For those who don’t know the tool: World Creator is a GPU terrain tool from BiteTheBytes with bridge plugins for Blender, Cinema 4D, Godot, Houdini, Unity, and Unreal Engine.

The big headline is a small textbox

World Creator 2026.4 lets you type mathematical expressions into numerical fields. That sounds like a nerdy feature, because it is. It also means fewer hand-calculated offsets, fewer copy-and-paste accidents, and more repeatable setups when building layered terrain that needs to stay art-directable. The same release adds full decal support. Decals are often the difference between a terrain that looks generated and one that looks dressed. They also help when you need localised detail without turning every change into another texture bake cycle.

Seams get quieter

Terrain normal blending wants to improve object-to-terrain transitions, so reduce the obvious cut line where a hero object meets the ground. If you build environments where a single rock edge can pull focus in a wide shot, this is the kind of “small” addition you end up using all day. World Creator 2026.4 also introduces configurable object shadow settings. That gives artists another lever for matching scene lighting behavior when objects sit on terrain, especially in lookdev and layout passes where readability beats physical purity.

Performance fixes that actually sound like production

VRAM scaling links the Max Object Count to available GPU VRAM. In practice, this ties a key scene limit to the hardware ceiling instead of a fixed guess, which can make scenes behave more predictably across machines.

There is another performance change that targets daily workflow friction. Shape Design Mode no longer triggers automatic material recomputes.

Bug fixes: import, UI, syncing, crashes

World Creator 2026.4 fixes an importing issue where Raw and R16 formats were hidden during import. It also corrects compass centering in the UI. On the data side, the update fixes missing Baseshape Color and Emissive toggles in the sync.xml file, resolves issues involving empty model objects, and fixes Stochastic Distribution failing when used with height blending. The release notes also state that several crashes were resolved.

Community Edition and licensing tiers

BiteTheBytes now offers a free Community Edition, positioned as a way to learn the realtime terrain workflow before upgrading to a commercial license. The export is disabled in Community Edition, while paid tiers enable export, with Indie listed as up to 8k and higher tiers listed as unlimited.

Yearly subscription pricing on the buy page lists Indie Yearly at $49 per year for revenue under $100,000, Professional Yearly at $99 per year for revenue up to $200,000, Studio Yearly at $199 per year for revenue up to $1,000,000, and Enterprise Yearly at $799 per year for revenue above $1,000,000.

Perpetual pricing includes Indie Perpetual at $99 and Professional Perpetual at $199. Enterprise Perpetual includes 12 months of updates with an optional renewal listed at $449 per year. Lifetime pricing shown includes Indie Lifetime at $249, Professional Lifetime at $499, Studio Lifetime at $999, and Enterprise Lifetime at $3,999.

https://docs.world-creator.com/release-notes/version-2026.x/world-creator-2026.4

https://www.world-creator.com

The post World Creator 2026.4 adds expressions and decals first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Scans Factory has released a free Next-Gen Tech Demo for Unreal Engine 5.7. The project recreates the city of Venice using Epic’s latest engine build and demonstrates the use of its core realtime features: Lumen (global illumination and reflections) and Nanite (virtualised geometry rendering). The scene includes over 500 modular assets: stylised buildings, bridges, courtyards, cafés, and public squares filled with small environmental details. The visual tone leans toward realism with slight stylisation, designed to illustrate UE5.7’s lighting and geometry improvements in dense urban layouts. Also: I nice walk in the afternoon, no mater how bad the weather is outside.

Performance: Solid but No DLSS

According to performance testing on DSOGaming, the demo runs at around 40 FPS in native 4K on Cinematic settings and 65 FPS on Ultra settings. The test system used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32 GB DDR5-6000, and an NVIDIA RTX 5090 under Windows 10 (64-bit) with GeForce driver 581.80. Notably, the demo does not include support for DLSS 4 or any other upscaling technology. Despite this, frame stability at Ultra settings indicates a well-optimised Unreal Engine 5.7 environment for high-end hardware.

Content and Availability

The Venice demo can be downloaded free of charge from Scans Factory’s distribution page. A walkthrough video and a comparative clip showing UE5.4 versus UE5.7 versions accompany the release, illustrating incremental engine performance improvements. Scans Factory notes that the project uses entirely self-authored assets. No pricing information applies, as this is a public showcase rather than a commercial release.

