3D Asset requires joining a newsletter, after which an email provides download instructions. If you are already on the newsletter list, previous emails are described as containing the same download instructions. The freebie is also positioned as part of a larger library described as 500+ other free 3D freebies. That bundle access is tied to the same newsletter workflow, rather than a one-off anonymous download link.

If your studio policy treats marketing email lists as a procurement step with paperwork attached, that is the moment to loop in whoever manages vendor communications. If you are an individual artist, it is simply a question of whether you want the asset enough to do the email round trip.

The paid pack it points to, and what it costs

The free asset sits alongside a commercial product called VFX Elements Volume 03: Blood Hits. That is containing 25 blood hit animations, delivered as Alembic files intended to load into render engines and 3D apps that support them. The listed price for the pack is $69.00, and it is as an instant download. The same engine and application examples show up here as well, including Blender, Houdini, Unreal Engine, Arnold, V-Ray, OctaneRender, Redshift, and Cycles. The pack is also shown with low-resolution playblasts used to preview the animations. That detail matters because it frames expectations: previews exist to show motion, but you should still evaluate how the cache behaves in your own render context, shading approach, and lighting setup.

Any new asset needs testing before you drop it into production shots. Import it into a sandbox scene first, confirm the scale, check frame-rate alignment, and verify how your chosen renderer handles motion blur on geometry caches. Do the same for both quality versions, because render cost and cache behavior can differ in ways that only show up once you hit real lighting.

Shading is the other big practical checkpoint. A blood hit cache does not automatically become convincing just because the animation looks good. You still need materials, spec response, and lighting that sell wetness and thickness. Your comp workflow also matters, especially if you plan to integrate the hit with interactive lighting or lens effects. This freebie gives you motion, but the final look still lives in your scene setup.

The Pixel Lab appears to be using this free Blood Hit 3D Asset as both a standalone giveaway and a doorway into the larger VFX Elements Volume 03: Blood Hits collection. If the one free hit covers your immediate need, great. If your work calls for a variety of impacts and angles, the 25 animation pack exists with a clear price tag and the same Alembic foundation.

https://www.thepixellab.net/free-vfx-element-blood-hit-3d-asset

The post Pixel Lab drops free Blood Hit Alembic first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

SKAP is an online service built to boost skin detail for digital heads used in VFX and games. The workflow starts from what most teams already have: a head model plus textures in the 2K to 8K range. From that input, SKAP generates 16K textures aimed at pushing pores and fine wrinkles into the kind of resolution that makes shader graphs feel seen.

The core outputs are displacement and cavity. Normal maps are also part of the offering for game engine use in Unity and Unreal Engine. Haemoglobin and melanin maps are available as additional outputs, aimed at supporting more accurate blood flow and pigmentation patterns.

What you feed it

SKAP takes two main ingredients: a head model file with suitable topology, resolution, and UV layout, plus a 2K to 8K texture, either diffuse or displacement. An optional ID mask can be uploaded to identify non-skin areas of the head, with the claim that it improves output quality. Not independently verified at press time.

UV layouts for MetaHuman assets in Unreal Engine and scans from 3D Scan Store are part of the compatibility story.

The maps that come back out

Displacement and cavity are the headline outputs, intended to drop into familiar surfacing and render pipelines. Multi-channel displacement is part of the feature set, splitting low-, medium-, and high-frequency detail across RGB channels Normal maps can also be generated for real-time work in Unity and Unreal Engine. Haemoglobin and melanin maps round out the optional set for skin shading workflows that want dedicated pigment signals. On the SKAP homepage, same-day turnaround and manual calibration by an in-house team are presented as marketing claims.

The handoff is blunt and practical. After the sculpt is finalised, the export list is a basemesh plus an 8K displacement texture,. A few craft notes from the trenches: It suggests storing a morph target before detailing, pushing detail a little stronger than usual, then blending intensity back with the morph brush at low settings to control where the detail lands. It also recommends setting alpha mid value to 50 to help avoid an overly bumpy look when dragging alphas.

Preview before you commit, because rendering is a snitch

Previews as a sanity check: A 2D map preview helps review micro-detail distribution and coherence before applying it back onto the 3D model. A 3D result view supports the same idea: validate the signal, then decide how it fits the look.

Pricing in human numbers

SKAP uses a credit model. A base set of displacement and cavity outputs uses 40 credits. Normal, haemoglobin, and melanin outputs add an additional 5 to 15 credits. Each credit has a base cost of 1 US dollar, with discounts available for bulk purchases.

Where it lands in production reality

In practical terms, SKAP is pitched as a middle move: take an existing head, feed it in, pull back higher-resolution skin detail, and keep rolling without booking a full scan job. The documentation includes guides for using the outputs in Mari and in Maya with Arnold.

As always, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production. Run it through your own shaders, your own lighting, and your own deadlines, then decide whether it earns a place in the wokrflow.

https://skap.texturing.xyz/

The post Texturing XYZ puts SKAP online, pores included first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Cold Storage is a 2026 horror comedy feature directed by Jonny Campbell from a screenplay by David Koepp, adapted from his 2019 novel. The film is a France–United States co-production principally financed and produced by STUDIOCANAL with Pariah, and distributed by STUDIOCANAL in Europe.

It stars Georgina Campbell as Naomi Williams and Joe Keery as Travis “Teacake” Meacham, two night-shift employees at a self-storage facility built atop an abandoned U.S. military base, whose world becomes a nightmare when a parasitic fungus sealed deep underground is released. The story combines elements of body horror, dark comedy, creature effects and outbreak survival as the protagonists race to contain the rapidly mutating organism before it causes widespread devastation.

Nikolas D’Andrade (Linkedin | Site | IMDB) is VFX Supervisor at MPC Paris, the studio responsible for delivering all 575 VFX shots on Cold Storage. Prior to Cold Storage, his screen credits include Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet), Guns Akimbo, and Borderlands. He is also credited as VFX supervisor on Mortal and won the Danish Robert Award for Best Visual Effects for The Shadow in My Eye.

Béatrice Bauwens (LinkedIn | IMDB) is Head of VFX and Post Production at MPC Paris and is credited on projects including Rust and Bone, Tell No One, and Emilia Pérez. In addition to studio leadership, MPC Paris’ recent filmography includes work on The Last Duel, Under Paris, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, and The Nun 2.

DP: “Cold Storage” is not exactly a casual weekend gig. How did you end up on this one?

Nikolas D’Andrade : I had joined MPC Paris a few months after returning from Montreal, right after finishing Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet. This was three years ago. Béatrice Bauwens, our Head of VFX & Post Production, needed someone with experience on mid- to large-scale features with U.S. clients, and I was fortunate to be assigned to the project. The production moved very quickly – I even did an urgent 24-hour round trip to Ouarzazate, Morocco, for a technical scout. 

Béatrice Bauwens: France is especially attractive for VFX production, thanks to a highly advantageous tax credit system. Productions can benefit from a 30% tax rebate on expenses incurred in France, starting at €250,000 in local spending. For projects with over €2 million in VFX spend within France, the tax credit increases to 40%. This financial incentive, combined with the presence of highly skilled and creative artists, makes France a leading destination for VFX work. This was decisive for Cold Storage in deciding on France for the VFX work. 

Combined with MPC Paris’s extensive experience on major international features and series, our production capacity, and the strength and diversity of our reel, MPC became a natural and strategic choice for the project. 

DP: MPC Paris, back in action. What did it feel like to have the logo on the door again after the Technicolor era imploded?

Béatrice Bauwens: Technically speaking MPC Paris never ceased its activity. MPC Paris was lucky to keep full activity in France while many other MPC offices around the world were facing disruptions. At the end of March, TransPerfect Group acquired MPC Paris as well as The Mill Paris. This period has been truly unique for all of us. We received tremendous support from the entire industry, and the team was fully committed to giving it the best possible chance of success. We were extremely fortunate to have been acquired, enabling us to retain the majority of our team in France. 

MPC Paris has always been deeply rooted in French cinema, with over 40 years of experience on local productions going back to the Mikros Image days. What hasn’t changed is the drive of our teams and the quality of the work we deliver; the two remain at the core of MPC Paris. 

