For those who don’t know the tool: Blender uses Blender Cycles for path-traced rendering, and viewport denoising helps lookdev stay interactive while lighting and materials evolve.

The news, minus the confetti

NVIDIA says Blender Cycles will integrate DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction as a new denoiser and ship it with Blender 5.3 in the fall. The goal is a more interactive viewport while keeping a “near-final” look in real time.

DLSS Ray Reconstruction targets ray-traced and path-traced content and replaces traditional hand-tuned denoisers with an AI model that reconstructs pixels in noisy areas where rays were not sampled. It also unifies denoising and Super Resolution into a single model that uses temporal and spatial engine data to rebuild higher fidelity images. Usually, that is for games – you need all the pixels and all the fidelities for veggie-mode in Microsoft Flight Simulator (Don’t Judge, the Dune expansion is great!) Here is a list of all Games that have that, and in that list, you can even spot Redshift, Marmoset and Keyshot. Strange calling those “Games”, but who hasn’t lost to a renderer?

The same announcement says DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction arrives in August for games, and it is also coming to Blender 5.3 in the fall. That timeline matters for anyone planning tool rollouts around seasonal show crunch. Prep first,so you don’t have a bad surprise up ahead.

What changes inside Cycles

Cycles already has an integration path via NVIDIA OptiX. The new piece is DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction as another denoiser option, layered on top of the existing OptiX integration.

If you spend your days in a path-traced viewport, denoising is not a luxury feature. It is the thing that keeps lighting decisions moving. A denoiser that keeps interaction up while pushing the look closer to final could reduce the familiar loop of tweak, wait, squint, tweak again. This sits squarely in the Blender Cycles ecosystem: you still light and shade the same way, you still render the same way, but the viewport becomes less of a tax on iteration.

The longer arc from hacks to shipping builds

Back in February 2026, Blender artist Blake Propst tested a Blender 5.1 build with DLSS on an RTX 3090, with reports of numerous bugs and visual issues. A patch also existed that added an option to use DLSS Ray Reconstruction for viewport denoising in Cycles, and users were encouraged to test Blender 5.1 beta and report issues toward a stable release.

Blender With DLSS!
byu/bbcool2002 inblender

That earlier phase sounded like classic early integration energy: exciting demos, messy edges, lots of caveats, and a very human amount of duct tape. It did prove one thing, though: artists wanted it badly enough to put up with rough builds, because interactive path tracing is still a wrok in progress on most desks. Now the situation shifts from experiments to a shipping target in Blender 5.3.

What DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction claims it does

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction uses a second generation transformer model. It is improving image quality in ray-traced and path-traced content, and the announcement lists changes such as higher compute capability, more parameters processed while maintaining similar performance to the previous model, better temporal stability, and clearer motion in ray-traced and path-traced scenes. For artists, the practical question is not whether the model sounds clever. The practical question is whether it behaves well under production pressure: animated textures, fast camera moves, thin geometry, alpha heavy foliage, refractive messes, and the kind of lookdev that loves to change one variable per second.

Viewport denoising is where time disappears

A big chunk of render pain is not final frames. It is the time you spend waiting for a viewport to become readable enough to make the next decision. A clean enough image lets you judge lighting ratios, contact shadow behavior, glossy breakup, and whether your material values drift into plastic. A noisy image forces you to wait, or worse, to guess.

The boring parts you still need to know

Pricing is not specified in the sources – propably will be part of drivers or blender itself, so should be free. Read the T&C before downloading, though.

Hardware requirements are not spelt out for Blender beyond the general statement that DLSS Ray Reconstruction works on all GeForce RTX GPUs. The Blender sources mention testing on an RTX 3090 and as part of an RTX focused stack, but they do not provide minimum GPU or driver versions for the Blender 5.3 integration. We’ll see.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/computex-2026-nvidia-geforce-rtx-announcements/

The post NVIDIA brings DLSS denoising to Blender 5.3 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

(Advertorial) By embedding powerful AI into generative stages while simultaneously keeping the control of traditional 3D workflows through cinematic RTX Rendering, upgraded image-to-3D in Headshot 3, precision AccuFace 2 capture, CC Mesh Wrapping Tools, Image to Cloth, and realistic Joint Corrective Morphs.

RTX Render: Achieve Cinematic Path-Traced Realism

Elevating render quality has long been a shared desire among our users, and Reallusion is doing just that by introducing RTX rendering as a free update. Developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, this integration leverages advanced RTX technology to deliver the cinematic quality of path-traced rendering at near real-time speeds.

With RTX GPU and DLSS technology, artists can showcase their work at its absolute best with exceptional clarity and performance. Optimised for Reallusion’s digital human shaders, RTX rendering offers control over hair, skin, and subsurface scattering, bringing characters to life with full realism.

Beyond digital humans, RTX unlocks new possibilities across commercial visualisation and industrial design, enabling more immersive visual experiences. With dynamic time-of-day transitions, adjustable cloud density, and natural atmospheric motion, achieving perfect lighting has never been easier.

Headshot 3: Next Level of Lifelike Digital Double Generation

Headshot 3 represents a massive leap in digital identity. Reallusion has developed and trained a proprietary AI model specifically for accurate image-to-3D head reconstruction. Trained on a vast dataset of facial scans, this model interprets facial landmarks, depth cues, and subtle anatomical features more accurately from 2D images. As a result, it produces a more precise head mesh with improved topology, enhanced identity preservation, and more accurate proportions.

In addition, Headshot 3 has included a range of powerful new features designed to achieve significantly higher likeness and precision. This includes 4K AI image generation from text prompts, spline-based head-shape refinement with fully controllable Bézier adjustments for portrait and profile, and built-in lens correction.

Users can also take advantage of texture channel enhancement and intuitive mask brush tools to effortlessly remove shadows and blemishes. For even greater accuracy, new body matching capabilities support full-body image measurements, ensuring accurate proportions for a more faithful digital double.

To celebrate this release, Reallusion is currently offering an exclusive prelaunch offer, allowing users to secure Headshot 3 for free by purchasing Headshot 2 before its official release.

AccuFACE 2: Highly Accurate, Lips and Facial Tracking

With the introduction of the new HD facial profile in Character Creator 5, Reallusion has correspondingly upgraded its motion capture capabilities with AccuFace 2. Adopting a newly trained tracking system optimised specifically for CC5 characters, this major update delivers exceptional accuracy and responsiveness.

The system captures even the most subtle high-frequency lip-sync details for natural expressions and speech. With support for both live webcam input and video-based tracking, AccuFace 2 offers flexible capture workflows without compromising quality.

When combined with video motion capture, you can produce high-quality facial and full-body animation seamlessly within the Reallusion toolset.

Mesh Wrapping: Open The Gateway to the Character Creator Ecosystem

As AI-generated 3D models become increasingly prevalent in the industry, integrating these static assets into professional animation pipelines has become vital. To address this, Reallusion is introducing CC Wrap.

This powerful tool allows you to effortlessly wrap any models, alongside traditional 3D models and cloth meshes into standard Character Creator (CC) topology.

By conforming to CC topology, this technology acts as a gateway to the entire CC & iClone ecosystem. You can seamlessly access Reallusion’s extensive asset libraries and instantly transform static meshes into fully functional characters, completely ready for highly detailed facial expressions and body animations.

In addition, detailed 3D outfits can be created from image references, featuring automatic skin weighting that significantly streamlines the entire character creation workflow.

Joint Corrective Morphs (JCM): Ensure Anatomical Accuracy with Realistic Muscle Deformation

In our pursuit of more realistic animation quality, Reallusion is introducing “Joint Corrective Morphs” (JCM) as a free update. This feature delivers enhanced accuracy for body shapes across a wide range of poses. Built on a joint-based deformation system, this technology goes beyond basic shape correction for extreme poses. It produces more natural and realistic muscle deformation, ensuring characters maintain anatomical integrity during complex animations.

AI Studio: 3D Previs to AI Render – Effective Hybrid Production

AI Studio is a true game changer for iClone and CC users, transforming 3D previs projects into photorealistic images and videos. It also supports stylized rendering, allowing you to tailor visuals to your unique creative vision. The built-in AI Actor Creator ensures character consistency across every shot while delivering lifelike dialogue and performances.

These AI-powered tools also enable precise character interactions and camera control, guided by iClone motion data and reference footage. Powered by Reallusion AI Cloud services, the pipeline is streamlined for efficiency without the need for additional hardware.

iClone 9: Rig anything. Animate everything.

Take a first look at how we’re unlocking more creative freedom in 3D character production. No longer limited to human characters, you can add skeletal structures to any model. You can retarget motion between characters with matching hierarchies to ensure consistent animation transfer.

Use custom Control Rigs for precise animation control, apply squash and stretch for expressive deformation, and add spring dynamics and secondary motion with ease. By enabling collision-aware simulations, artists achieve greater flexibility and control in every stage of animation.

Stay Ahead of the Curve: Choose Your Access

Reallusion is dedicated to keeping our users at the vanguard of the CG-AI transformation, providing the cutting-edge tools needed to ensure peak production efficiency.

To maintain that competitive edge, you now have flexible ways to integrate these upcoming innovations into your pipeline. By joining our Subscription plans, users will automatically receive updates to the latest versions and all these great upcoming features at no additional cost. Alternatively, users can choose to acquire Permanent Licenses upon their official release dates.

