For those who don’t know the tool: Wafer is a focused 3D texture painting app that sits next to Uniform and CozyBlanket, now stretching from iPad to Windows with a stylized, hand-painted vibe.

Windows gets a new paint box

Wafer now has a free open beta build for Windows. The app started life as an iPad-only release, and this beta marks the first time the tool shows up on a platform outside iPad.

The target is clear: stylised, hand-painted, and NPR texture work. The feature set also aims higher than the word beta sometimes suggests. The app includes multi-channel painting, meaning a single brush stroke can update multiple channels at once, including colour, roughness, and metalness. The beta build on Windows aligns with the current iPad release and includes new features introduced in the Wafer 1.1 update, such as a Smudge tool.

The familiar stuff, in the right places

Wafer leans into an illustration-style workspace, then applies it directly to 3D surfaces. Brushes, layers, and masks sit at the centre of the UI concept. The toolset includes brushes, lasso clips, gradients, wet painting, and blur, all intended to operate directly on 3D geometry.

Layers follow a full layer system approach: paint layers, fill layers, editable masks, blend modes, and opacity. The workflow stays non-destructive.

Symmetry covers both 3D and 2D use, with configurable independent pivots, and mirroring across any axis. That matters for stylized assets where mirrored motifs can be a feature, not a shortcut.

Wafer also keeps 3D and 2D views in sync. You can paint on the 3D mesh with unlit, shaded, or physically based preview modes, or work directly on the 2D texture, with both views side by side.

Multi-channel painting without the busywork

Multi-channel painting is one of the headline capabilities. A single stroke can paint color, roughness, and metalness simultaneously. Wafer also supports custom channel layouts for NPR and stylized shaders, letting you define channel setups beyond the standard trio.

On the production side, the appeal is not just fewer trips between tools. It is fewer chances to drift out of alignment when a material style depends on more than one channel moving together. If you have ever tried to keep painterly color breakup and matching roughness breakup locked in step, you already know the pain. If you have not, congratulations on your serene past life.

That said, multi-channel painting only helps if it matches the rest of your pipeline and shader expectations. New tools and innovations should always be tested before use in production.

Projects, materials, and exporting with intent

Wafer supports projects containing multiple meshes, materials, and texture sets at once. That matters for anything beyond a single prop, and it also matters for stylized characters where separate materials often carry separate rules.

Asset browser built into the app

Wafer includes an integrated Asset Browser meant to keep texture resources close at hand. The browser covers stencils, triplanar mapping textures, brush alphas, HDRIs, decals, and stamps. The pitch is that these assets stay organised and accessible in a single panel, ready to apply as you work.

Within that set, stencils project patterns onto surfaces, triplanar projections wrap textures across 3D geometry, brush alphas provide custom brush tip shapes, and decals and stamps place detail textures with precision.

Performance claims, labeled as claims

The app describes extreme optimization intended to run smoothly on low-spec, older devices. It also states it can push modern hardware with up to 64K resolution per layer. These are marketing claims. It also claims brush and tool performance stays stable and predictable, with minimal impact from texture resolution, layer count, or stroke speed.

For compatibility, Wafer requires no special GPU or CPU features and targets any compatible device from the past 10+ years, listing 256 MB of RAM and OpenGL 2.0.

A published memory table provides approximate peak memory numbers for RGBA 8-bit textures with four layered materials: 150 MB at 4K, 350 MB at 8K, and 900 MB at 16K. It also notes that resolution scaling uses tiles and that available memory is the limiting factor.

One practical wrinkle: the Windows beta can be downloaded directly from the Wafer website, based on an update dated April 3, 2026. The Wafer product page itself currently shows a message that desktop downloads are coming soon.

If you are evaluating Wafer, treat the beta label like it means something. Keep a backup plan, keep your assets versioned, and do not bet a delivery date on a tool you have not run through your own texutre pipeline.

Pricing, or the lack of it

Wafer on Windows is free during the open beta period. A stable release date has not been announced, and official pricing for the stable release has not been announced either. A license server is described as suggesting the Windows version will be priced slightly higher than the iPad release, but no official price is stated.

https://sparseal.com/wafer/

The post Sparseal Wafer opens Windows beta first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: tamga is a quick sculpt plus vertex paint sketchpad that hands off via Wavefront OBJ to heavier DCCs like Blender when your scene stops being cute.