DP: For people who only know the film as “that slime movie”: what was MPC Paris actually responsible for?

Nikolas D’Andrade : Everything was produced by MPC Paris, from on-set data capture all the way through to the DCP. We handled the assets, environments, prep, compositing, and more. Creatively, Cold Storage was a true challenge, covering the entire VFX spectrum: from basic rig cleanup to full environment destruction, creatures, digital set extensions, and the enhancement of practical SFX makeup. 

The distribution of work over time and across MPC teams was particularly complex. With the edit constantly evolving, the VFX departments were tightly interconnected: creatures, environments, destruction, compositing. Every narrative change had cross-cutting impacts, so the teams needed careful coordination and a high level of flexibility throughout production. 

DP: How many humans did it take to manufacture this much biological unpleasantness?

Nikolas D’Andrade : We split work mainly between Paris and Bangalore, and all in all, around 500 people contributed to the project – not all at once, but across the different phases. From a production standpoint, Cold Storage was set up to be highly collaborative and flexible. A core production and supervision team kept things on track, supported by leads across assets, animation, FX, environments, lighting, and compositing. This structure let us respond quickly to post-production needs, test screenings, and ongoing creative tweaks.  

Big international projects always involve a lot of creative voices, and Cold Storage was no exception – producers, supervisors, the director, STUDIOCANAL, and the U.S. producers were all closely involved, sparking frequent artistic discussions and iterations. The whole process ran on strong collaboration, shared creative drive, and a single goal: pushing the film’s quality as far as we could. 

DP: Give us the boring-but-essential part: what did the pipeline look like on this show?

Nikolas D’Andrade : We had an excellent production team – three VFX producers, a truly outstanding PM, and coordinators who were proactive, efficient, and a joy to work with. They kept work distribution, tracking, and cross-department communication running smoothly. It may sound obvious, but it’s worth saying: the production team plays a more-than-essential role – without them, the machine doesn’t run. And of course, the artists made it all happen, giving it everything they had. Huge thanks to the whole team. 

On the technical side, our process kicked off with modeling, building creatures, CG doubles, environments, and all fully CG assets. We then moved into texturing with Adobe Substance Painter, Substance Designer, and Mari, which let us handle assets smoothly and non-destructively. Lookdev came next, shaping materials, shading, and lighting in Maya and Arnold, while FX lookdev in Houdini with Arnold set the tone for dynamic elements. Fully CG sequences – the explosion, the opening timewarp, macro shots inside veins and the brain, and the late-arriving cockroach sequence – each brought their own challenges, tackled as they entered the pipeline.  

At the heart of it, MPC Paris relies on a pipeline honed over the years and shared with The Mill Paris, built around Arnold, Maya, Houdini and Nuke. This blend of trusted workflows and smart custom solutions let the teams stay nimble while delivering complex sequences to the highest standard. 

It was also on this project that we were able to launch the development of a workflow manager prototype, which allowed us to automate entire sections of our production chain. This prototype has since been merged with our flagship open-source software, Meshroom.

DP: You were on set. What is your mental checklist before you sign off on plates and walk to the VFX suite?

Nikolas D’Andrade: I don’t handle data capture myself, I have a dedicated person or team for that. There are a few reasons: First, I need to stay constantly next to the director, the DP, or the 1st AD to control what’s happening. Even on shots that, at first glance, aren’t supposed to be VFX. It’s often exactly in those cases that you need to be there, because things can quickly impact the budget, like shots that weren’t planned in the bid.

Second, it’s simply logistical: when we change setups, that’s when a lot of creative and technical discussion happens between the director and the DP (and sometimes other departments). I can’t afford not to be there because I’m busy taking measurements or photos.

I’m also there as an authority figure during certain captures (HDRIs for example), to make sure nobody moves on set while the wrangler team is shooting the HDR. I ask my team to note certain things in the VFX report that might help us later, or that will require discussion during the edit (continuity, extra work, or creative input).

On my side, I write a daily VFX LOG, a shot-by-shot journal of what we shot the day before, which I then send to the producer and the VFX producer, so I can flag any complications that will require additional work, or, on the contrary, confirm that everything went as planned.

DP: What’s in your on-set bag of tricks these days, besides gaffer tape and quiet despair?

Nikolas D’Andrade : Personally, I have my iPad with me so I can draft/paint over things to show or discuss specific points with the director, along with the screenplay, the VFX breakdown, and the day’s call sheet/work plan provided by the 1st AD the day before. I also carry my walkie-talkie so I’m in constant contact with my wrangler team.

For the wranglers on set: the usual kit. ColorChecker, chrome/grey balls, a laser distance meter, tape measures, a stills camera with different focal lengths – I usually ask for a CPL filter to cut reflections on polarized materials such as water and other shiny surfaces, except metal, so we can provide references and textures with as less lighting interference as possible, plus LiDAR.

DP: Tooling question, but make it spicy: what’s new in the MPC toolbox now that you’re inside the TransPerfect umbrella?

Béatrice Bauwens: Tooling-wise, moving into the TransPerfect Group didn’t mean starting from scratch. Under Technicolor, we had a massive global toolbox across MPC Paris, The Mill, Mikros Animation and Technicolor Games, and that legacy came with us when we joined TransPerfect. A good example is Meshroom, which still powers a lot of our workflows.  On top of that, TransPerfect DNA is about technology. This is a perfect place for us to land with great opportunity to innovate and find the smartest technical and human solutions for filmmakers… Cold Storage gave us the perfect playground to test new techniques, strengthen the studio, and keep raising the bar. 

DP: Roughly how many shots were “normal”, and how many were “this needs a hazmat suit”?

Nikolas D’Andrade : We delivered 575 shots in total. Roughly 300 were “invisible” VFX such set extension, makeup enhancement, while the more “hazmat suit” work broke down to about 175 slime/fungus shots, 60 creature shots, and 23 explosion shots.

DP: Slime is a liar. How did you keep viscosity, weight, and stickiness from drifting into videogame goo?

Nikolas D’Andrade : The process was long, but honestly very cool to develop. My very first step, right after our early pre-production discussions with director Jonny Campbell, was to read David Koepp’s novel to find details that can be useful but are sometimes hard to convey in a screenplay because of format limitations. David writes hard sci-fi, grounded in scientific and physical principles (which I personally love, authors like Carl Sagan with Contact, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy).

In the novel, we learn how this cordyceps “evolves” depending on the chemical elements it encounters and absorbs. It mutates and evolves into an increasingly intelligent entity, constantly trying to spread further. That became our starting point for giving personality to what is essentially the film’s antagonist. For example, its favourite molecule, its holy grail, is water, and its worst nightmare is fire. There’s a shot, a top shot, where we designed the fungus shape on the tarmac after a vehicle explosion: a dead zone in a circular shape, because it’s too hot for it to get close.

From there, we worked closely with the FX team and entered an R&D phase. We needed an asset, something we could almost “release” into a 3D scene and let it live its life, the way a cordyceps would, but at the same time, because we know the constraints and reality of working with production constraints, such as framing, we still needed control over its propagation so we could design it shot by shot.

We also asked ourselves very practical questions: how does it get through a gap? And we established rules like: it spreads faster or slower depending on the surface, if it’s water, it spreads extremely fast. That’s why in the parking-lot scene after Dr. Friedman’s implosion, the parking is almost completely covered within just a few shots, whereas in the storage facility it progresses much more slowly.

For lookdev, we went through a lot of back-and-forth to find what felt best. The original brief was a fluorescent green, but we ended up moving toward a more vegetal green, testing options like verdigris tones or even black. I personally liked the black because it added a more threatening feel, but it leaned too much into a Venom-style symbiote vibe and also created readability issues in darker moments.

DP: Who paid the price for the slime? How did you split the work across departments, and how many iterations did it take before everyone stopped wincing?

Nikolas D’Andrade : All departments were involved constantly, because whenever we did a new iteration, say we or the client felt the fungus was moving too much in a shot for instance. We had to adjust the asset parameters inside the shot, re-sim, re-export the Alembics, re-render, and then update the comps. The FX team was by far the most relied-upon, because they “owned the recipe” and knew how to cook it. They did a fantastic job, by the end we genuinely had a real digital cordyceps asset.