The post Reallusion Announces 2026 Vision: Redefining 3D Production through Hybrid AI first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Nature Generator is a procedural asset library add-on that lives inside Blender via the Asset Browser and an N-panel, sold on Superhive Market, so you can kitbash nature without leaving your DCC.

The whole point is staying in your scene

Nature Generator builds natural assets directly inside Blender. Rocks, terrains, plants, water, and other environment bits all come in as editable, generated assets rather than fixed meshes. You drag an asset into the scene, the side panel recognizes it, and the controls you need show up without a detour to another app. The comparison to Quixel Megascans is obvious, being fully procedural and customizable.

The minimum version requirement is Blender 4.1 or higher. Hardware requirements call for a modern GPU from NVIDIA, AMD, or Apple Silicon. There is an optional texture options folder with 1K, 2K, and 4K texture resolutions. By default, the add-on uses low resolution preview textures, and the guidance recommends keeping the texture folder on a fast local SSD because it affects performance.

Installation stays simple. You drag and drop the zip into Blender, click OK, and the library sets up inside the Asset Browser. The Nature Gen panel appears in the side panel and opens with the N key. From there, drag and drop assets into the scene and start tweaking.

Geometry controls that reward restraint

Every asset follows a similar structure: shader settings and geometry settings, with slightly unique controls per asset. Geometry includes a resolution section, and most assets support a low-poly option. Viewport and render resolution can be controlled separately, and resolution can be subdivided or voxelized depending on the asset.

The documentation also includes the most honest feature statement possible: resolution can go infinitely high, and every asset can crash Blender if you push it too far. That makes the control powerful, but it also makes self-control part of the user interface.

Base shapes come from primitive forms you can alter in edit mode. Some assets follow the structure of a mesh and react to topology. Some are planes. Some are driven by curves. Displacement settings include multiple texture and noise displacement controls, with patterns such as noise breakup, stratification lines, and crack patterns. Many categories expose basic settings and an advanced subcategory for deeper tuning.

At around the moment you start dialing prcoedural detail like it is free, that crash warning stops reading like documentation and starts reading like prophecy.

Custom shaping can use a gradient with its own displacement, falloff, location, and scale settings, with viewport gizmos available when the modifier is selected. Alternatively, a custom curve object can influence the terrain, with a radius setting and a distance based falloff where farther from the curve means weaker influence. A secondary custom shape can be added, such as one curve for valleys and another for mountains.

Scatter was rebuilt to be more direct

The latest update changes how the scattering system works. If you have an older version, the update workflow shown is to download the new version from Blender Market and drag and drop it into the scene so it overrides the old version.

The new scatter setup aims to be simpler with fewer settings. The key change is the import flow. You import the specific assets you want to scatter, then assign them into the scatter collection. After importing, you can toggle an exclude option so the collection does not sit visibly in the scene, while still being used by the scattering system.

Core scatter behavior remains familiar. You can adjust density, and you can still use slope based scattering, altitude based scattering, and noise based scattering. Scatter zones remain part of the tool, controlled by empties with viewport gizmos so you can define a local area for scattering.

The update also introduces threshold softness controls across settings. The stated purpose is scaling down scattered assets toward the edges of masks. That creates a smoother falloff where a hard cutoff would look like a stamp.

Draw where the scatter goes

A major addition in the update is a scatter curve or grease pencil option. You can assign a curve or a Grease Pencil object and use it to decide where scattering appears and where it does not.

The workflow shown is straightforward: create a blank Grease Pencil object, draw directly on the surface, then select that drawing as the scatter guide. The same idea works with a curve object. You get controls for draw radius and radius softness, and the falloff scales down scattered assets toward the edges. There is also a noise option to distort the shape and avoid a too clean, too perfect outline.

Remove the draw object, and scattering returns to the default behavior. That makes the feature easy to test and easy to abandon if a shot changes direction.

Viewport survival mode, now with choices

Scatter can get heavy. The update adds a display mode control in the instance settings. You can display instances as originals, as boxes, or as wire box. Instance scale stays, but the update adds a secondary scale and a secondary scale probability. That lets a minority of instances become much larger than the rest, adding variation without requiring a second scatter layer. Rotation controls remain.

There is also a new wind animation option for scattered assets. Wind time is a value you animate, with an example workflow of adding a driver expression using hashtag frame and optionally dividing to slow it down. The update explains why this stays manual: using a scene time node inside node trees made performance drop sharply, including an example of frame rate dropping to around seven. Removing the time node restored smooth playback. With many scattered objects each carrying the scatter system, the update keeps wind time explicit to protect performance.

Terrains, water, and the new step look

Terrain and mountain assets use a separate X and Y resolution, because resolution on those axes influences the shape and form of erosion. Terrain maps include a random seed, and terrain can generate from noise or be influenced by a custom shape.

Noise displacement includes control over influence on X, Y, and Z, plus a noise seed and standard noise settings. Texture displacement adds rock detail. Erosion settings apply erosion from a selected height, with placement, falloff, and an option that can add mountains and inverted valleys. Boundary falloff can flatten edges.

Water effects add a cube with a procedural water shader. Controls include height and depth, and rivers can be created by combining a water effect value with custom curve shaping that pushes terrain down so water appears in selected areas. Water shader settings appear in the shader tab, including animated noise controls to create the illusion of moving water with separate speed controls on X and Y.

The update adds terrain presets, including a forest preset and a canyon preset. The forest preset uses the scattering system, and trees can default to box display for performance on lower-end systems, with the option to switch back to originals. The update also adds a terrain steps feature on some presets, described as a stepping effect. Controls include the number of steps, detail, strength, and blur, with noise-based selection and influence. Terrain steps can be found in erosion settings, in noise settings, and when drawing along a custom curve.

Trees arrive, and snow gets more physical

The update adds tree assets. Tree shaders follow the same structure as flowers, including leaf color controls and translucency. Leaves can be pushed toward an autumn look by changing colors. There is also a setting for a leaf mask, and leaf shapes are generated procedurally, with controls for scale and mask threshold.

Scatter categories shown include plants such as flowers, wheats, grass, ground cover, shrubs, plus rocks, snow, and trees. Scattered rocks are procedurally generated and have their own settings such as resolution, shape distortion, size ratio, and a seed.

Snow scattering gets a notable twist. Importing a snow object can be recognized and turned into a volume style approach for creating snow on objects rather than only shader based snow. Snow settings sit in the geometry tab, including resolution and displacement settings. Particle detail adds small particles with alpha textures, intended to improve realism for close-ups. The tool also notes that foamy snow detail may require higher transparency bounces.

Materials, uniqueness, and the new override option

Materials are shared by default. The tool includes Make Material Unique to create a new copy of a material for the selected object, and Revert to return to defaults. The update also adds a use custom material feature for the new scatter effect. The workflow shown duplicates a material and assigns it as an override for the scattered assets, so you can make unique changes without affecting the original material used elsewhere.

Scatter effects can stack, and the update shows renaming modifier labels to organize multiple scatter effects. This is the part where it starts feeling less like an asset pack and more like a small ecosystem.

Pricing and what is actually specified

Pricing is specified on the product page. A Personal License costs $99. A Commercial License costs $169. A Studio License costs $259.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/the-nature-generator?ref=586

The post Nature Generator update brings procedural nature to Blender first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Vegas Pro (formerly Sony Vegas) is a Windows-first nonlinear editor built for fast timeline cutting, finishing, and delivery, with tight audio tools, broad format support, and a workflow that stays nimble even when projects get messy.

Boris FX announced the acquisition of Vegas Pro, Sound Forge, and Acid Pro from MAGIX Software GmbH. The deal folds a long-running Windows NLE and two established audio tools into the same product family as the company’s existing VFX, motion graphics, audio, and photo toolsets, and it also brings new AI technology into the organization.

The product development teams and engineers behind Vegas Pro, Sound Forge, and Acid Pro will come over with BorisFX, with teams based in Madison, Wisconsin, and Germany. And to get all that rolling, the Vegas Pro 2026 release is the first major update in this new setup, introducing new features across the lineup and signalling that more development and integration work is planned beyond this initial drop.

If you learned to cut on Vegas Pro (Sony Vegas, previously) back when the last millennium was still the current one, you are not alone. I first used Vegas Pro more than a quarter of a century ago, and my knees just filed a bug report about that fact.

Vegas Pro 2026 aims straight at speed, stability, and staying local

Vegas Pro is available in three editions: Vegas Pro, Vegas Pro Plus, and Vegas Pro Ultimate. The 2026 release introduces major new features across the lineup, with an explicit focus on workflow and stability. The core editing workflow adds advanced 2D and 3D titling options, support for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, a newly updated AI model, AI-driven transcription and voice generation tools, and support for the ProRes RAW format.

There is also a new integrated title package called the Continuum Title Pack, described as a collection of 2D and 3D motion graphics and titling tools from the Continuum toolset. It includes 70 drag-and-drop presets, and it is designed to let users design, extrude, deform, and animate titles and graphics without leaving Vegas Pro.