Context: UE5.7 in the Wild

Unreal Engine 5.7 has been appearing in a growing number of fan-made and experimental projects. Other recent community tech demos include remakes or reinterpretations of titles such as Halo 3: ODST, Spider-Man, and STALKER, as well as small-scale environment studies like “Rome Italian Town” and “Witcher-like Village.” While such projects are non-commercial and unofficial, they offer insight into the rendering behaviour and efficiency of Epic’s evolving engine pipeline.

Test Before Production

As with all publicly shared Unreal Engine demos, performance and compatibility can vary by hardware configuration. D’uh. And, if you need some proper cicchetti, have a laugh about the Milanese or just take a relaxed walk in the absurd city, this is for you. Bonus Points if you find the spot where Indiana Jones climbes out in front of the Church, and says: “Ah, Venice!”

Get your walkies on in Vencie here.

The post Venice in Unreal: Scans Factory’s UE5.7 Demo Goes Public first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Another month, another pile of free stuff from Epic’s Fab marketplace, and this one’s for everyone who’s never set foot on a real construction site (which, let’s face it, probably covers 98 percent of us in VFX and game production). Environment artist Marcos Frazao, better known as Brasileirisses, has released a bundle of 120 free 3D construction-site assets, available until 4 November 2025.

The pack includes everything you need to turn your shiny Unreal level into a dusty work-in-progress: pipes, girders, bricks, breeze blocks, foundations, pillars, and all those half-finished walls that make your scene look appropriately unsafe. There are also generators, skips, and portable toilets — so, everything a proper building site requires, minus the coffee truck.

The release includes five pre-built actor components, three wall setups, and a set of decals for adding that authentic layer of grime, tape, and warning signage. There’s even an asset-showcase map, because no collection of industrial debris is complete without a guided tour. A materials variation system lets you swap finishes and tones, so your scaffolding can look either freshly delivered or appropriately neglected.

Under the hood, the numbers tell a story of genuine production quality. The pack ships with 246 unique meshes, each with custom or automatically generated collision geometry, and vertex counts ranging from 44 to 115,544 tris. There are three LODs per non-Nanite mesh, and for the rest, Nanite handles the heavy lifting. A total of 11 base materials, 169 material instances, and 590 textures in resolutions from 512 to 4,096 pixels cover every surface from rusty metal to concrete dust.

The assets are designed for Unreal Engine 5.3 to 5.6 and run on both Windows and Mac. They’re mid- to high-poly models suitable for visualization and games, and they include blank template textures if you want to roll your own material library. If you notice any weird black splotches, the documentation even offers a fix: open the console and type r.Raytracing.Shadows.EnableTwoSidedGeometry 0. (Because sometimes, realism in lighting just goes a little too far.)

All example scenes are built with Nanite-enabled meshes stored neatly inside the “Nanite” folder, so you won’t have to dig through the rubble to find them. The assets are distributed as a standard Fab Asset Package under the Fab Standard License, which means you can use them in any engine or DCC tool like Unreal, Unity, Blender, Omniverse, as long as you respect the no-redistribution clause.

And for anyone reluctant to download gigabytes of rebar and rubble into their project browser: there’s a free playable demo (11 GB via Google Drive) where you can stroll through the digital construction zone before committing.

So if you chose a career in VFX precisely because you didn’t want to spend your days in steel-toed boots surrounded by dust and concrete mixers — here’s your chance to change your mind. Digitally. No hard hats required.

The post No hard hats mandatory: 120 Free Construction-Site Props for Unreal & Beyond first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

EZ Tree is a lightweight, free, and open-source procedural tree generator for 3D production workflows. Developed in Python and available under the Apache 2.0 license, EZ Tree runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, either via command line or its built-in GUI. It’s aimed squarely at CG artists, technical directors, game developers, and anyone who needs to populate scenes with tree assets—without wrestling a full-grown digital forest.

Lightweight, No-Nonsense Tree Generation

EZ Tree is available on GitHub and positions itself as a simpler alternative to heavier solutions like SpeedTree. It focuses on generating tree geometry quickly and predictably, using a Python-based system that outputs .obj files. That means it’s widely compatible with most DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools.

Users can create trees by running the script from a terminal or using the GUI executable (provided for convenience). Once generated, trees are exported in .obj format, which can be imported into almost any 3D software pipeline without additional plugins or converters.

Procedural Simplicity – With Custom Controls

EZ Tree supports a JSON-based configuration system. This allows users to define procedural parameters such as:

• Trunk height
• Branching angles
• Number of segments
• Leaf density
• And many more ….

You can tweak the .json configuration file manually or select from several prebuilt presets. The developer promises “readable and editable” config files, so even non-developers should feel at home (or at least not completely lost).