DP: Before this film, did you know what a rat king was, or were you blissfully untraumatised?

Nikolas D’Andrade : Yes. I’d heard about it a long time ago, but to me it was basically an urban legend. During my pre-production research, especially after reading a 2006 white paper from the Natural History Museum / University of Tartu in Estonia. I realised it’s probably not just a legend, but a real (and very rare) phenomenon.

The director had initially sent me a photo he found online, and from there I tracked down more images. Even so, we ended up doing the concepts largely from scratch. If you’re curious, here’s the paper I’m referring to:

Miljutin, Andrei. (2007). Rat kings in Estonia. Proc Estonian Acad Sci Biol Ecol. 56.

DP: Cats have infinite internet references. Deer have nature documentaries. Rat kings are rare and appear mostly in nightmares. How did you even start designing and animating that thing? 

Nikolas D’Andrade : Based on the concepts and the photos we found, the brief we received was that the tail knot was the epicentre, almost like a python pinned into the concrete floor. As a result, each rat is trying to pull in a different direction, but they’re all restrained by that fixed point, like a dog trying to attack you while tied to a pole.

To make it properly disgusting, we used two types of rats assets: “hero” rats and “extra” rats. The main pile of rats, positioned in the lower part, was the “mass”, inert and animated in a soft-body / simulation approach, has been made with “extra” rats, while the hero rats were placed on top and animated in keyframes. Once everything was assembled, we poured slime over it. The complexity of that shot was collisions: between the volume of the rat geometry, the thickness of the fur, and the slime on top. It was pretty intense to manage all the collision interactions.

DP: Finale time. There’s a big bang at the end. What was the brief, and what did you need to sell to make it feel real?

Nikolas D’Andrade : The creative intent was very simple: an underground nuclear explosion that collapses the entire environment over a radius of a few kilometres. To achieve that, I asked production for a drone so we could mount the camera (ARRI Alexa) and shoot plates and “tile” the environment, both to camera-map certain areas and to get wide establishing coverage. We also used maps to rebuild the terrain topology beyond a certain distance, especially elevation data, and LiDAR for everything close to camera.

We had a very long previs/postvis phase because the sequence was originally intended to be only a few shots, but production decided to extend it to increase the intensity. It’s the film’s climax, so you want it to hit hard, so there was a lot of back-and-forth with editorial to find the right action narrative and timing.

It was a challenge because the volume was enormous. We had to cluster the work by zones, manage all the collisions with trees, and stack layers of volumetric fluid, etc. The key for me was contrast ratio: using the light emanating from the ground cracks created by the explosion to naturally build a chiaroscuro lighting that’s immediately flattering and readable. And then adding debris and atmospheric particles to create depth and fill the volume.

DP: Was that mostly simulation FX, mostly comp, or the usual unholy marriage of both?

Nikolas D’Andrade : FX, elements, and plates, all cleverly blended together by our great comp team.

DP: Your favourite shot, and be honest: was it because it looked great, or because it finally stopped breaking?

Nikolas D’Andrade : There are several shots I’m really fond of. Early in the film, when they find the first body: the ribcage is open and the skull collapses in CG. the CG/asset work is genuinely strong, and I find the shots aesthetically beautiful from a photographic point of view.

The “Garbage” shot (Lujza Richter) when she turns around on Level -2, and you can see the wall behind her through her eye sockets, crafted with love by one of our best CG artists, André Monteiro.

The “Ironhead” shot (Andrew Brooke) lying on the ground after being shot as well, for the same reasons, with the blood spreading across the floor, I really like that one.

Another shot I think is very successful is a totally invisible one you can spot in the breakdown: it’s a full-CG shot of the camera moving forward in a travelling move toward a storage unit with the door closed, while the bikers are pounding on it. It was seamless, and I love that.

DP: What’s next for MPC Paris?

Béatrice Bauwens: We’re incredibly proud to share that Lise Fischer and the MPC Paris teams won the César for Best Visual Effects for L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche. It’s a wonderful recognition of the talent, creativity and collaboration that drive our studio every day, and we’re still celebrating this beautiful moment together. 

In the coming months, a bunch of exciting projects are set to hit screens: we delivered 150 VFX for the new AppleTV+ series The Hunt by Cédric Anger, 138 shots for The Gallerist by Cathy Yan, and 165 shots for Les rayons et les ombres by Xavier Gianolli. 

Beyond that, our supervisors are deep in development on several other projects and on set, though for now we can’t spill the details but stay tuned  

We stay passionate and inventive, always exploring new techniques and large-scale approaches. Cold Storage gave us the perfect playground to keep building the studio, test new methods, and strengthen our capabilities. We’ll be at Cannes Film Festival this year with some projects already in consideration, continuing to experiment, learn, and push our craft forward. 

The post MPC’s Cold Storage first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Arnold is the production renderer from Autodesk, integrated via MtoA, MAXtoA, HtoA, C4DtoA and KtoA into Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D and Katana, and increasingly used in USD pipelines.

Arnold 7.4.5 is now available. According to the official Autodesk documentation, this release introduces new shaders focused on non photorealistic rendering, expands point based shading workflows, improves OpenVDB volume perfromance on CPU and GPU, and adds controls to Cryptomatte and lens effects. It also includes API changes, bug fixes and updates to OSL and USD support.

All feature descriptions below are taken from the official Arnold 7.4.5 documentation. Where Autodesk provides measured performance figures, these are cited as vendor benchmarks and are Not independently verified at press time.

Line shader for NPR work

Arnold 7.4.5 introduces a new Line shader. The shader is designed to render line based effects directly in Arnold. According to Autodesk, it can generate outlines, contour lines and stylised strokes across surfaces.

The shader works procedurally and can be driven by surface attributes and shading inputs. The documentation states that it can be combined with other shaders and textures to create sketch style and illustrative looks. Autodesk positions it for non photorealistic rendering workflows and motion graphics style treatments.

The Line shader integrates into Arnold’s standard shading network. It supports typical shader parameters for controlling line thickness, colour and other attributes. The exact parameter list and behaviour are detailed in the official shader documentation. Appearantly, this does not replaces existing toon or contour solutions. It is presented as an additional shading node within the Arnold core.

Nearest Points shader

Arnold 7.4.5 also adds a Nearest Points shader. This shader samples nearby points from geometry or point cloud data and exposes their properties to the shading network.

The shader can read point data from geometry and OpenVDB sources. It computes distances and relationships to nearby points and outputs shading data based on those calculations.

This enables effects such as network-like connections, proximity-based colour changes and graph-style visualisations.

The shader exposes controls for the number of points sampled and the search radius. It is designed to work within Arnold’s existing shading system and can be combined with other nodes. No claims are made to replace external point-processing tools. The feature is described strictly as a shading node within Arnold core.

OpenVDB volume performance

A major focus of Arnold 7.4.5 is performance improvements for volume rendering. On CPU, the volume node now supports OpenVDB grids with mipmaps. Mipmaps are pre-filtered versions of volume data at multiple resolutions. According to Autodesk, using mipmapped OpenVDB grids can significantly improve rendering speed when sampling large volumes.

Autodesk states that in internal test scenes, CPU volume rendering can be betwen approximately 1.5 times and 5 times faster when using mipmapped grids. These figures are vendor supplied benchmarks and are Not independently verified at press time. On GPU, Autodesk reports performance improvements of up to 3.5 times for certain volume rendering scenarios. The documentation attributes this to optimisations in volume sampling and shading. Always remeber that results depend on scene content and volume configuration.

Lens Effects updates

Arnold 7.4.5 updates the Lens Effects imaging node. A new Aperture Dispersion parameter has been added. This parameter controls colour dispersion in bloom effects, simulating chromatic dispersion across highlights.

The Lens Effects node operates as a post process imaging operator within Arnold’s render pipeline. The new control extends its ability to simulate optical artefacts.

Cryptomatte controls

Cryptomatte support has been updated in Arnold 7.4.5. The documentation states that new controls have been added for handling instances in Cryptomatte outputs. These controls affect how instanced geometry is encoded into Cryptomatte IDs. Cryptomatte is commonly used for ID based compositing masks in post production. The new options allow artists to refine how instanced objects are represented in the resulting mattes.