On the performance side, the Blackwell GPU support is positioned around accelerating playback, compositing, effects processing, and rendering, and it also calls out smoother handling for 4:2:2 footage by removing the need for software decoding for AVC or HEVC formats on supported systems. On the codec side, Vegas Pro 2026 adds native, Apple-certified ProRes RAW support on Windows, with RAW parameter control inside the application, including colour space, ISO, and white balance.

Depth masks, transcripts, and voiceover, without the cloud detour

The Enhanced Z-Depth Effect is an AI-based depth model trained by the in-house machine learning team, with the goal of more accurate, higher-resolution depth masks and improved foreground and background separation. It is aimed at practical compositing-style use, like placing text behind people or adjusting background treatment quickly.

Speech-to-Text is a fully offline voice-over transcription with no internet connection required, with support for over 100 languages, text-based editing, automatic subtitle creation, and unlimited transcriptions with multiple model options to balance quality and performance. This offline transcription feature is available exclusively with Vegas Pro subscriptions.

Text-to-Speech is also described as offline, creating voiceovers locally on a PC with no internet connection required. It supports 9 languages and 54 voices, allows unlimited voiceover lengths, and includes adjustable speed, pitch, and volume controls. It is also available exclusively with Vegas Pro subscriptions.

Subscriptions also include access to a Storyblocks media library inside Vegas Pro, offering royalty-free stock footage, music, and sound effects directly in the application.

Plus and Ultimate lean into effects and audio

Vegas Pro Plus includes everything in Vegas Pro and adds tracking and masking tools, motion graphics and particle effects, audio editing, and AI-driven audio cleanup. It includes Mocha Vegas planar tracking, described as a way to track surfaces and objects, create masks and roto shapes, stabilise footage, and apply tracked effects using the same planar tracking tech used in other products. It is integrated directly within Vegas Pro Plus. It also includes Particle Illusion Pro, a real-time GPU 2D and 3D particle engine with thousands of presets and customizable emitters, available as a plugin.

Vegas Pro Ultimate includes Vegas Pro Plus and adds two VFX plugin packages, AI-powered audio clean and stem separation, and photo editing and digital artist tools. It includes Mocha Pro and Continuum, plus CrumplePop SoundApp as a standalone audio toolkit, and Optics as a photo editing toolkit available as an Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom plugin and as a standalone application.

Pricing is clear, and licensing is not “one size fits all”

Vegas Pro and Vegas Pro Plus are available with subscription or perpetual licensing. Vegas Pro Ultimate is available as a subscription plan.

Monthly subscriptions are $17.95 for Vegas Pro, $24.95 for Vegas Pro Plus, and $39.95 for Vegas Pro Ultimate. Annual subscriptions are $99.95, $149.95, and $199.95.

Upgrade and support plans are listed at $143.95 for Vegas Pro and $199.95 for Vegas Pro Plus. Perpetual licenses are $219.95 for Vegas Pro and $299.95 for Vegas Pro Plus.

A practical gotcha lives in plain sight: offline Speech-to-Text and offline Text-to-Speech are subscription-only features in this release, so your licensing choice directly affects your feature set.

The toolbox effect, now with fewer missing pieces

The product family list includes tools for video editing, VFX, motion graphics, audio, and photography plugins powered by AI, and it includes – as you damn well know – products such as Silhouette, SynthEyes, Continuum, Sapphire and Mocha Pro, alongside Vegas Pro and multiple audio tools like CrumplePop and Sound Forge. Currently it is not included in the Suite, just in the family – but we’ll see what happens there.

For my own day-to-day, that combination feels like a pretty complete toolbox, because it covers editorial, tracking, roto and paint, camera solving, and a lot of audio cleanup and finishing in one place, with fewer reasons to go hunting for another wrench mid-project.

Sound Forge

Sound Forge is a dedicated environment for detailed audio work beyond the timeline, positioned for precise editing, mastering, and restoration. It is also a comprehensive tool for audio recording, editing, sound design, and mastering, built around a single audio file workflow.

Features cited include recording up to 32 channels at once, automatic record start, a second-source audio option, restoration tools, quick dialogue editing, applying effects, and WaveColor visualisation, plus fast background operations intended to save time. It is integrating seamlessly with Vegas Pro or working alongside a preferred digital audio workstation.

Acid Pro

Acid Pro is the third new tool in the Boris -Verse, and it is a loop-based music software designed to make it easy to create songs and beats without prior experience, built around a simple workflow and a large collection of royalty-free loops. It includes automatic pitch and tempo matching, live preview, multitrack recording, editing, and mixing.

It also includes hit-point markers for tight video sync and an intuitive timeline arranger. In other words, it sits right where a lot of editors first meet music creation: quick structure, quick iteration, and fast alignment to picture, without pretending every user wants to become a full-time producer overnight. That last part is a personal reaction, not a spec sheet.

Training and upgrades

To celebrate the launch, Vegas Pro users can claim complimentary access to the Vegas Pro Essentials training series, a premium download normally priced at $49.95. The 22-part course includes more than three hours of instruction, with included footage, project files, and high-resolution lesson videos, and it is available until Friday, December 5, 2026.

Customers who own any previous version of Vegas Pro or Sound Forge can upgrade to the latest versions at a single, simplified price until Friday, December 5, 2026, via the webshop.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/vegas-pro/
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/sound-forge/
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/acid-pro/
https://borisfx.com/

The post Boris FX welcomes Vegas Pro first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

ONYX builds ONYX Ai Matte as a GPU-accelerated matte extraction tool for segmentation, tracking, and mask refinement inside OFX-compatible hosts. It targets hair and fur edge work and shots with more than one subject, and it frames the speed and quality claims as marketing claims. Under the hood, it uses Meta SAM3 and VitMatte models, packaged via ONNX in FP16 and accelerated with NVIDIA CUDA 12.6 and TensorRT 10.x.

Prompts, trimaps, and tracking

The UI exposes five pipeline modes: box or point prompts with auto track, box or point prompts with manual track, text prompts with auto track, mask prompts with auto track, and a trimap workflow using VitMatte with manual track. Point and box workflows let you set foreground and background points and a bounding box. The interface supports up to 32 points.

Text prompt mode detects objects that match your text. If it finds multiple matches, one foreground point picks the instance. Mask prompt mode takes a rough input mask and uses it as the prompt for a refined segmentation. The trimap path expects white foreground, black background, and a grey uncertainty band for edge refinement. Tracking integrates directly into the prompt workflows. In Nuke, the box center can be driven by expressions so a tracker can push it through the shot while size stays consistent. You still need to test any new tool before it goes into production, especially when the alhpa becomes the single point of failure.

Hosts and compatibility

The published host list includes DaVinci Resolve 18 and later, Fusion Studio 18 and later, and Nuke 13 and later. It also positions the plug-in as working in any OFX compatible app, like Autodesk Flame specifically.

System requirements and what is not supported

Minimum requirements list Windows 10 64 bit, an NVIDIA RTX GPU, 6GB of VRAM, 16GB of RAM, and 8GB free space. Windows 11 64 bit is also supported. Text prompts require 8GB of VRAM or more. The baseline GPU callout is an NVIDIA RTX 2060 or better with SM 7.0 or higher. Not supported: GTX 1000 series, AMD Radeon, and Intel Arc.

Trial, licensing, and pricing

A full featured 7-day trial is offered with no credit card required. Licenses are sold as lifetime, one time payments with no subscription, plus free minor updates. Pricing is published in euros as lifetime tiers on the official pricing page. Indie costs €80 for one machine node locked. Studio 3 costs €180 for three machines node locked. Studio 10 costs €450 for ten machines node locked. Studio 10 also includes priority support.

https://onyxofx.com/

The post ONYX Ai Matte for OFX hosts first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: OctaneRender is a GPU renderer that sits after lookdev and before finals, and it talks fluently with DCC plugins plus OpenUSD and MaterialX, when it is in a good mood.

The alpha, the scope, the fine print

OctaneRender 2027.1 Alpha 1 is out as a public development build intended for testing by experienced users, and it is explicitly not positioned as production ready. Scenes saved in this alpha are not guaranteed to stay compatible with future builds. The build is Windows only right now, the minimum required NVIDIA driver version is 572. The downloads listed for this alpha are the standalone Windows installer and a ZIP archive. Other build types are planned for subsequent releases.

Real time neural viewport, now with thunderbolt energy

The headline feature is a new real-time neural viewport mode that replaces the previous real-time mode. It is built on the neural radiance cache framework introduced in OctaneRender 2026. The alpha describes the new mode as enabling near noise-free interactive rendering at very low sample counts compared to traditional path tracing. The mode is designed to preserve the spectral path-tracing behaviour while improving interactive feedback, even under complex lighting conditions. It combines internal research with NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

In the UI, the alpha notes a dedicated toggle. The real-time neural viewport can be enabled or disabled using a Thunderbolt button in the viewport components bar. Quality settings for the real-time denoiser live under the imager node, with the goal of balancing performance and quality depending on the hardware. If you have ever watched a veiwport go from soup to something readable right as a director walks over, you already know why this matters. The promise here is faster clarity, not just faster pixels.