Small app, big get-it-done energy

tamga runs in a web browser, on desktop, and as an iPad app. The web version targets browsers with WebGPU. The iPad version requires iPadOS 26.0 or later. The design goes for minimal UI and a low friction workflow. There are no accounts, no subscriptions, and no ads stated for the tool. The tool is also described as offline by choice, with work staying on the device. This makes tamga a handy place to rough shapes, do quick paint passes, and spit out something presentable before you move to the usual monsters.

Sculpting that stays out of your way

Brushes include Clay, Smooth, Inflate, Flatten, and Drag. A modifier flips brush behavior into an alternate mode, and there is a smooth override that temporarily switches to the smooth brush at the same size. Dynamic topology is available per brush and is described as auto-splitting and simplifying as you sculpt. Remeshing rebuilds uniform topology at a chosen voxel density, and version notes mention a Close Holes button in the Remesh pop-up.

Symmetry support includes mirror sculpting across an axis, plus a symmetrize operation that applies symmetry to existing geometry. There are desktop shortcuts for undo and redo, and gesture based undo and redo on iPad.

Masks, booleans, and posing without the drama

You can paint masks to protect areas from other brushes, with an unmask action via the modifier concept. Masks also feed mesh creation. Extract Masked creates a new mesh from the masked region, and Extract Shell creates a thin shell from the mask boundary.

For fast shape bashing, there are primitives with boolean operations: union, subtract, and intersect. A smoothness slider controls how soft the boolean blend is. Positioning uses a gizmo, snapping is on by default, and a modifier disables snapping.

There is also a pose workflow built around placing anchors and dragging to deform, with options to remove anchors, freeze to bake deformation, and clear anchors. tamga comes from galata.ink, and it is a weekend project created outside professional VFX work.

Vertex paint, plus ink lines for style passes

Painting is vertex based, so paint lives on the mesh rather than in UV mapped textures. Channels listed include albedo, roughness, and metallic, with per channel toggles for painting, filling, and clearing.

Ink mode lets you draw ink like strokes on the 3D surface. View styles listed include paper mode, matcap, and PBR. Paper mode has controls such as valleys, peaks, chisel, and a mix control that blends between standard rendering and full paper mode. Render export formats listed are PNG, JPEG, and OpenEXR.

Export, pricing, and the reality check

Import and export uses Wavefront OBJ, so you can hand off to tools like Autodesk Maya or ZBrush when you need deeper pipelines. There is also export to a tamga format, plus auto recovery that saves work and restores after crashes, hopefully. Personal use is free, and personal, educational, and non profit use is free on most platforms. Commercial use requires one time payment of 12.99 USD.

A final note for people who ship frames for a living: test new tools and innovations before you rely on them in production, especially around OBJ round trips and vertex paint persistence. Do one quick scuplt, export it, reimport it, and check if the alebdo channel survives. If it does, you just bought yourself a nimble little idea machine.

https://tamga.galata.ink/

The post Galata.ink Ships Tamga Sculpt and Paint for Browsers first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Placement in the Pipeline and the Ecosystem: For those who don’t know the tool: Apple Creator Studio is Apple’s new subscription bundle for Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor and company. It collects the firm’s long-running apps under one roof, apparently to remind users they still exist.

Old tools, new subscription

Apple has announced Apple Creator Studio, a new subscription at 12.99 dollars per month (129 dollars per year) that combines the company’s creative and productivity apps into a single plan. The bundle launches on 28 January 2026 with a one-month free trial and discounted student pricing.

The offer includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage, along with premium templates for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. Freeform will join later this year. Family Sharing allows up to six users. For those who prefer traditional ownership, Apple confirmed that all pro apps will remain available as one-time Mac App Store purchases, a wise reassurance given that some of these apps see updates about as often as Halley’s Comet.

AI headlines, unclear substance

The bundle carries the usual 2026-era headline, F***** AI everywhere. But Apple’s newsroom announcement remains vague on technical details, and none of the tools appear to have been rebuilt or meaningfully modernised.