OSL and shading updates

Arnold 7.4.5 includes updates to OSL support. OSL, or Open Shading Language, is used for writing custom shaders. The documentation lists new and updated OSL functions and improvements to compatibility. These changes aim to ensure consistency between OSL and native Arnold shader behaviour. No deprecations are prominently highlighted in the summary documentation, but API level changes are documented for developers.

USD workflow improvements

Arnold’s USD support is also updated in this release. The official documentation references improvements to USD related workflows, including enhancements to how Arnold interacts with USD scenes and Hydra delegates. USD, or Universal Scene Description, is increasingly central to pipeline interchange. Autodesk documents refinements to integration rather than new headline features.

API and developer changes

Arnold 7.4.5 includes API updates for developers integrating Arnold into custom pipelines. The release notes document changes to certain API functions and behaviours. Developers are advised to review the API changes before upgrading production builds.

Platform support

Arnold 7.4.5 is available for Windows, Linux and macOS, as stated in the official documentation. GPU rendering remains supported on compatible NVIDIA hardware under supported operating systems. The documentation does not expand hardware requirements beyond those listed in the system requirements section. Integration plugins for supported DCC applications are updated separately. Autodesk provides corresponding builds for host applications including Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D and Katana via their respective Arnold bridges.

Practical implications

For production teams, the most concrete additions are the Line shader, the Nearest Points shader and the documented OpenVDB volume speedups. NPR and motion graphics teams gain native shading tools inside Arnold rather than relying entirely on external compositing or geometry preprocessing. Pipeline engineers should review API notes and test custom plugins before deployment. As always, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production. Arnold 7.4.5 is available now via Autodesk’s official distribution channels.

// Arnold 7.4.5 Release Notes
// https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_core_7450_html

The post Arnold adds lines, points and faster volumes first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the site: Kitbash3D makes themed 3D environment kits for VFX, games, and visualisation. The new New Delhi Kit joins their growing library of ready-to-use digital worlds, compatible with most major DCC and realtime tools.

City without chaos

Kitbash3D has released New Delhi, a detailed collection of 3D assets designed to recreate the layered architecture and street textures of India’s capital. The kit includes 84 models and 127 PBR materials, intended for artists working in VFX, games, animation, and visualisation. The collection mixes colonial-era façades, contemporary concrete towers, and dense market alleys. Kitbash3D states that the assets are built for “realistic, lived-in environments” and are designed for both large-scale cityscapes and street-level storytelling.

Compatible across pipelines

The New Delhi Kit is supplied in standard formats, including FBX and USD, and integrates with major DCC tools such as Blender, Maya, and 3ds Max. It is also compatible with realtime engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity, and supports common renderers including Arnold, Cycles, and Redshift.

Kitbash3D lists the kit as ready for immediate production use, with pre-optimised geometry and consistent scaling for modular assembly. The files use standard PBR workflows and are organised for straightforward import and texturing.

Architectural detail and reuse

According to the official description, the New Delhi Kit focuses on flexibility and reusability. Building assets can be mixed to create anything from residential areas to commercial centres. Street props, market stalls, and signage extend the set for scene dressing or background population.

The kit is part of Kitbash3D’s ongoing series of geographically themed city kits, following earlier releases such as Tokyo, Paris, and New York. The New Delhi collection adds a South Asian context to the library, expanding possibilities for worldbuilding and localisation in cinematic and interactive productions.

Available now

The kit is available for purchase directly from Kitbash3D. The New Delhi Kit is included in Kitbash3D Unlimited, the company’s annual subscription giving full access to its 3D asset library via the Cargo desktop app. Unlimited costs USD 995 per year for individual freelancers and USD 3,995 per year for small studios with up to 50 employees. Assets can be used in active productions during the subscription, but new projects require an active licence. Perpetual rights are available separately for specific kits.

Artists are advised to test the assets in their own production setups before integrating them into active pipelines, particularly when mixing renderers or real-time and offline workflows. A quick inspection of the models suggests consistent texutre naming and clean geometry, but the actual level of optimisation can vary depending on import method and scene scale.

https://kitbash3d.com/products/new-delhi

The post Delhi in 3D: Kitbash3D goes urban first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

It is kind of a ridiculous idea to make a 3D animated short film all by yourself, particularly if you are a perfectionist and you do not want the result to lean on stylisation as a shortcut. I am Maxim, 25, from Germany. I spent five years creating my animated short film SEN with almost no budget and countless hours of work. This is a rewind of that adventure.

senshortfilm.com | YouTube | Bluesky | LinkedIn

SEN is a 3D animated short film made entirely by one artist. Built with Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and Substance Painter, the project combines procedural VFX, detailed hard-surface modelling, and full compositing in a solo production pipeline.

Where I Started

It was early 2020. Covid was still “that virus over there”, at least from a European perspective. I was studying Media Design at a small university in rural Germany. We were tasked with creating a concept for a creative project and executing it the following semester. I had already made a few student short films and many small 3D projects, so an animated short film was the obvious choice.

I started preproduction around February 2020 with vague ideas. Very early on, it became clear that the main character should be a robot, since I have always enjoyed hard-surface work much more than organic creatures or characters. There is something about rusty metal and subtle surface imperfections that speaks to me, and the challenge of bringing an object to life pushed me to get to work.

First Concepts and Story Iterations

I developed story ideas while concepting the protagonist and environment. The first idea failed and was scrapped quickly. A second storyline centred on the protagonist and made it into the final film, though in altered form: a small mining robot escaping from a mining station it was attached to by cables. That original concept still survives in the final model as the cable stump detail on the robot’s back.

I was still not satisfied with the script. I wrote an entirely new screenplay in which the robot accidentally awakens a huge worm-like cave creature and traps it during a chase. Two months in, I had two robot stories, neither fully convincing.

A breakthrough came from a writing method I had learned in a lecture: asking “what if?” questions. The idea was to allow any thought, no filtering, no judgment, regardless of how implausible it seemed. What if he meets another robot? A mentor figure. What if the mentor is old and rusty? One further “what if?” unlocked the twist. I scrapped the previous storylines and wrote another script, the fourth or fifth by that point. I rewrote it dozens of times based on feedback from friends, my professors, and strangers online.

Rewriting and Planning

While rewriting, I planned the environment and visual logic: the portal design, the planet’s material identity, the crashed spaceship in an icy desert, and how the robot arrived there. Some answers carried over from earlier versions, and others were reworked to fit the new narrative. By mid-2020, the film’s core story and setting had stabilised.

Inspiration: Proof That Solo Is Possible

The new plot increased scope: large environments, distant views, FX, and more animation. I doubted whether I could finish it alone. I found Chris Jones’s blog, who made an animated short film in the early 2000s called “The Passenger”. Reading his production notes was the reality check I needed: if he could do it on early-2000s hardware, I could at least attempt it on modern technology.

Animatic: Solving the Edit Before Final Shots

In parallel with story development, I finished the robot concept, rigged it, and built basic set pieces. Once the script was ready, I created the first animatic. That first version was the hardest because it meant building cameras, scenes, and cuts from a blank slate, knowing none of it would appear in the final render. It felt like throwing time away, but it was necessary.

A total of 13 animatic versions and regular feedback rounds shaped edit and shot layout over the span of about a year, with production starting after the first few months. For an animated project like SEN, much of the final edit is effectively resolved in previz. My last animatic layout and the final edit are almost identical in shot lengths and rough camera positioning.

Discipline: The Real Production Infrastructure

The hardest part of a solo short is not a specific tool or technique. It is continuity. Many people abandon projects of this size, and I came close to doing so more than once. I want to share some tricks that I’ve used to keep myself going.

My favourite strategy is breaking tasks down into steps so small that your brain cannot argue with them. Some mornings my first task was simply “open the software.” Completing that gave a tiny dopamine reward and reduced friction.

Accountability was another tactic, the “sledgehammer method” of motivation: tell EVERYONE you are making the project. If you care about your reputation, you will feel pressure to deliver because people keep asking for progress. This comes with mental health risk, so I would only recommend it once you have fully committed. Routine mattered as well. Habits beat procrastination, and discipline is physical. Exercise kept me under pressure: daily jogging and daily workouts. I overdid it a bit and do not recommend the exact dosage – my knees and back had opinions at 25. Still, it helped.