Upscaling joins the party: DLSS and FSR modes

This alpha adds support for new up-sampling modes based on NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. The build also references AMD FSR 3. The implementation sits in the Upsampler section of the imager node, alongside other up-sampling methods. On the DLSS side, the referenced technology page describes DLSS Ray Reconstruction as an AI method that replaces hand-tuned denoisers with an AI network that generates higher quality pixels between sampled rays in intensive ray-traced scenes. Those statements describe DLSS generally, not a specific Octane integration result. This renderer is CUDA based, and the Windows alpha focuses on NVIDIA GPUs (Big surprise!).

AI Light 2.0: sampling that tries harder

AI Light 2.0 lands as a new light sampling method intended to resolve noise faster. AI Light is described as a hierarchical algorithm for sampling scenes with many light sources, and the update is positioned as a major revision compared to the original introduction back in OctaneRender 4.0.

For lighting heavy setups, this is the kind of change that can alter how fast you converge on creative decisions. If your daily routine includes juggling dozens of practicals, emissive set dressing, and a few too many hero gobos, any sampling improvement tends to show up right where it hurts, in the first minutes of iteration.

USD export and a more hands on USD workflow

OpenUSD workflows get a concrete upgrade. Geometry export to USD is included, and the build adds the ability to export a scene in USD format. The cgchannel overview also notes that geometry export in USD can include limited support for USD Preview Surface materials.

On the editing side, the standalone edition includes a USD Stage editor that allows selecting variants and layers without saving and reopening the USD file. The alpha also adds built in support for authoring variants and muting USD layers directly within the USD geometry archive.

If your pipeline already treats USD as a transport layer between layout, lookdev, lighting, and downstream tools, these changes aim straight at friction. More export options reduce the number of awkward handoffs that turn into late night chat messages that start with “hey quick question….”

UVs and geometry: more room for messy reality

The UV ceiling changes, because production UVs are never as polite as tool demos. The maximum number of UV maps allowed per primitive increases to 10, up from 3, and UV sets can be assigned arbitrary names in DCC apps that support it.

Other geometry and attribute changes include support for named UV vertex attributes, support for using vertex attributes in bump maps, support for colour vertex attributes in vertex displacement, and a Vectron tube primitive addition.

If you have ever inherited an asset with five UV sets and a note that says do not touch UV4, you now have more breathing room. The named UV support also helps keep humans oriented when the same mesh carries multiple UV purposes across shading, decals, and baking.

Changelog nuggets for TDs who read release notes for fun

Beyond new features, the alpha lists a spread of resolved issues and smaller changes. A few examples include fixes around DDS preference crashes, Alembic instancing, several MaterialX node behaviors, and multiple OpenUSD import issues such as points not loading correctly and animated point instances importing incorrectly.

The Lua API gets deprecations in geometry exporter properties, including moving from renderSizeX and renderSizeY to textureRenderWidth and textureRenderHeight, and replacing writeOcsData with embedNativeData. A small UI level tweak removes Clock Rate and Cores fields from the GPU information panel. This is where you start thinking about tool glue. If you have scripts that poke exporter properties or automate export settings, the deprecations are your early warning sign to check for breakage.

Availability, licensing, and pricing

This alpha is available alongside the stable OctaneRender 2026 releases. The software is offered as rental only via Studio+ subscriptions. The pricing listed is €23.95 per month or €239.88 per year, and the Studio+ subscription page also lists an annual price presented as 19.99 € per month billed yearly.

Free Prime editions are also available for OctaneRender and Octane X, with the Prime editions limited to rendering on a single GPU and offering a smaller set of DCC integration plugins. The alpha download links themselves require a licensed customer login for access. That is where OTOY enters the picture in the most practical way possible.

Production reality check

This build is explicitly framed as experimental, and it is not recommended for production use. That guidance aligns with the normal alpha reality: features change, files drift, and stability work continues in later builds.

New tools and innovations should always be tested before use in production, ideally on representative scenes with your actual assets, shading conventions, and deadline pressure.

What to watch while you test

The big workflow test is whether the neural viewport mode makes iteration measurably smoother on your scenes, and whether AI Light 2.0 shifts your sampling strategy. The second test is whether USD export plus USD Stage editing reduces round-trip times in YOUR pipeline. The third is whether the DLSS and FSR upsampler options behave predictably inside your lookdev and review loop, especially when you rely on consistent framing and visual stability.

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=85551

The post OctaneRender 2027.1 alpha goes neural first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Manuel Kotulla.

For those who don’t know the tool: Redshift from Maxon is a GPU renderer for Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and Katana. It targets final-frame GPU rendering and USD Solaris pipelines, sitting at lookdev and lighting in production.

Consolidation, not features

Maxon has released Redshift 2026.3.0. The build includes plugins for Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and Katana. It is a maintenance release focused on stability, host compatibility and incremental displacement updates. No new headline rendering features are introduced.

On Apple hardware, Redshift now requires macOS Sonoma 14 or higher. Maxon recommends macOS Tahoe 26.2 as the latest officially supported version, while noting known rendering artefacts on Intel CPU plus AMD GPU systems on Tahoe. On Windows and Linux, updated NVidia driver minimums apply, including specific requirements for Blackwell 50xx GPUs. Linux requires glibc 2.28 or higher.

Texture displacement cleaned up

Texture displacement receives performance improvements and several correctness fixes. The update resolves holes in meshes, vertical artefacts in the software ray tracer and cases where displacement disappeared on tessellated meshes without UVs.

Support for smooth normals has been added to texture displacement. The UV Context Projection node gains a new camera selection mode for camera projection mapping.

Additional fixes address deformation motion blur with displacement, incorrect auto-bump behaviour, and noisy details on scaled meshes. Material blending issues involving stacking and the Material Blender shader have also been corrected.

Hydra and Solaris updates

Redshift adds support for Houdini 21.0.559 and 21.0.596 and drops support for 20.5.654 and 21.0.440. The Hydra delegate now supports the Solaris 21.0 statistics panel in the latest Houdini 21.0 production build.

Hydra 2.0 fixes include motion blur limitations, primvars sampling issues, light linking problems, nested instancing errors and live updating of custom light and camera parameters. Support has been added for USD implicit surface primitives, USD mesh lights via the Geometry Light LOP, and updated USD and Alembic procedurals. AOV-related bugs affecting ObjectID, Depth, cryptomatte, deep and Refractions Light Groups have been fixed.

Redshift 2026.3 is a stabilisation release aimed at removing pipeline friction introduced in earlier 2026 builds. As always, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production.

// Redshift 2026.3.0 Release Notes
// https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/Redshift-2026-3-0-2026-02-February-10-2026

The post Redshift 2026.3 fixes displacement headaches first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t now the tool: HydroFX is a standalone GPU-based FLIP liquid simulator from Storm VFX, designed to generate water simulations for downstream use in DCC tools via Alembic, USD and OpenVDB. It does not render, shade or composite anything itself, and it does not try to be clever about it.

A standalone solver, not a Swiss army knife

Storm VFX has released Storm HydroFX 1.0, a commercial version of its GPU-based FLIP fluid simulator previously available in beta form. The software is positioned as a focused standalone application for liquid simulation, rather than a general-purpose dynamics system or a host-integrated plugin.

HydroFX implements a custom FLIP solver designed specifically to run on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA. The solver runs entirely on the GPU, with the stated aim of providing faster iteration times compared to CPU-based fluid solvers. This performance claim is made by the developer and is not independently verified at press time. HydroFX runs on Windows only. No macOS or Linux versions are listed on the official site or the commercial product page at the time of writing.

Import, simulate, export, repeat

HydroFX is intended to sit between layout and lighting in a conventional VFX pipeline. Users import static geometry in Alembic or OBJ format, which can act as emitters, colliders or force drivers. Simulation parameters are adjusted directly through a node-free interface that mirrors the design language of Storm VFX’s main Storm application.

Simulation output can be exported as particle caches in Alembic, USD or PRT formats. Storm HydroFX 1.0 also supports exporting liquid surface meshes, allowing the simulated water to be rendered in external DCC applications or real-time engines. OpenVDB output is available for preview surfacing and volumetric workflows. Cache sizes for playblasts / preview can be reduced by exporting only surface particles rather than full particle sets. .

Whitewater, foam and other small things that float

HydroFX 1.0 includes built-in systems for foam, bubbles and spray, collectively described as whitewater. Whitewater can be simulated as part of the main solve or as a separate system, and can be exported independently from the main liquid body. Storm VFX describes improvements to whitewater behaviour and stability compared to the beta versions.

The solver is explicitly positioned as an offline simulation tool. There is no claim of real-time playback, interactive editing or on-the-fly meshing, and none should be inferred.

Pricing and licensing

Storm HydroFX is sold via Gumroad under annual subscription licences. The base (Indie) Storm HydroFX licence is priced at €145 per year. A Storm HydroFX Studio licence is priced at €249 per year, with multiple seat options selectable during purchase. Exact seat counts and per-seat pricing for the Studio tier are not listed as fixed values and must be configured on the Gumroad page.

Licences are activated online. The Gumroad listing specifies a seven-day money-back guarantee. HydroFX is distributed as a downloadable standalone application rather than an installer-based package.

Hardware and compatibility limits

HydroFX requires an NVIDIA GPU and uses CUDA. No support for non-NVIDIA GPUs is listed. The software currently runs only on Windows. These limitations are explicitly stated by the developer and should be considered non-negotiable at this stage. While HydroFX does not provide host-specific plugins, its reliance on standard interchange formats allows it to be integrated into pipelines built around tools such as Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini or Unreal Engine. Storm VFX does not provide official integration tools or presets for any of these hosts.