Final Cut Pro adds Beat Detection, which uses an AI model from Logic Pro to mark beats on a timeline. Editors can align cuts to music, though this feature has been available in competing NLEs for years. Montage Maker auto-edits footage based on the best visual moments, and Auto Crop reformats clips for vertical output. A Transcript Search and a Visual Search are supposed to help locate shots, though Apple did not explain how the algorithms evaluate content.

Logic Pro, MainStage, and Pixelmator Pro each receive AI-branded updates too, with Apple promising enhanced creative tools. No performance data, model types, or reproducible benchmarks have been published.

Motion and Compressor are included in the bundle as if they had recently evolved, but even the most charitable user would struggle to find significant updates from this decade. Their interfaces and functions remain nearly identical to releases from the late 2010s.

Pixelmator and productivity perks

The more active development clearly comes from Pixelmator Pro, which finally arrives on iPad with Apple Pencil support. It gains a Warp tool and cross-platform compatibility. Apple also introduces a Content Hub offering stock-style assets across its apps. Subscribers to Pages, Keynote, and Numbers gain access to premium templates and beta tools such as Magic Fill for spreadsheet completion and a text generator for presentation outlines. Apple calls these AI-powered, though again, details are thin.

The audience question

Creator Studio’s real target appears to be users deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem, those who already own Apple hardware, sync files through iCloud, and occasionally edit or compose but do not rely on frequent software updates. For professional postproduction environments, the package’s low entry cost may seem attractive, yet its long-term reliability is uncertain. Update history for Motion and Compressor suggests Apple’s creative maintenance cycle is, at best, intermittent.

Services first, creatives second

Apple’s newsroom release ties Creator Studio to record-breaking 2025 services revenue. The company’s real strategy seems less about improving the apps and more about turning previously static tools into a recurring-revenue stream. The 13-dollar monthly price places it below Adobe Creative Cloud, though it is limited strictly to macOS and iPadOS devices. Some features require Apple Intelligence-capable hardware, further narrowing the audience. Apple has not disclosed regional rollout details or whether the AI models run on-device or in the cloud.

Verdict for production

Creator Studio simplifies access for hobbyists and educators who want Apple’s tools for occasional use. Working editors, compers, videeogrpahers and musicians expecting frequent feature releases or pipeline stability will likely stay with established platforms. As always, professionals should test any new Apple suite in a controlled environment before integrating it into live projects.

We’ll see when it is released, and how the update cycle will develop.

The post Apple Bundles Its Ageing Pro Apps in Subscription first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Serious video work has been possible on an iPad for quite a while now, with apps like DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, or even Luma Fusion (see here). But until now, most professionals would consider the tablet for preparation while being off-base and not for finishing in a complete workflow. With the arrival of the M4 processors, which blow away most of the competition in the Mac mini or MacBook Pro, we’d like to have another look at the iPad Pro with such a processor.

Reviewed hardware and its OS

Apple kindly lent us a well-equipped iPad Pro M4 with 16 GB of RAM and 2 TB of solid state storage. We have been running it under iOS 18.4.1. For comparison, we use a Mac mini M4 Pro with 24 GB, 12‑Core CPU, and 16‑Core GPU. While we still like macOS Sonoma better, this one can only be operated under MacOS Sequoia, (currently in version 15.4.1). Our first part will be focused on their use for DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve

Blackmagic Design (BM for short) already has a public beta for version 20 of DaVinci Resolve (DR), but not on the tablet. While beta testing under iOS is possible with Apple’s TestFlight, they obviously didn’t care to go through the hassle of registration. So, version 20 will probably only show up on the tablet once it’s final. Accordingly, our comparison will take place primarily on version 19, 19.1.4 Studio to be precise. BM mentions that projects (.drp files) or archives (.dra) are fully compatible, but now there’s one caveat: those out of version 20 are not backward compatible.

There are other limitations when trying to get serious: no RAW formats other than BM’s own BRAW are read by DR on the iPad. Since we wanted to try a widely available benchmark on either hardware, we used the one by Team 2 Films, which you can download here. To seriously challenge the hardware (and DR), it’s using several other RAW formats in resolutions up to 8K. Puget Systems now has a version of their popular PugetBench for Creators under MacOS too, but not for the tablet. A basic score of 8811 for the Mac mini Pro in that test is remarkable, in particular in relation to its low power consumption.