Similarly, it can also really help to get someone else invested into the project. When Stuart Michael Thomas joined me in 2022 and scored the movie, that was a major motivation boost. No way can I not finish the film now that this amazing professional had spent so much time and effort on making a score for it! Thank you again, Stu!

The Schedule

About one year into the project (January 2021), I wrote a schedule that now reads as slightly unhinged: up at 6, tutorials and books until 9, then work until 9 PM. Weekends free. Later, I shifted to 8 PM plus Saturday hours. This was what it took to make speedy progress, but with additional responsibilities, this pace was not sustainable. There were weeks and months with little progress. During a three-month internship in Hamburg in 2021, I paused the film entirely. Once I started working full-time (late 2022), progress slowed dramatically. Luckily, I had pushed hard the previous years, and SEN was already 60 to 70 per cent complete by then.

Technical Details

Workflow: Iteration and Feedback as a System

One key lesson: everything starts out looking bad until you iterate enough. Finding things wrong with an asset, shot or edit, then figuring out how to improve it is the main creative challenge. After that, execution just comes down to time plus technical knowledge.

Feedback was critical. Every time a piece reached a somewhat presentable state, I would collect notes from professors, friends, family, and online communities. Feedback improved the film and taught me why certain choices worked or did not.

I want to give a big shout-out to Melanie Beisswenger here, who was my professor when I started the project. She also became my bachelor’s thesis critic, and even after graduation, she continued to give valuable notes and feedback. Another big shoutout goes to Nikolai Neumetzler, another brave soul who joined to judge my bachelor’s thesis and also stuck around to give feedback afterwards. Also, he even animated one of the shots! Thank you, Melanie and Nik, for your contributions to the project!

Assets: Building a World That Holds Up in Closeups

Asset building was a comfortable area for me. I had experience from university projects, building most assets myself, so modelling, texturing, and shading were familiar territory. The two characters remained informally named “robot” and “rusty”. Environment assets followed. Everything went through multiple iterations across months or years. Some assets were hand-modelled, others sculpted, and some kitbashed.

Only a few assets were purchased online: lava rocks for the first shot background, a large cliff dividing the environment (internally called “DivHill”), and base geometry for the wreckage.

The wreckage relied heavily on procedural shaders, but I extracted the large surfaces, created quick UVs, and painted custom textures in Substance Painter. Photogrammetry scans also entered the pipeline. Snow clumps were based on scans I made in 2020 by spraying water on flour and clumping it.

Scene assembly strategy

Assets were loaded into shots as referenced Maya files. Most were placed in world space so they arrived in correct relative positions. I was not consistent with this rule, and the assets that did not follow it created extra “fun” in transform matching.

The crater asset rework

The crater went through major redevelopment. The first version used a complex procedural shader, leading to slow renders without holding up in close-ups. Later, I rebuilt it using tiling textures blended via hand-painted masks. Displacement remained complex but delivered good base detail. For close-ups, it was still not enough. I created mud clump assets from rock models found online, resculpted them in ZBrush to read as mud, textured them in Substance Painter, and then manually placed them to enhance detail and hide underlying weaknesses.

Placement was tricky because edges could break the illusion of a continuous surface. A lot more of those mudclumps were later added per-shot in the lighting stage. SEN ended up with 10 major assets, 5 minor assets (including snow and mud clumps) and roughly 87 million triangles across assets combined (excluding certain FX caches treated as assets)

Rigging: A Referenced Maya System for Swappable Geometry

Rigging is not my strongest suit, so it took time to arrive at a reliable setup for the characters. I started with the robot while developing the script and animatics, again following an iterative approach. Both the robot and Rusty rigs were based on Maya referencing, using two geometry workfiles per character: a low-resolution proxy for animatic, animation, and previews, and a high-resolution version with shaders and final detail.

The low-res and high-res files mirrored naming exactly, meaning any object in low-res existed in high-res under the same name. There was no hierarchy in the geometry files, with all geometry sitting at the root level of the outliner. The rig workfile referenced the low-res geometry and then created the hierarchy and control groups that the rig moved. Because naming matched, the low-res geometry could be swapped for high-res cleanly. Choosing robots avoided organic deformation, skin weighting, and the related rig complexity.

The robot rig took roughly six months to be fully rigged, although usable versions existed much earlier for animatic work. The biggest technical challenge was wheel rotation driven by translation. This breaks when the character turns 180 degrees, as wheels begin spinning backwards.

World Vectors to the rescue!

The solution was a world-vector wheel rig setup found via a tutorial after considerable time trying to solve it independently. The system compares the previous and current frame’s world-space positions and adjusts the wheel rotation based on the delta. The arms are driven by an IK setup, while all remaining controls operate in FK. The wheels include a suspension setup that drives the spring, damper, and gear rotations at the correct ratios and reacts inversely when the body banks.

For ground interaction, I considered constraining the wheels to the surface but ultimately chose to animate wheel height manually across all shots to retain control. In many cases, managing the amount of ground intersection was important for later FX work. For Rusty, large parts of the robot rig could be duplicated and adjusted rather than rebuilt from scratch.

How SEN Got a Professional Score

In mid-November 2020, after months of animatic iterations, I began planning the music. The film has no dialogue, so the score carries a large share of the narrative load. I posted on r/composer with the title “Looking for Shortfilm Score (Paid)”, offering $100 as a starting point for negotiation and sharing the animatic along with work-in-progress assets.

Stuart Michael Thomas, a professional composer, got in touch and offered to score the film on the condition that the money be donated to a charity instead. He worked on major studio franchises such as Iron Man, Avengers, and Fast & Furious. His involvement was creatively transformative and kept me motivated through the later stages of production.

Animation Process: Blocking to Spline Without Losing Your Mind

For me, animation is fun for about two weeks. After that, it becomes repetitive. Fortunately for me, there was a boatload of other tasks on my to-do list, so for most shot,s I could allow myself to take breaks from animating every few weeks and do other tasks. The general approach was consistent across shots:

• Set up the scene.
• Load the rig.
• Load or build low-res proxy environment geometry.
• Import camera from previz and optionally import robot from animatic as reference.
• Create a blocking pass.

Pose-first blocking

I often lay out key poses on single frames first to avoid having to deal with curve tangents immediately. I would stack the key poses in the first 10 frames of the shot, with keys on all controls, even if a control did not move. On a typical shot, I spent half a week refining poses, then spaced them out for timing and added in-between poses. Feedback cycles followed. I stayed in blocking because big changes are easiest there. Late in blocking, I retimed sections aggressively and began refining body parts independently. All of these blocking passes were done without any interpolations. This allowed me to craft strong key poses and lay a solid foundation.

The spline crash phase

When I finally splined, the shot entered the “crappy phase”. No matter how solid the blocking looked, the first spline pass always felt like rediscovering animation curves for the first time. The shot that previously held together suddenly looked broken, and the amount of work ahead became unclear. To stay sane during splining, I refined shots in 20- to 80-frame chunks, polishing one section at a time before moving on. This workflow repeated across all 11 shots.

Lighting: Making Snow Read and Renders Happen

Once motion worked, I moved into lighting, which had its own technical friction. Lighting robots differs from lighting faces, and classic portrait lighting rules apply differently. Doing lighting in Maya was also challenging for morale. Today I would likely light in Houdini, but switching mid-project was not feasible.

Early on, I created a “master light rig” – basically just a Maya file with a Skydome, directional Sunlight and an area light to fill in shadows. This was the starting point for all shots. I always made adjustments to these lights and added further shot-specific ones.

The snow problem and the cloud shadow solution

Snow is tricky. In photos, it often becomes a blown-out flat white field unless shadows create form. Shot 5, the exposition crater shot, forced the learning: cloud shadows. I created large grid meshes and drove opacity with noise textures to simulate clouds, then manually positioned them to cast landscape shadows.