Production reality check

Storm HydroFX 1.0 is a narrowly scoped tool that does one job and avoids pretending otherwise. It does not replace broader simulation frameworks and it does not attempt to manage rendering, shading or scene assembly. For teams already comfortable moving caches between applications, this may be a feature rather than a limitation.

As with any newly released simulation software, artists and technical directors should test HydroFX thoroughly on representative shots and hardware before committing it to production use. New tools and innovations should always be validated in controlled conditions before being deployed on actual client work.

Link Citation Block

// Storm HydroFX product page
// https://stormvfx.gumroad.com/l/hydrofx

// Storm VFX official website
// https://storm-vfx.com

The post Storm HydroFX ships water without the node graph first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Cinebench by Maxon has long been the go-to CPU and GPU benchmark for 3D professionals. It’s based on the Redshift rendering engine that powers Cinema 4D, and its scores have quietly dictated workstation builds across postproduction, VFX, and colour suites for years.

Updated guts for a new generation

Maxon’s official release confirms that Cinebench 2026 has been rebuilt around the latest Redshift core, mirroring the renderer inside Cinema 4D 2026. The test scenes and compiler base have been modernised to reflect current rendering workloads. As a result, scores from Cinebench 2026 are not comparable with those from Cinebench 2024 or earlier. Cinebench 2026 runs natively on Windows x86-64, Windows ARM64, and macOS. It remains free to download from Maxon’s website.

GPU support: Blackwell, Hopper, and Apple M5

The new benchmark now fully supports Nvidia’s Blackwell-series GPUs, including GeForce 5000 and Hopper cards, and AMD’s Radeon 9000 series. For Mac users, Cinebench 2026 is compatible with Apple M4 and M5 chips, using Apple’s unified memory architecture. Intel GPUs remain unsupported, according to Maxon’s documentation. GPU tests require at least 8 GB of VRAM (or 16 GB of unified memory on Apple Silicon), and the CPU tests scale with available system memory.

New SMT test: threading laid bare

A new SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) test isolates logical-thread performance, showing how modern CPUs handle parallel workloads. This separates Cinebench 2026 from prior versions, which measured only total core performance. The result gives a clearer view of per-thread efficiency, especially relevant for render nodes and multi-core workstation CPUs.

Real-world alignment with Redshift

Maxon emphasises that Cinebench 2026 now uses the same Redshift code as Cinema 4D’s production renderer, making the benchmark a closer reflection of actual 3D rendering performance. This move should reduce the gap between synthetic test scores and real-world frame render times inside DCC applications.

That said, as always, benchmark results should be validated in actual production environments before being used for purchase or deployment decisions.

Availability and notes for cautious studios

Cinebench 2026 is available now, free of charge, from Maxon’s official site. The installer covers Windows 10/11 (x86-64 and ARM64) and macOS 14.7 or newer. While the tool’s interface remains largely unchanged, the new test scenes and threading evaluation mean you’ll need fresh baselines for every workstation in your pipeline. Studios that have not updated since Cinebench R23 or 2024 will find their old score sheets effectively obsolete.

Given the tight budgets and cautious upgrade cycles across post and VFX, this update serves both as a wake-up call and as free therapy for outdated benchmarking habits. Social media: Cinebench 2026 drops with GPU and SMT upgrades. Time to see if your workstation’s still earning its power bill.

Fact check reminder: Test new benchmarks on your own hardware before using results to guide workstation or render-node purchases.

The post Cinebench 2026: Benchmark therapy first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

When Chaos Labs first showed off Chaos Arena and Chaos Vantage together, the pitch sounded almost heretical: a real-time virtual production suite that skips game engines entirely. To some, that sounded impossible. To others, overdue. We spoke with Chris Nichols, Director of Chaos Labs, about what it means to go “engine-free,” why USD and MaterialX matter when the lights go up, and how Gaussian splats actually behave outside a SIGGRAPH paper. *¹

DP: Chris,before we jump into the tech: Chaos Arena and Chaos Vantage together are pitched as a virtual production suite without the usual game engine baggage. How would you describe the idea behind this approach in your own words?

Chris Nichols: One of the biggest issues with virtual production is rendering. There are options that have existed for a while, including working with game engines, but they require you to move to an entirely different platform, use an entirely different ecosystem, and switch to an entirely different pipeline. What we’re doing is focusing on the rendering part in a way that lets you keep your current ecosystem and pipeline. 

Using Chaos Vantage and Chaos Arena simplifies the entire process. You can basically just take what you already do and work with real-time content. You don’t need to bring in additional experts or learn new systems, you just do what you’ve always been doing and take it a step further. 

DP: Arena and Vantage now support USD, MaterialX, and even Gaussian Splats. Could you walk us through why these formats are important?

Chris Nichols: A lot of times, people are forced into using a specific system or format that puts them in a walled garden. It makes them take additional steps, which just slows everything down. We’re trying to break out of that by adopting open source formats and making things as easy as possible, and the visual effects companies that have begun to accept and support USD and MaterialX have an advantage. With USD and MaterialX, no matter what tools they are using – Blender, Maya, Houdini, 3ds Max, etc. – they are directly compatible with Chaos Vantage and Chaos Arena without needing to convert anything. 

With gaussian splats, that’s just a general demand that people want. It also works really well with some of the things we specialize in, especially ray tracing, and it allows us to utilize them more than just a 3D point cloud. 

DP: One of the bold claims is that you can work without pre-processing, no baking, no data wrangling. From a technical standpoint, how are you pulling that off?

Chris Nichols: This is a very interesting question. If you’re looking at game engines, which use rasterized rendering, that does need pre-processing, and you do need baking and data wrangling. But if you skip rasterization and go full ray tracing, none of those things are necessary. So they are essentially two separate things that seem similar, but are not. It’s kind of like asking how many miles per gallon an electric car gets, which is an understandable question given that we’ve been thinking in those terms for years, but it’s really two different technologies that work differently. 

With rasterized rendering, pixels are free. No matter what the resolution you’re working in, the render times are not affected that much, but adding more polygons slows it down. With ray tracing, polygons are free. So no matter how much geometry you throw at the system your rendering isn’t affected all that much. Alternatively, when you start adding more pixels you need more rays, which slows things down. 

What has really changed that allows us to bring it all together is recent technological breakthroughs. That includes AI, which lets us denoise and upscale our renderings at very, very high quality, using something called “ray reconstruction,” which was first introduced in DLSS 3.5 and has since been improved. Ray reconstruction allows us to produce very good renders using smaller resolution bases with fewer rays, while keeping the speed. Add in AI and you can get clean, high resolution results with far fewer rays cast, and significantly fewer pixels. AI fills in the gaps. 

With ray tracing, there is no baking. That’s the point. We don’t have to pre-render the lighting, it’s full global illumination in real time. Move lights and move objects, all the lighting follows in real time, no rebaking. There’s also no need for data wrangling, because we can just throw the maximum geometry at everything all the time. We don’t need to create levels of detail, we don’t need to do anything else. We can just say the final asset is in real time and enable that, which basically means one asset for everything across the board. 

DP: If I’m an artist walking onto a stage with Arena and Vantage for the first time, what does the workflow look like from setup to shooting?

Chris Nichols: It’s actually very straightforward. Vantage itself is a simple program. You can just load your asset into Chaos Vantage as either a .vrscene file or as a USD with a MaterialX system. We also support OBJ and a couple other formats, but those are the most common.

Navigating around is then very straightforward, like most 3D applications. Chaos Vantage is not trying to be a game engine, and it’s not trying to add all kinds of complicated systems. It’s just meant for real-time visualization. So you put your cameras down, move your lights, and move your objects along with a couple of other things. Arena manages multiple instances of Vantage and enables them to operate simultaneously, synchronizing multiple render nodes across a large LED wall. Essentially, it’s saying “here is a master Vantage scene, here’s all the slave nodes that are working in the background.” Arena makes sure everything is synchronized and rendering together. 

Arena also adds the camera tracking system you are already using, and we support multiple camera tracking systems. We just enable the protocols. It could be OptiTrack, stYpe, Mo-Sys, or any of those systems, and it enables where the camera is looking. It’s very straightforward and there’s not much of a learning curve. It’s essentially a viewport. This makes it much easier for people to adapt to the system. 

That means that a Maya user can easily jump into Arena within a half an hour or less. Same with a Houdini user, a Blender user, or any of those types of tools. Those are the types of artists we are specifically targeting, giving them the ability to continue in the real-time world. That also includes people like directors of photography, because it operates like how a real camera operates. It’s the same language they would use. 

DP: Virtual production workflows often involve deciding what to solve in real time and what to leave for post. How does your toolkit support that balance?

Chris Nichols: In the past, there’s always been this break between what you need for offline rendering, and what you need for real-time rendering. It’s two different pipelines, two different teams, sometimes two different companies doing completely different things. We’re looking to make one system that can cross many departments and many avenues simultaneously. We want to offer the same asset that can be used from previs to virtual production to post-production, and make it as seamless as possible. With USD and MaterialX, you are free to use the same asset across the whole production cycle, no matter what DCC, what renderer, and what pipeline you use. It’s your pipeline, and your choice.