Benchmarking M4 against M1 Pro

Nevertheless, we also wanted to know how much faster a Mac mini M4 Pro would be compared to a trusty old MacBook Pro M1. The Puget benchmark yielded a score of 4962 in a tad under 16 minutes on the M1 Pro, but the new Mac mini gave us a score of 8811 in less than 4 minutes. This is better than a Windows laptop with the mobile version of the RTX 4090, but less than an Apple M3 Max or a desktop PC with a 4090 (according to Puget Systems’ ranking). Not bad for such a tiny computer! Under full load the fan became audible, but it was not an aggressive sound and could be held well under control with TG Pro.

PugetBench is running DR under external control, while the one by Team 2 Films is just a DR project with demanding source files and complex operations. Rendering it in its original format on the MBP M1 Pro took just short of 12 minutes, and the 32 GB RAM in that machine were enough to avoid swapping to the SSD. We also took the times under Sequoia and for DR 20 beta 2, but they were identical within a reasonable margin of error. The Mac mini M4 Pro needed 10:35, but was faster at 9:46 with DR 20b2, which seems to have some optimisations for M4.

Our machine has only 24 GB, the standard for this model, and it went into occasional swapping with R3D in 8K, but not with 6K. The decoder is grabbing quite a chunk of RAM too. So, if you regularly need to work in 8K and are eying this little machine, you may want to go higher. It’s not offered in 32, though, you’ll need to go for 48 GB to be on the safe side. OTOH, a bit of swapping won’t kill your SSD right away, just make rendering a bit slower. And then, there are even ways to replace the SSD in the Mac mini now.

Benchmarking the iPad Pro

Our first step to make it run on the iPad was converting and relinking all incompatible clips to ProRes 422HQ in their original resolution. CineForm would be accepted too, but now that DR can export ProRes under Windows as well, this point doesn’t really matter. For reference, we tested this version of the project on the Mac mini M4 too. It got rendered just a tad faster than the original version at 9 minutes and 26 seconds. After all, those Macs have hardware for ProRes too, while most RAW formats are quite CPU-heavy and needed a little bit longer.

Trying to run that version on the iPad was a disappointment. Rendering stalled in various places, after which we got false offline messages for some clips. This is a typical problem in DR 19, where you can’t always take such messages literally, if the sources are still connected and should be compatible. Even if complex processes at high resolution with that benchmark occasionally provoked some swapping to SSD, MacOS never showed any such errors. Trying to render in shorter chunks, after opening up the hidden Deliver page to see where it failed, didn’t really solve the issue on the tablet.

The iPad is not available with more than 16 GB of RAM, and even that only in the expensive 1 TB or 2 TB version. So we downscaled all the 8K clips to half their resolution, but 6K and below were kept at their size. Now, finally, the iPad got through with the rendering and needed 10:19. Not bad for a machine with passive cooling only, but even a MacBook M1 Pro finished the downscaled and converted project in 8:02, the Mac mini M4 needed 6:34. The iPad consumed 8% of a full charge during that render, so it should run up to two hours without needing external power. SSD speed is more balanced than in older models, with over 2.8 gbps read speed and close to 2.8 write according to Jazz Disk Pro.

Preliminary conclusion

All of this points to a memory issue with higher resolutions, even if the iPad Pro supports playing 8K over HDMI. There is no app for iOS directly comparable to the Activity Monitor under MacOS, but using Device Monitor² we could see that the iPad was getting close to 99% of memory in use when rendering stalled. Obviously, we have a memory management issue here for production in DR, even if the iPad Pro supports playing 8K over HDMI.

Our MacBook M1 Pro with 32 GB RAM didn’t even start swapping, the Mac mini with only 24 GB got into occasional swapping to the SSD, for example with 8K REDcode footage. But it was still perfectly stable when doing this, there were no stalls or any other render issues. So, either the memory management of iOS for the iPad Pro is not as good, or the issue is on Blackmagic’s side. Next we’ll test the tablet with Apple’s Final Cut Pro X.

The post Mac mini or iPad Pro M4 for Post? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Uli Plank.