These cloud shadows also make a landscape feel larger. But Iteration still ruled: light-by-light adjustments repeated until the shot held together, or Maya crashed and erased progress. Subsurface Scattering was used a lot for all the snow and some plastic parts of the robot, but the heaviest passes were probably the volumetric FX elements in the crater.

Batch rendering automation

A key productivity tool was a Python script I wrote to generate and execute .bat files using Maya’s batch render command. In a display of unjustified ambition, I christened it “Renderfarm.py”. It also allowed me to limit render threads, so I could keep working while renders ran. Sometimes, renders ran in the background while I played games with friends, and I complained about frame rates as if it were anyone else’s fault.

FX: Houdini-First, With Strategic Cheats

FX is my favourite part of the pipeline: technical, varied, and rewarding. The story allowed for a lot of FX work, which was at least part of the reason for my excitement.
SEN includes smoke, snow and mud trails, snowfall, water droplets, ash, portal FX, stylized portal travel FX, and a timelapse decay effect for rusting metal. I started some FX in Maya (snowfall and ash from wreckage) but moved most FX to Houdini, which I had begun learning in early 2020. The film’s icicles were among my first Houdini projects, built as a procedural generator.

Smoke pipeline

The fire in the wreckage was faked using flicker-animated area lights and 2D elements in comp, while smoke was simulated in Houdini and exported as VDB sequences for rendering in Maya. The film uses two smoke passes: an older simulation visible in the wide crater introduction in shot 5, and a re-simulated version created in 2024 for the closer crater shots.

Portal FX construction

I wrote a creative description of the portal effect before implementation to define visual intent. I built two circular volumetric base elements by emitting particles from a sphere in one direction and giving them a 10-second lifespan to form a line. Then, bending the line into a circle, and emitting smoke from particles, once before and once after bending.

From these two bases, I created 15 elements total. Many were particle-based and relied on geometry-based SOP operations to bend or deform finished simulations. Some layers used advection by the base volumes.
The main plasma effect consisted of: Two circular particle elements, a third supporting particle element and finally a geometric particle layer resembling a UI, discovered through experimentation. Activation-specific elements included lightning strikes made in Maya using a rigged curve, plus two Houdini activation particle elements.

Environment interaction passes included two particle elements, four volumetric elements and two volumetric elements converted to polygons for heat distortion in compositing. I documented these FX in detail for my bachelor’s thesis, but that exceeds the scope here.

Compositing: AOV-Driven Look Development in Nuke

I broke renders down into multiple layers, which allowed selective re-renders of only parts of a shot. This was crucial without access to a dedicated render farm. Each layer included a full set of AOVs such as diffuse, specular, SSS, and others, enabling extensive look development in Nuke. I did not separate lights into light categories, as I did not yet know how to combine material channels and light categories in a single setup. As a result, lighting had to be locked before final rendering. Whenever possible, I fixed issues in comp to avoid re-rendering. Some of these workarounds made the Nuke scripts heavy and unstable, with crashes that occasionally halted progress.

How SEN Got Me to London

In 2022, living in Hamburg, I finished my bachelor’s degree, using the main shot of the film as the practical component. I was now officially finished with studying and ready to join the scary, exciting world of being a professional artist. With a reel largely built from SEN shots, I applied to multiple places, including Framestore’s Launchpad internship. I assumed I was not ready. To my surprise, I was invited to three online interviews.

Framestore struggled to place me because true generalism is rare, and it didn’t help that I was not certain what my strongest skill was. The interviews went well, then silence, then the email that changed everything: not an internship, but an offer for a Junior Generalist position. SEN had made an impression.
I moved to London, where I work at Framestore to this day (currently in my fourth year). Being flexible as a generalist helped to get some stability during strikes and broader industry turbulence, though my main focus continues to be FX work.

Reworks: Outgrowing Your Own Past Work

Long projects create a problem: you improve faster than your older shots. In 2021, I was proud of the teaser shots. By 2023, as an entry-level professional, those shots looked weak. That added rework load on top of new shots. Reworks included improved lighting, additional FX sims, environment cleanup, and better composition. Everything required re-rendering, pushing my PC hard for months. Flat-rate electricity helped me and devastated y landlord. The most reworked element was the crater asset, originally built in autumn 2020 and later rebuilt multiple times.

The main shot was also reworked. It was finalised in early 2022 due to time constraints on the bachelor’s thesis, which forced shortcuts and messy scripts. Revisiting it in 2024 required cleanup before progress could be made. Reminder: work as clean as time allows, because you may return years later.

Sound FX: Handing Off to Company3 Connections

Sound FX was unfamiliar territory. I built temporary SFX for teasers, but wanted professional work for the final film. Colleagues at Framestore connected me to people at Company3, a Framestore subsidiary focused on post-production. I allocated a roughly 1k budget, and they produced sound FX. Being on the client side was stressful because I had to give notes outside my expertise, but the team was strong, and I trusted them. They delivered an Atmos mix. I hope I implemented it correctly and did not break it in the edit…

Cut Content: What Did Not Make It

Several planned elements were cut to keep the film readable and the workload under control. Heavy snowfall across the entire film was reduced, as dense snowflakes would have obscured the environments and significantly complicated compositing due to overlap with smoke, ash, and portal effects. Light snowfall remains in the early shots, while the crater sequences use none.

A half-frozen waterfall never progressed beyond concept and RnD. It added visual complexity without contributing to the story, so further work on it was dropped. A Maya nParticle setup for snow landing on the robot and melting into droplets came close to working, then collapsed under technical instability and was cut as well. While this could likely have been rebuilt later in Houdini, doing so would have required additional renders and strict continuity tracking across shots, making it impractical at that stage.

Release: From Festival Run to Online Premiere

Over the course of 2025, SEN screened at six festivals. It did not win any awards, but that was never the objective. The goal was to find out whether I could complete a project of this scale, enjoy the process, and possibly inspire others to start their own long-form personal projects. Anything beyond that was a bonus.

At the time of writing, I am preparing the online release. Marketing an online release is real work and easily the least enjoyable part of making a film: tailoring formats for different platforms, writing captions, and optimising for reach. Chatbots help with hashtags and surface-level optimisation, but they do not solve questions of taste or authenticity. Feedback from festival screenings was consistently positive, and it will be interesting to see how the film is received online. The public release link is here: Have a look on Youtube

Alongside this, Melanie Beisswenger suggested telling the story of the little robot further in the Digital Production, which means the article you are reading right now.

Will I Do Another One?

People have asked me about sequels or another animated short. Currently, there are no plans for further animation projects, since I want to try my hand at live action next. I miss having a personal project, but the next one will not be solo.

Should You Make a Film by Yourself? Is University Worth It?

If you are passionate, you should pursue it. The work requires time, dedication, discipline, and craft. You will not enjoy it if you do not love the process, but if you do, it can give your work direction and meaning.

University is a double-edged sword. It can be valuable for networking, structure, and protected time to learn, especially when supported by loans or grants. In Germany, student support can reduce financial pressure compared to other countries. You could learn everything online if you are disciplined and organised. My degree was in Media Design, a broad programme covering many aspects of media. It teaches fundamentals, but personal projects remain essential for building a portfolio. Do not expect to follow a curriculum and receive job offers automatically. A bachelor’s degree can help with visas and legal frameworks, but in media industry hiring, it carries limited weight. In practice, skills matter more than formal qualifications.

During university, I steered projects toward 3D and VFX whenever possible and reduced effort on areas less relevant to my goals, such as print. Making a solo film strengthened my generalist skills, at the cost of deeper specialisation. Demand for generalists may grow, but that is hard to predict. Generalists can be difficult to position, as their value is not always immediately obvious, but they often act as the connective tissue that holds projects together.

SEN taught me that passion projects are possible if you love the process. Make something awesome.

The post How I Spent Five Years Making a Solo 3D Film first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Hair shading improvements

The Standard Hair shader now supports a new accurate mode which simulates each hair strand as a cylinder rather than a flat surface. This produces better close-up renders but increases render times by around 10 to 30 percent. A further adaptive mode has been added, switching automatically to the accurate mode for close-ups and reverting to the approximate mode for distant hairs. The result is a more efficient balance between image quality and performance.