The transition from virtual production to visual effects to post-production should be as seamless as possible. That’s one thing that we feel that we support very well. The best example of that is the asset we used for the short film we created to announce Arena, Ray Tracing FTW. You can watch it here in full:

That was just one massive asset that had the entire town. That included the interior of the bank, five kilometers of train tracks, the tunnel, the bridge, every blade of grass… everything. In total, the asset contained around 2.8 trillion triangles, and the whole asset was generated in a matter of days. We used it for everything, then we’d take that same asset and use it for post-production, because we still had all the detail that we originally had from the beginning. That’s how you save a lot of money. So basically, why build it three times when you can build it once?

DP: You tested Arena extensively on the short film Ray Tracing FTW. What were some surprises?

Chris Nichols: Our assistant director on Ray Tracing FTW was Ben Hansford, a well-established commercial director that has experience with virtual production. He told us to plan for an hour to an hour and a half of crashes every day, because that’s what’s expected when traditionally working with virtual production. We ended up completing the shoot in three days without a single crash.

In fact, I don’t know of any crashes that have ever happened on set with Arena, at least nothing that was not recoverable in a matter of a few minutes. We didn’t expect it to be as stable as it was, especially in those early days when it was barely a product and the shoot partly meant to be a test for it. 

DP: Real-time changes on set are often the stress test for virtual production. How did Arena and Vantage handle that during Ray Tracing FTW?

Chris Nichols: We aren’t doing any baking or anything like that, so real-time changes are trivial to us. That’s exactly the way it should be. Rasterized rendering can look very photoreal, but you have to do a lot to make it look like that, and some of the things you have to do to make it look photoreal involve not being able to edit it later. For us, if you’re just ray tracing the whole time, none of those things matter. 

DP: Vantage has always been about pure ray tracing in real time. How does Arena extend that, and what does the combination unlock that wasn’t possible before?

Chris Nichols: When you’re done ray tracing, you’re done. You don’t have to solve any of the other problems, so you massively simplify your process. If you go back to 2006 when VFX started to adapt full ray tracing – not just the hybrid ray tracing that most game engines use – teams were still trying to rasterize things, but they started to realize they could simplify the process. They didn’t need to have things like full teams of shader writers, instead they could use ray tracing and that essentially solved the problem. It made things much, much faster and more efficient. 

The same philosophy is true here when we’re doing real-time ray tracing. It gives us a big advantage, and it’s not just in the quality of how things look, it’s how fast you can make something look good, and how easy it is to get there. So you’re actually saving a ton of money by ray tracing. 

In terms of what new technology has made all of this possible, when the 2080 graphics cards came out in 2018, it was the first time ray tracing cores were enabled on NVIDIA cards, and that let us design around that technology. But we weren’t able to achieve that super high level of quality resolution needed for virtual production until DLSS 3.5 came out. More recently, AI has made a lot of things possible. The best way to think about it is one out of every eight pixels is real, the rest are AI generated.

DP: For artists who are used to Unreal Engine or Unity, what’s the biggest mental shift when moving into an Arena/Vantage-based workflow?

Chris Nichols:  Unreal and Unity are fantastic tools for making games, and essentially what they’ve done for virtual production is to try to gamify the film making process. Game engines turn everything into a game control system, which can work to some extent, but it completely deviates from the other systems that the movie industry has been using for a long time, especially visual effects. What we’re doing is we’re making it easier to streamline that process across all departments. 

For people that have been using game engines, Arena is much simpler and you’re not sacrificing anything to get there. There are a lot of tricks and processes that you need to know for a game engine, and that’s just the way it has been. With Arena, we’ve had people ask if we can recreate a unique process they’ve been doing, but we don’t need to implement their workarounds. So their very clever tricks are completely unnecessary in the way that we do things.

DP: Gaussian Splats are hot right now. How do they behave inside Arena and Vantage compared to the hype we see in research papers?

Chris Nichols: Gaussian splats seem like they are here to stay, plus they are simple enough that it was relatively easy to support them compared to other standards in the past. The technology is also fairly familiar, and builds on the older light field technology that we experimented with years ago, first with companies like Lytro, then Google. Gaussian splats are essentially a representation of color and light from multiple different angles that change based on the angle you are viewing it, which is similar to what a light field does.

The problem with light fields is that it involves massive amounts of data, and lots of redundancy to get it there. So much so that they were impractical to use. But if you use neural fields to represent all the redundancy, it changes things. That’s basically what neural radiance fields, or NeRFs do, they are essentially light fields with a neural network. It’s a really cool system, but still very cumbersome. 

So when gaussian splats came along, it solved a lot of issues. All we really need is a point in space and a shape on that point – typically a disc or an ellipsoid – that changes colors depending on the viewing angle. It’s such a simple idea that began as a concept and grew from there. And because they’re so lightweight, because they do so well, it just became so easy for us. 

The benefit that we get from gaussian splats, and the way that we’re approaching it by actually ray tracing it – as opposed to rasterizing it – is that we can put 3D objects inside of a gaussian splat and they will ray trace that gaussian splat directly. The best example I can give is that you can take a gaussian splat of a city, and then you put a CG car on a street within the city. Then when the car travels through the city it will accurately reflect the environment within the gaussian spalt. If you did it as an HDR, every light point is at infinity, and that’s not how it really should be.

DP: From a director’s or DoP’s point of view, what kind of creative control does this system provide on set?

Chris Nichols: Everything that a DP would do manually, we can offer virtually. You can move lights, you can change colors, you can do all kinds of things. You can manipulate all of those different areas as well. We’re actually in the process of working on getting a DMX control for what we’re doing, so the digital gaffers can work together in terms of all the lighting controls you would have.

Another thing that we’re working on for the future is a new way of doing depth of field so that we can control the ability to figure out the distance between the camera and the wall, and add the appropriate compensated depth of field postwall. When the camera and wall defocuses are combined, it is the correct level that you would need for your set. 

DP: Are there particular hardware setups that Arena and Vantage thrive on, or can it scale from laptops to full LED stages?

Chris Nichols: Most LED stages I’ve worked on have, at a minimum, an A6000 card, if not two, and that’s perfectly reasonable for most setups. That’s one of the practical advantages of Arena – it can be installed on an existing LED wall in a matter of a few hours, without changing any hardware. In fact, we do that all the time. 

Another benefit of using this type of setup is that Chaos Vantage is a standalone app that can be installed on any laptop running an NVIDIA card. So a virtual production supervisor, a VFX supervisor, or even a director can open the scene and look through the 3D environment on their laptop.

DP: What role does MaterialX play in enabling consistency across tools, especially when moving assets between DCCs and Arena?

Chris Nichols: When someone uses Arena, they may work on an asset that ends up going to several different visual effects studios, each of which has their own pipeline and tools. Some might be using V-Ray, some might use Mantra, some might be using Arnold, and on and on. We want to make sure all of those studios can continue to use the same asset without any compatibility issues. And for shaders to translate, the best thing we can do is support MaterialX. As long as a studio supports MaterialX, they can use the same asset as everyone else without issue. 

DP: If you look at the ideal future workflow, what would be the hand-off between on-set capture with Arena and finishing in post with Vantage or other Chaos tools?

Chris Nichols: Really, it’s just a matter of being able to use the same asset. You can have an asset at a post-production house, then hand it off to a virtual production studio and keep doing what you’re doing. The asset might receive some changes along the way, but when you get it back, it’s essentially the same asset. 

When we were working on Ray Tracing FTW, there’s a scene in a Spanish hacienda. We were busy getting everything ready, so we didn’t have time to build one ourselves. We just went to Evermotion and bought one for around $100, and within 10 minutes it was on screen. It just worked. There are a ton of great assets out there that are Arena ready, and you can find comprehensive libraries filled with virtual production-ready assets from sites like Turbosquid, Evermotion, and KitBash3D to name a few. Hopefully, future workflows will keep things easy. We’re not trying to overcomplicate things. Just use one asset and use it across everything.

DP: Finally, what’s next for Chaos Labs in this space?

Chris Nichols: With Chaos Labs, each project builds on the success of the last, and each new experiment opens the door for the next. For our film Ray Tracing FTW, we wanted to know if Arena could work as a virtual production tool, and it did, because we could see how easy it was to go from one asset to the next. Right now, we’re building on that and testing to see how we can improve the complete filmmaking workflow, from the earliest stages of development to the final pixel, all using a single asset that will be developed throughout the lifecycle of a film. 

One of our focuses with Chaos Labs right now is on creating a previs system for Vantage that enables camera tracking on a bluescreen environment. Using the same asset for previs, we can then translate it for virtual production for in-camera VFX, and then go on to be used for final production. So we’re really looking at the full lifecycle. 

DP: What would be your recommendations for people getting into it?

Chris Nichols: Arena is designed to be easy. It’s virtual production made simple. You don’t need to learn any complicated new techniques or workarounds, you just use what you already know. Your pipeline, your choice. Load the free trial and give it a whirl!

DP: What good resources are out there to learn more about it?

Chris Nichols: There’s a lot of great documentation out there. We make it a point to offer as many tips and documents as possible. There are also tutorials and things like CG Garage. I recently recorded an episode specifically about this. 