Maxon One 2025 brings extensive new features to Cinema 4D, Redshift, Red Giant and Cineware. Of particular note is the introduction of ZBrush for iPad, which fully integrates touch control and Apple Pencil without limiting the performance of the desktop version.

Cinema 4D users will benefit from improved simulation capabilities, and Redshift offers new tools for controlling toon renderings and light refraction. However, each new feature should be tested carefully before use in current projects.

ZBrush for iPad

ZBrush for iPad allows artists to use the award-winning sculpting software on the go, modelling and painting their creations in real time. The mobile version includes many of the features of the desktop version, including over 200 digital sculpting brushes and a customisable user interface that makes working even more efficient. In addition, the latest iPad generation can handle meshes with up to 92 million polygons without compromising performance.

In addition, ZBrush for iPad offers the following functions:

• ZRemesher: Creates a new mesh with an even distribution of polygons while preserving the important details and texture of the surface.
• Sculptris Pro: Automatically adjusts the density of triangle meshes with each brush stroke, making modelling easier without technical limitations.
• DynaMesh: Retopologises the model during sculpting, allowing the digital “clay mass” to be stretched or enlarged without losing detail.
• Array Mesh: Enables real-time creation of duplicates of the geometry in different patterns and shapes.
• Dynamics System: Allows surfaces to be draped over other surfaces to create realistic effects.
• Live Boolean: Combines, subtracts or crosses different geometries to achieve unique results.
• PolyPaint: Facilitates simultaneous modelling and painting without the need to assign a texture map.

ZBrush for iPad is included in the Maxon One subscription or can be subscribed to separately. It offers artists full creative freedom on the go. A free version with limited functions is also available in the App Store. For beginners, ZBrush offers a free version with limited functions and 28 brushes. The paid version offers over 200 brushes and a comprehensive package of functions, which already has practically all the features known from ZBrush – minus a few little things that are to come soon.

ZRemesher, Live Booleans, Sculptris and Dynamesh are already included, ZModeller and the layer system will hopefully be coming soon.

Cinema 4D

Every Cinema 4D subscription renewal now includes Redshift GPU. Simulations and particle effects are easier to control with new tools (Art-Directable, as it is called in English). The Follow Spline modifier allows particles to be routed along vectors, which should please MoGraph people in particular. Finally run PArticles within the vector graphic!

Rigid Body simulations offer improved weight and force settings, while Pyro offers new ways to fine-tune visual effects. A new field driver tag lets you control procedural animations more precisely. Improvements in OCIO colour management ensure consistent colours and the exchange format supports integration with Substance 3D and USD workflows.

Redshift
Redshift 2025 enables GPU and CPU rendering, both photorealistic and stylised. Toon renderings have been enhanced with global contour options that allow precise control of lines and shading.

Brute force caustics allow you to detail light refractions through glass or gemstones. In addition, Redshift now offers procedural shaders as inputs for sprites and a new Volume Depth AOV pass for compositing clouds, smoke and explosions.

Red Giant
Red Giant 2025 brings new features to After Effects, including support for 3D objects and rigged animation features. Improvements to Particular Designer streamline preset handling and colour grading with the new Parametric Curve tool that can precisely control HDR video.

Cineware
Cineware 2025 improves Cinema 4D integration with After Effects and Unreal Engine. With performance optimisations and seamless integration, you can easily work between different host applications.

Capsules
Maxon Capsules expands its library with new scanned materials for Redshift. New additions include scans of outdoor materials such as rock and grass, as well as a large selection of plants from Laubwerk and textures for roof shingles from Fuchs & Vogel.

Maxon App
The Maxon App makes it easier to work on multiple computers by allowing you to quickly switch between licences without having to use the MyMaxon portal administration.

Prices and licences
Maxon One is available as a subscription. Prices vary depending on the chosen package and licence duration, but a monthly subscription of Maxon One costs €195 per month, an annual licence €1425. This package includes access to Cinema 4D, Redshift, Red Giant, ZBrush and other tools. Prices may vary slightly depending on VAT and any exchange rate adjustments. The ZBrush for iPad app is available in a free version with limited features; the full version can be purchased at any time.

Product documentation | Maxon

The post ZBrush for iPad and new updates for Cinema 4D first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.