New bloom modes in Lens Effects

Arnold 7.4.4 expands the Lens Effects imager with new bloom-generation modes. A notable addition is the aperture bloom mode, which emulates physical-camera bloom by allowing control over aperture-blade count and curvature. This provides more natural-looking highlights and camera-style glare for cinematic imagery.

Material & lighting enhancements

The thin-film component of the OpenPBR material now observes better energy conservation for iridescent surfaces. Lighting receives additional flexibility: mesh lights can now optionally cast shadows, while light-blocker geometry can include ramp or negative density values, offering more nuanced lighting control for compositors and look-development artists.

Performance gains

Global Light Sampling (GLS) has been refined. The algorithm now factors in the spread parameter of quad and disk lights, which helps reduce noise in low-spread scenes. Autodesk reports performance improvements of up to six times faster in specific lighting scenarios, though more typical gains appear to average around 1.4 times. Texture handling has also been improved. Arnold now auto-generates missing TX files more efficiently, significantly reducing time to first pixel, especially on Windows systems with many CPU cores.

GPU rendering & denoising updates

On the GPU side, Arnold adds support for the Motion Vector shader and improves consistency between CPU and GPU parameter overrides. GPU memory usage has been reduced when rendering instances. The OIDN denoiser now supports NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and AMD RDNA 4 GPUs, expanding compatibility for new hardware.

Integration plugin support & system requirements

The release is supported by updated host-application plugins, including MAXtoA 5.8.4 for 3ds Max, C4DtoA 4.8.5 for Cinema 4D, HtoA 6.4.5 for Houdini, KtoA 4.4.4 for Katana, and MtoA 5.5.5 for Maya. Arnold 7.4.4 runs on Windows 10 and later, Linux with glibc 2.28 or higher, and macOS 11.0 or later. GPU rendering remains available only on Windows and Linux, requiring a compatible NVIDIA GPU. A single-user subscription is priced at 55 USD per month or 430 USD per year.

Caveats & things to test

While the update looks solid, a few points warrant testing before adoption. Autodesk’s claimed sixfold speed improvement in light sampling likely represents an optimal case; most users can expect more modest gains. The accurate hair mode, while visually impressive, carries a measurable render-time penalty. GPU rendering remains unavailable on macOS in this release. As always, studios should test all new features in their own pipeline before committing to production use. Users of previous Arnold 7.4.x builds will find the 7.4.4 upgrade worthwhile for its stability and refinement. Before installation, back up your projects and test key scenes with the new hair mode, bloom settings and light sampling. Evaluate the render-time impact to confirm benefits in your own workflow.

Arnold 7.4.4 focuses on polish rather than reinvention. The improved hair shader, refined lens bloom and smarter light sampling deliver genuine quality gains without disrupting established pipelines. GPU and denoiser updates further modernise hardware support.

The post Arnold 7.4.4: better hair, bloom & light-sampling first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

MotionMaker: AI Gets a Better Sense of Sitting Down

The Autodesk Maya 2026.2 Update brings substantial improvements to MotionMaker, Autodesk’s generative animation system. The editor now remembers where you left it and lets users customize row colours and keyboard shortcuts. Lighter mesh assets and character referencing mean faster playback and smaller file sizes. Enhanced machine learning models offer more accurate low-speed character behavior, yes, even wolves sitting and lying down are now more plausible. In short: more efficient, more responsive, less waiting around for characters to fall over convincingly.

LookdevX: MaterialX Joins the Party

LookdevX 1.9.0 for Maya introduces node previews and finally lets users load MaterialX documents into scenes. The update includes a live link to the source file for MaterialX, and users can now see swatches update in real time while editing. OpenColorIO (OCIO) now supports input colour spaces and aliases for MaterialX, so material authors can skip colour management workarounds. The default OCIO role is now “sRGB Encoded Rec.709 (sRGB)”, and AdobeRGB has joined the list of scene-linear colour spaces. ACES2065-1 is out as a rendering space due to display and accuracy headaches.

USD for Maya: 0.33 with Dual USD

USD for Maya 0.33 now ships with both USD 24.11 and 25.05 installed, reducing compatibility pain. While animation curve import/export isn’t explicitly detailed in Autodesk’s public notes, the dual-version install is official.

Arnold for Maya: Now with GPU Toon, Stats, and More

Arnold for Maya 5.5.3 includes the latest performance improvements, initial GPU support for Toon shading, a shiny new HTML-based interactive render stats report, and enhanced USD integration. If you’re only here for bug fixes, you’ll find them too, but Autodesk highlights significant rendering and workflow improvements.

Bifrost: Now Non-Optional

Bifrost 2.14.1.0 is now bundled by default with Maya—no more “optional component” toggling. The new version supports both USD 24.11 and 25.05.01, depending on what Maya is using. Featurewise, it’s a minor update, but there’s a new series of modular rigging tutorials by Maya rigging specialist Matthew Tucker for anyone wanting to wrangle character rigs in Bifrost’s node soup.

Animate in Context and Tutorials: More Guidance, Less Guesswork

Maya 2026.2 debuts new tutorial videos for both Bifrost modular rigging and the Animate in Context toolset. The Animate in Context update brings an exploration panel and improved error messaging—handy for anyone tired of deciphering Maya’s more cryptic complaints.

Pricing, OS, and Indie Reality Check

Maya supports Windows 10+, RHEL and Rocky Linux 8.10/9.3/9.5, and macOS 13+. Subscription pricing stands at $255/month or $2,010/year, with the Indie license holding at $330/year (subject to income and project caps). Maya Creative follows a metered pay-as-you-go plan, starting at $3/day and requiring a $300 annual minimum.

Read the Docs, Test Before You Trust

These features come straight from Autodesk’s official documentation. For anyone with production deadlines, remember: test updates in non-critical environments before rolling them into live pipelines. That’s the difference between a smooth update and a week of unexpected bug-hunting.

Next Up? 3ds Max!

The post Maya 2026.2: Lighter Wolves, Smarter Motion, and One Less Excuse to Skip MaterialX first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Well, the documentary „Our universe“ has a bigger scope than the west of England, but the VFX House Lux Aeterna is based there – and we got a chance to chat to VFX Supervisor Paul Silcox!

DP: To get a sense of the scope of your project, how many full CG shots did you create for the six episodes? Was there anything you didn‘t simulate?
Paul Silcox: Hi, yes, we did visualise a lot of phenomena but not everything was simulated, where possible we leaned on proceduralism in Houdini to produce the variety of FX. In the end there were nearly 400 full CG shots in the show and nearly 700 shots in total, these were produced over an 18-month period.

DP: How big was the team for this show, and what was your “primary” pipeline?
Paul Silcox: The team for Our universe varied over the production but was generally between 20 and 30. We had a very senior team working FX, Lighting and comp so we were able to deliver beautiful shots effi­ciently. In order to handle the sheer amount of active shots and the massive amounts of data utilised in the show we boosted our IT infrastructure adding 70 High-end render nodes, high bandwidth network hubs and super fast SSD storage. Managing all of this is our bespoke Shotgrid and Deadline management software.
The core of the studio‘s creative output is based around Houdini, Maya and Nuke and this is managed through Shotgrid, though we still work in C4d and After Effects for certain shots or projects. Our renderers of choice
for Our Universe were Arnold, Mantra and Redshift.

DP: Did you use different toolsets for the different shots?
Paul Silcox: Houdini was our go to creative package for a lot of phenomena and this was supported by Maya and Nuke. The power of Houdini to test ideas and play with concepts allowed us to communicate scientific stories in a variety of new and interesting ways.
Our Universe was a dream job as there were so many examples of phenomena that we had to synthesize, from the inside of the cell to the inside of the sun there was always a new creative challenge. The atomic sequences are a great example of the type of collaboration that marked the production – our CG Supervisor created a beautiful sequence visualising the interaction of atomic particles and the FX department was tasked with developing a system that could replicate the look across a variety of shots. The team developed a procedural SDF system in Houdini that was relatively light-weight and art directable and this was used to demonstrate the many atomic interactions that drive the universe.

DP: Did you add any special tools to the Houdini pipeline?
Paul Silcox: Houdini was our primary FX software though there were other packages used for simulation FX. For one sequence we handled a massive SPH dataset computed in SWIFT at Durham University on the Cosma supercomputer. The data arrived in HDF5 format and was converted to a usable format for visualisation in Houdini. We also use MASH in Maya, particles in nuke and we use After Effects with Element 3D.