DP: What is the next project you are working on ?

Chris Nichols: There is a feature film in development that we are using as a major case study for Chaos Labs, designed to showcase how this can all work. We feel strongly that Arena and Vantage will debunk the idea that virtual production is only for big, expensive movies. It’s a tool that can be used for everything, even low budget independent films. They can have the same power and process as a major production, at a much lower cost. That’s what we’re trying to do within Chaos Labs. We want to show people that you can do your $5 million movie with virtual production and get the same results as films with huge budgets.

1. Editorial Comment: Did Chaos Lab want their name in every sentence? No. But we find it funny to have a highly technical topic, talking to a top-shelf expert, and almost every sentence has the word “Chaos” in it? Yes, because I am somehow still cursed with the humor of a 5-year-old. ︎

The post Keep Your Pipeline: Chaos on Skipping the Game Engine first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Pixar has announced the twelfth RenderMan Art Challenge, titled “First Contact.” The competition runs from 13 August to 10 November 2025 and focuses on shading, lighting, rendering, and compositing with Pixar’s renderer. The theme is aliens. Pixar ties this to two anniversaries: the release of Elio in 2025, where a boy is mistaken for Earth’s ambassador to outer space, and the 30th anniversary of Toy Story.

Participants are provided with 3D assets from Adobe, KitBash3D, Greyscalegorilla, Ozone3D, and Pixar. Submissions must be rendered using the official RenderMan plugins for Maya, Houdini, Katana, or Blender.

Rules of engagement

Each artist may submit one entry only, created individually. Works in progress must be posted to prove originality. The supplied assets form the backbone of the scene, but participants may add supporting geometry if it aids storytelling. Final images must meet these conditions:

• Resolution: up to 3840 x 2160 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 16:9
• Render engine: RenderMan only
• Compositing allowed: colour correction, grading, AOVs [Arbitrary Output Variables], LPEs [Light Path Expressions], and background replacement with owned/licensed material
• No paint-overs, photo-bashing, or third-party renderers are permitted.

Extraterrestrial feedback loop

Unlike many competitions, the RenderMan Art Challenge is structured as an open mentorship exercise. Pixar’s RenderMan team moderates the forums, answers technical questions, and provides critiques while the challenge runs.

Participants are encouraged to share works in progress. This creates a feedback loop where knowledge spreads across the community. Past challenges have shown that this process often produces detailed documentation of workflows, shading networks, and lighting techniques—resources that remain accessible after the contest ends. Semi-finalists will be asked to submit their project files to verify compliance with rules before judging.

Jury on the mothership

The 2025 jury includes senior professionals from Pixar and the wider VFX and animation industry. According to Pixar’s announcement and AWN’s coverage, jurors will include:

• Markus Kranzler, Global Technology Supervisor at Pixar
• Hannah Chan, Shading Technical Director at Pixar
• Tomer Meltser, Global Head of Education, NVIDIA
• Ahmed Gharraph, Head of Visualisation at Framestore
• Tom Reed, Senior Principal Engineer at Dell
• François Le Gall, Senior Look Development TD at Animal Logic

This mix of production TDs, hardware engineers, and educators suggests the judging will focus equally on artistic quality and technical accuracy.

Prizes orbiting the winners

The prize pool is made possible by a broad list of sponsors. The highlight is a Dell Precision Pro Max 16 mobile workstation with NVIDIA GPU.

Other prizes include:

• Software licences from Adobe, Foundry, Greyscalegorilla, KitBash3D, SideFX, SpeedTree, and fxphd
• Render credits from Ranch Computing
• Hardware tools from AMD, NVIDIA, Xencelabs, and Dell

Winners will be announced on 17 November 2025. According to Pixar’s rules, prizes are non-transferable and have no cash equivalent.

Conditions and eligibility

The contest is open to all registered members of the RenderMan community, regardless of whether they use commercial or non-commercial licences. Restrictions apply under US export control laws: entrants from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and sanctioned Ukrainian territories are excluded.

Each entrant must respect asset copyright conditions. When publishing challenge images outside the contest forum, the following credit line is required: Assets by Adobe, KitBash3D, Greyscalegorilla, Ozone, and Pixar. RenderMan “First Contact” Art Challenge © Disney/Pixar.

Why these challenges matter

Since 2014, Pixar’s RenderMan Art Challenges have provided a public platform to test shading, rendering, and compositing skills in a production-like setting. Unlike vendor showcases, the contests rely on open participation and require all artists to use the same set of assets.

The format highlights what RenderMan can and cannot do in real-world workflows. Past challenges, such as “Shipshape” (2023) and “NASA Exploration” (2022), remain visible as galleries of tested techniques. For studios, this generates a form of community-driven benchmarking. For artists, it offers an opportunity to receive direct critique from Pixar staff and industry veterans.

The post Pixar beamed up: RenderMan Art Challenge 2025 goes alien first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The IBC announcement

At IBC 2025, Adobe confirmed that Premiere Pro 25.5 integrates the full Film Impact transition and effect library directly into the application. The company is emphasising this as both a creative expansion and a practical elimination of a common subscription burden. Until this release, Film Impact was a standalone plug-in collection costing €15–30 per month. With version 25.5, the entire catalogue is bundled into Creative Cloud at no additional cost. Adobe is making this available to all Premiere Pro users beginning 12 September 2025.

Film Impact’s evolution from plug-in to built-in

Film Impact is a developer with a reputation for stable, GPU-accelerated transitions and effects widely used in professional editing. Adobe’s acquisition, reported earlier in 2025, was not simply a brand buyout but an absorption of a mature, commercially proven toolset. This toolset now appears in Premiere Pro without any separate installation or licensing. The effects are accessed in the Effects panel, or through the dedicated Film Impact Dashboard under the Window > Extensions menu, where editors can browse live previews of each transition.

The catalogue is wide. It contains polished versions of dissolves, blurs, and wipes—updated variants of editing staples that now render more smoothly and play in real time. It also includes more aggressive stylisation tools. Earthquake, glitch, distortion, chaos, and VHS-damage are among the more destructive transition types now standardised inside Premiere. For editors seeking more abstract visuals, the library also contains kaleidoscopic transformations and 3D transitions that add spatial depth between cuts.

Crucially, all of these tools are GPU-accelerated. In practical terms, this means an end to the familiar red render bar above transitions that once required preview rendering before playback. According to Adobe, the effects remain real-time even under heavy parameter customisation. This GPU dependence is a direct continuation of Film Impact’s engineering focus before the acquisition, where the company consistently positioned its transitions as faster to preview than comparable third-party solutions.

One unique feature of Film Impact that Adobe has retained is the “Surprise Me” button. Instead of default settings, this function instantly generates randomised variations of an effect, allowing editors to preview unconventional results and select creative alternatives without manually keyframing or duplicating effect instances.

Expanding motion capabilities inside Premiere

Adobe’s strategy is clearly to offload simpler motion design work into Premiere Pro, reducing the need for round-tripping through After Effects for straightforward graphics animation. Several of the new Film Impact tools are aimed at titles and logos. Editors can now transform static text into 3D animated lettering with shadow casting and depth within seconds. Logos can be duplicated and animated using pre-built behaviours, creating the illusion of bespoke motion graphics without building compositions. Titles can be animated using light sweeps, glow effects, wiggling distortions, bounces, and pops. While these animations remain parameter-driven and customisable, they are designed to produce acceptable results directly from their default states, speeding up editorial workflows.

Beyond motion graphics, Film Impact effects now serve grading and look-development purposes. Editors can apply glows, halation, and lens echoes, or simulate atmospheric lighting through volumetric rays. Bokeh effects generate photorealistic out-of-focus textures. Red, green, and blue channels can be shifted independently to correct fluorescent light imbalances. Chromatic aberration is available for stylistic distortion. Blend modes can be applied directly within the effect framework. Vignette tools no longer rely on simple oval shapes, but allow arbitrary warping to match composition geometry. A camera shake simulator is also included, able to add handheld movement to static tripod shots. Collectively, these tools extend Premiere Pro’s built-in grading capabilities beyond simple Lumetri adjustments.

Timeline and playback refinements

Parallel to the new effects, Adobe has targeted workflow bottlenecks in the timeline. For years, dragging a clip within Premiere’s sequence produced only an empty rectangle, requiring editors to guess sync relationships with underlying audio. In version 25.5, audio waveforms remain visible even during clip movement or when performing ripple, roll, and rate-stretch edits. This change is accompanied by markers and keyframes staying visible as well, preventing alignment errors during complex edits.

Another update addresses fading. Editors can now apply and adjust multiple fade or crossfade transitions across clips simultaneously. Combined with last year’s visual fade handles, this reduces repetitive clicking and improves batch adjustments.

Adobe has set a clear benchmark for playback responsiveness: reducing the delay between pressing play and seeing frames to under 0.1 seconds. The company states that significant progress has already been made toward this target, and that further optimisations will follow. This represents a technical focus on perceived latency—an issue that has consistently affected longform editing in earlier Premiere releases.