GUI or Terminal – Your Choice

Users can run EZ Tree as a CLI (Command Line Interface) tool if they’re integrating it into automated pipelines or batch processes. Alternatively, a GUI (Graphical User Interface) is available for standalone use, especially helpful for those just exploring the tool or adjusting parameters visually. The GUI is included as a .exe file for Windows and runs independently—no installation needed.

Designed for Speed – and Openness

Because it’s written in Python, EZ Tree can be easily extended or customized by studios and artists who want to integrate it more deeply into their own tools or pipelines. The use of open standards like .obj for mesh export and .json for configuration makes it friendly for adaptation.

There’s no built-in renderer, shading system, or rigging functionality—just tree geometry, untextured and unshaded. But that’s the point: EZ Tree does one thing, and does it fast. It grows your trees and gets out of your way.

Availability and Licensing

EZ Tree is free to use and modify. It’s distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows commercial and non-commercial use, modification, and distribution. The tool can be downloaded from its official website or directly from GitHub.

What You Need to Know for the Pipeline

For Technical Directors looking to integrate EZ Tree into existing toolchains, its architecture offers some clear benefits: the .json config makes it straightforward to version-control different tree presets or feed in procedural variations at runtime. Since the tool is written in Python, wrapping it in PySide or Qt-based GUIs—or even baking it into asset management workflows (think Shotgun, ftrack, Kitsu)—shouldn’t be a major lift.

EZ Tree outputs clean .obj meshes only, so no UVs, no materials, and no hierarchy data (e.g., no LOD groups or physics proxies). This is strictly mesh generation. If you’re targeting real-time engines like Unreal or Unity, expect to process the output via import scripts that assign materials and prep for instancing or batching.

The simplicity of the source code means a RESTful wrapper or local socket interface could be DIY’d for network rendering or procedural scene population. In short: It’s a good seed for your own tools, if you don’t mind watering it a little.

Reality Check

The tool’s design emphasizes predictability and control over randomness. While EZ Tree uses procedural generation under the hood, it avoids overly complex simulation-style growth models. Instead, it’s more about crafting a tree to spec—fast.

While EZ Tree shows real promise as a lightweight procedural asset tool, it’s still new and evolving. As always: Artists working in production environments should verify performance and compatibility before introducing new tools into critical pipelines. No one wants a surprise sapling sprouting in the render queue.

The post EZ Tree: Your Next Tree’s Just a Click Away first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The team at SideFX has dropped a freebie that’s neither small nor subtle: a fully rigged, animated, textured mech character model, designed with Unreal Engine 5 workflows in mind. It’s called the Mech Squad: VX Model, and it’s ready to walk, stomp, aim, and repeat—all while being FBX-friendly and production-agnostic. Think of it as a test dummy with attitude, though significantly more polygonal firepower.

Animations Included (Yes, Also Free)

The downloadable mech comes with a suite of built-in animations: walk, run, idle, turn, aim, and shoot. These pre-authored motions give users a solid starting point for character prototyping or for examining animation retargeting pipelines. It’s essentially SideFX offering an animated sandbox that’s more titanium than sand.

Rigging-wise, the mech comes with a pre-structured skeleton that’s already animated and baked—perfect for direct export. And since the format is FBX, artists are free to bring it into whatever DCC (Digital Content Creation) app they prefer, assuming that DCC speaks FBX—which, in 2025, is almost a prerequisite for existing. The rig was created using Houdini’s KineFX system, which specializes in procedural motion workflows. The model is not only rigged and animated but also textured and shaded. SideFX notes that the mesh is specifically set up for efficient use in Unreal Engine 5, which suggests polycounts and shader networks are tuned for performance as well as visual readability.

Also of note: this is a baked rig. That means no live constraints or procedural dependencies once exported—what you see is what you get, frame by frame. For those planning to pipeline this into a game engine or cinematic sequence, that’s a plus. Less surprise, more control.

Use It, Abuse It—Just Don’t Sell It

The model is free to use for both personal and commercial projects. Yes, that includes dropping it into your next demo reel, cinematic, or stylised robot western. However, redistribution is a no-go: you can use it, but you can’t repackage and sell it. So, no sneaky “Mech NFT” scams, please.

The download is available now from the official SideFX website, where you’ll also find documentation on the rig’s setup and export workflow. If you’re wondering how to bring your own characters through the same Houdini-to-Unreal process, the Mech Squad model serves as a functional case study.

Download the Mech Squad VX model here and happy animating.

The post Free Mech, Fully Armed: SideFX Drops Rigged & Ready Model for UE5 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.