DP: And then you added particles to everything?
Paul Silcox: Lux Aeterna‘s Comp team did a brilliant job of working with Houdini and Maya environments, simulations and FX and they are always adding a sprinkle of something to a shot, from volumetric lighting to new particles. Our 3D teams worked closely with comp to make sure they had everything necessary in the renders from an AOV point of view and all shots were lit and rendered in ACES colour space to the required delivery spec.

DP: How did you keep an overview of these many, sometimes rather similar shots?
Paul Silcox: Lux Aeterna used Shotgrid to manage the shot delivery and our workflows allowed for there to be a significant number of shots to be live and worked on concurrently. Production was brilliant at managing the reviews through the playlists on shotgrid and for the artists this worked very well. You‘d think that it would be easy to get confused when the differences between shots are subtle but it‘s like the penguins finding their young, once you have worked on a shot you can find it and talk about it instantly no matter how many similar versions you have worked on.

DP: Did you have to develop something from scratch for “Our Universe”?
Paul Silcox: Our Universe presented many challenges and Lux Aeterna responded in a variety of ways developing numerous new workflows, one example was our collaboration with Amazon AWS. We had used online render farms many times before but we had never needed so many hours of rendering in such a short delivery window. We worked closely with the UK and US teams to implement the AWS software and learn the intricacies of working with datacenter infrastructure to add several hundred nodes to our render capacity at peak times.

DP: And speaking of delivery, how long did you (approximately) render per frame?
Paul Silcox: Ha, how long is a piece of string? Let me just say this, there were a significant number of shots with super complex volumes, billions of voxels instanced many times, SSS shots with full frame transmission and scenes with many millions of polygons, all rendered at 4K. A lot of these shots would take 5 hours plus per frame to render all layers so the demand on the render farm was huge.

DP: In comparison to other shows like Blue Whales or 8 Days, what were the difficulties in the pipeline?
Paul Silcox: Our Universe was complex and wide ranging in its scope but the demands are always the same, more power, more storage and more bandwidth. Lux Aeterna has developed a pipeline to handle the complexities of a show like Our Universe and I was proud to see it delivered so efficiently.

DP: There were “pickup” and “inbetween shots” in almost every jump from documentary footage, animals, and the space-pictures – did you have a library for that, or did you create a shot for each?
Paul Silcox: Our artists worked particularly hard on the interstitials creating the timelapse and spatial jump effect that bridged the many sequences. We didn‘t rely on anything except the creative flair and extreme hard work by our dedicated team.

DP: I assume that some shots had “invisible Vfx” as well?
Paul Silcox: There was definitely some cleanup and augmentation as this is always the case for this type of show. Our comp team worked brilliantly to create the continuity in the show though you‘ll have to look hard to find it!

DP: How did you balance between the “Look” and the input from the scientific advisors?
Paul Silcox: Finding the balance between science and entertainment is always a journey, luckily we have experienced and senior creatives with a long history of scientific storytelling having worked on BBC Science shows like ‚Wonders of the Universe‘, ‚Wonders of Life‘ and ‚Human Universe‘, just to name a few. They brought this considerable experience to the show working closely with the showrunner Mike Davies and the brilliant Producer Directors to deliver a cinematic vision and relatable stories to the screen.

DP: What would you do differently if you started at Episode One again?
Paul Silcox: VFX is a dynamic business and so we are always looking forward not back, having said that there are always efficiencies to be found. In an ideal world I would share ALL of our knowledge with our younger selves, even if all it did was bring the render times down.

DP: And what was your favourite shot?
Paul Silcox: Of course, as the supervisor I‘m not allowed to have favourite shots ;). I would say that the first episode was fun as we were right at the beginning of our journey and discovering a look for the programme, it was a really exciting time.

DP: What are you working on now?
Paul Silcox: We are always under such strict rules when it comes to discussing live projects but what I will tell you is that as well as our unscripted slate we are very happy to be working on more scripted productions and as always we are developing new ways to tell stories and continuing to challenge our skills in environment and FX.

The post Our Universe of… Houdini? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Autodesk has announced the release of 3ds Max 2024, which offers several new features. A technology preview now enables the use of OCIO colour management in Max. A new Boolean modifier with OpenVDB meshing method enables alternative calculation methods that are independent of the initial geometry. The array modifier has also been updated to provide a new phyllotaxis distribution technique and a progressive transformation mode. A new controller allows the addition of multiple transform controllers as layers of overlaid animation data. In addition, the slate material editor has been reworked and the material editor now includes a new compound node. The list of modifiers has been improved and now includes a search function. The default mirror axis of the symmetry modifier has been changed to X to better suit artists’ workflows. There are also improvements to STL import speed, automatic smoothing and retriangulation for Edit Poly and Editable Poly. 3ds Max 2024 comes with Substance 2.4.10 and Arnold 5.6.0.1.

Here are the full release notes.

The post 3ds Max 2024 is here! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mike Kuhn.

In nuce: If you model with Blender, you also have to render with Blender? Not if Aaron Powell has his way! The owner and creative director at Luna Digital has released version 0.4.5 of BtoA (aka “Blender to Arnold”). The add-on is developed by the Blender community and links Blender with Autodesk’s rendering tools. Version 0.4.5 offers: Support for Blender 3.0 and up, better support for Arnold 7, several bug fixes, and numerous improvements to existing toolbox.

More info on BtoA (and the brains behind it): In a post on blenderartists.org , Aaron reveals he uses BtoA across the board for his work at animation studio Luna Digital – for example for: Product renderings, marketing videos, VFXing for indie films and short films. Aaron is an alumnus of the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in 3D Digital Graphics.

Click further: Everything you need to know about BtoA on Github and BlenderNation.

The post New version of “Blender to Arnold” released! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Every week, we present you with the best tutorials that will help you polish your workflows with the hottest digital content creation tools in the world! Today we’re treating ourselves to a tutorial that will delight anyone interested in denoising with Arnold.

What will you learn in this tutorial? This video tutorial on the Arnold Renderer YouTube channel shows you how to take a professional approach to denoising with Arnold. The video lasts just four and a half minutes, so it’s perfect for your lunch break:

Click on: If you would like to find out about other useful Arnold tutorials, click on the associated YouTube channel to watch video tutorials on other things worth knowing about Arnold. Among other things, you will learn how to render clouds or a board game , or how to expertly light a portrait.

Goodbye! Check back next week when it’s Tutorial Tuesday again!

Arnold Tutorial – How to use denoising in MtoA

 

 

The post Denoising mit Arnold | Tutorial Tuesday first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Support for multi-core CPUs

Arnold recently released the latest version of its Arnold renderer. Version 6.0.4 now offers improved performance when rendering with multi-core processors. The supported processors include AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper and Intel’s Core i9 and Xeon. Thanks to the improved support, rendering times should be noticeably shorter.

Features? Features!

Other new features include automatic file path remapping when working in parallel on several workstations at the same time. But also a new tint control of the rim ligth for Arnold’s toon shader, as well as extended GPU rendering and OSL and USD support. Support for Open Shading Language has also been extended.

The integration plug-ins have also been equipped with new features worth mentioning. For example, the 3ds Max plugin MAXtoA now has the Arnold Renderview. In addition, there is now a real-time render preview function and support for the tyFlow Physics toolset. Furthermore, C4DtoA has been equipped with a new render time scattering system (Arnold Scatter).

Further information, system requirements & availability

Arnold 6.0.4 is available from Windows 7, RHEL/ CentOs 6 and above, as well as Mac Os X 10.11 and subsequent programme versions. The renderer can be integrated into 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Katana and Maya. A legacy plugin has been created for Softimage.

Arnold is sold exclusively as a subscription model. Single-user subscriptions start at 45 US dollars per month or 360 US dollars per year. Multi-user subscriptions start at 630 US dollars per year. A 30-day trial version is also available for download.

For a complete list of the new features, it is worth taking a look at the corresponding online documentation.

The post Autodesk | Arnold 6.0.4 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.