Codec support and GPU acceleration

Premiere Pro 25.5 introduces new codec handling and GPU acceleration. Hardware decoding of 10-bit 4:2:2 H.264 and HEVC media is now available on NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell GPUs, enabling real-time playback of formats traditionally known for high quality and low file size but difficult decoding. Canon Cinema RAW Light now benefits from hardware acceleration, providing smoother playback and up to tenfold faster exports. ARRI workflows also see support for ARRIRAW HDE (High Density Encoding). In this mode, footage is encoded at 60 percent of its original file size while retaining image data. Premiere Pro can now natively play back this optimised ARRIRAW format without relying on third-party plug-ins.

Small but necessary workflow fixes

Alongside headline features, Adobe has implemented several incremental corrections. Editors can now set a default font for captions and text, eliminating the need to manually override the long-standing default of Minion Pro. Keyboard shortcuts have been extended, making it possible to toggle track mute and solo based on track targeting without mouse interaction. A persistent bug has also been corrected in the Effect Controls panel, where adding a keyframe at the last frame of a clip previously jumped to the beginning of the following clip.

For high-end colour workflows, 16-bit PNG import is now supported, and metadata handling has been improved across PNG, DNxHR, and DNxHD formats, reducing errors when exchanging files with other finishing environments. To improve organisation, new Sequence Colour Tabs allow editors to colour-code timelines, adding a layer of visual reference to complex sequences.

After Effects 25.5

The companion release of After Effects 25.5 includes fewer features, but they target daily efficiency for motion designers. The standout is Quick Offset, a tool that allows multiple keyframes or entire layers to be shifted in time with one click-and-drag action. This eliminates the need to manually adjust dozens of layers individually in large compositions. In addition, zooming and navigation inside the composition viewer has been re-engineered for smoother response, particularly when magnifying to pixel level for detailed work. Cache handling has been refined, improving preview and playback responsiveness.

Availability and scope

Premiere Pro 25.5 and After Effects 25.5 will roll out beginning 12 September 2025, timed with IBC in Amsterdam. The Film Impact integration is included in the main install of Premiere Pro and requires no separate download.

Adobe has not published a comprehensive mapping of Film Impact’s original plug-ins against their new built-in equivalents. It remains unclear whether the entire legacy library has been preserved or whether some plug-ins were excluded. Until further documentation is available, users are advised to compare older Film Impact installations with the new built-in set before migrating active projects.

At IBC, Adobe also showcased new enterprise-level updates for Frame.io, including metadata handling on account level, low-code connectors for workflow integration, and additional sharing and security options. These developments affect collaborative workflows but fall outside the scope of Premiere Pro and will be covered separately.

As with any new release, these features should be tested thoroughly before deployment in production environments. Stability, render consistency, and interoperability with shared project files remain critical factors for professional pipelines.

The post Premiere Pro gains 90+ Film Impact effects – plug-in now built-in first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

by Peter Beck, Field Product Manager Workstations
and Rugged at Dell Technologies in Germany.

This new approach to filmmaking has revolutionized the industry by blending digital technologies with traditional techniques. It merges virtual environments with live-action filming, allowing studios to project ultra-high-resolution backgrounds onto LED walls where actors can perform in real time. Camera tracking allows virtual backgrounds to react to camera movements in real time, making the scenery appear fully realistic. Studios can simulate buildings or landscapes that exist in the real world, as well as completely fictional worlds such as imaginary planets or fantasy cities. Studios can replicate real-world locations, such as buildings or landscapes, or create entirely fictional worlds, from alien planets to fantastical cities.

The benefits of virtual production are extensive. Post-production work is often reduced, and overall costs are lower since crews no longer need to travel to global locations like New York, Paris, or London to shoot on site. This also helps reduce CO₂ emissions, which is a clear environmental advantage. Directors and film crews can adapt virtual environments quickly, make last-minute changes, and experiment visually without being tied to external factors.

Freed from concerns like weather, natural light, or time-of-day constraints, teams gain greater control over planning and execution. Virtual environments are also far easier to reuse than physical sets. This facilitates so-called pickups, i.e. additional or supplementary shots that are recorded after the main shoot to improve, supplement, or correct certain aspects of a scene. But even the next sequel to a successful blockbuster series can be produced much faster and more efficiently.

Workstations as a Central Component

Software tools like Blender and Unreal Engine make virtual production possible. Artists often use Blender to design photorealistic 3D models and animations, while Unreal Engine renders these assets on LED walls and enables real-time interaction between actors and digital content. For these tools to operate effectively, they require equally capable hardware. This is where workstations come in, especially those outfitted with high-performance GPUs. These machines are the backbone of the virtual production process.

Workstations render the digital environments live and display them on LED walls. They also handle compositing, the process of blending actors and physical elements with the virtual background. These workstations allow directors, cinematographers, producers, and department heads to hold virtual scouts; collaborative sessions in a shared digital environment used for pre-production planning. By interacting in real time within the virtual assets, teams can explore camera angles, lighting setups, and set design long before principal photography begins.

One reason workstations are so effective is that they harness the specific strengths of modern GPUs. While CPUs generally produce higher-quality final renders, GPUs are much faster at generating real-time previews. This performance difference stems from their underlying architecture. CPUs are designed for complex, sequential tasks and typically include a few very powerful cores. GPUs, by contrast, excel at parallel processing and are equipped with thousands of smaller cores that can handle many simple calculations simultaneously. This enables rapid on-set rendering during virtual production. More detailed work, such as final colour grading or complex simulations, can then be completed during post-production using CPU-intensive data centres.

Dell Precision 7875 Tower Workstation: Purpose-built for Virtual Production

The Dell Precision 7875 Tower Workstation (SpecSheet) is a standout hardware solution for real-time rendering. Designed specifically for professional use in virtual production, it supports up to two NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPUs. This graphics card delivers extremely high computing power for real-time rendering. Its architecture includes RT cores that accelerate ray tracing and Tensor cores that specialize in AI calculations. It also has a large graphics memory. This combination enables complex 3D scenes with numerous details and high-resolution textures to be displayed smoothly without delays. With this level of hardware, filmmakers can make creative decisions in real time and integrate highly realistic virtual sets directly into their production workflows.

The post Workstations for Virtual Production first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Advertorial.

Kromatica’s DigiDiff v3.0 brings an upgraded digital diffusion toolkit to DaVinci Resolve, aiming at colorists, finishing artists, and digital imaging technicians who want real-time, pixel-accurate optical diffusion in post. The plugin expands creative and technical control with new tint features, highlight handling, and a pack of presets based on industry-standard filters. Like before, it’s strictly pay-once and cross-platform, with a perpetual two-seat license.

v3.0: Now With Color and Clarity Tweaks

Version 3.0 introduces the Diffusion Tint control in its core DiffDesigner panel, letting users tint the diffusion effect either via Hue mode for custom color casts or CCT mode for Kelvin-style temperature shifts. This update caters to both creative and technical looks, such as “warming up” highlights or adding targeted color atmospheres.

DiffBoost, another new v3.0 feature, boosts diffusion only in image highlights. Two sliders, Boost and Clamp, ensure that bright details bloom as intended, while midtones and shadows stay crisp—a feature designed for users who want “mist” effects without sacrificing sharpness everywhere else.

Seven new presets have been modeled on analog diffusion filters frequently requested by DITs and colorists: Warm Black Pro Mist, Soft Net Black, Hollywood Black Magic, Bronze Glimmer Glass, HD Classic Soft, Black Frost, and LoCon. Presets can be tweaked and saved as custom profiles.

Under the Hood: Real-Time Diffusion

The heart of DigiDiff remains its mathematical diffusion engine, designed to replicate the scatter, glow, and blooming effects of real glass filters. Profiles can be dialed in to match specific film stocks or lighting scenarios. GPU acceleration is required for real-time playback up to 4K, with system recommendations set at 16 GB RAM, 6–8 GB VRAM, and Apple M-series or NVIDIA hardware. Support for higher resolutions is possible but should be verified per workstation.

Compatibility and Integration

DigiDiff is compatible with both the free and Studio versions of DaVinci Resolve. It runs on macOS 11 and above—including Apple Silicon—and Windows 10/11 with modern NVIDIA GPUs. ACES and Resolve Color Management pipelines are supported, and the plugin reads native camera log formats, integrating with color workflows used on set and in post.

Pricing

DigiDiff v3.0 is priced at $149 for a perpetual license, with no recurring fees or cloud requirement. Buyers receive two seats per purchase, usable across platforms. Licenses are perpetual and valid for two seats. One license covers two installations, whether that’s a Mac and a PC or two machines of the same OS. No subscriptions, and free updates for the foreseeable future.

Background and Use Cases

DigiDiff started as a workaround for missing or inadequate diffusion plugins in Resolve and quickly developed a following among colorists. Developers position it as a “digital extension” to optical filters, not a replacement, with case uses including commercial spots and branded content. Real-world feedback notes that DigiDiff can fill the gap when in-camera filtration wasn’t possible or for fast look development.

Production Reminder

As always, even the best plugin is only as reliable as its performance on real shots and workstations. Test DigiDiff v3.0 thoroughly in your own environment for playback stability, color accuracy, and client-facing output before relying on it in production work.

The post DigiDiff v3.0: Kromatica’s Pixel-Level Diffusion for Resolve first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The industry-standard graphics benchmarking tool Specviewperf, developed by SPECapc and maintained by the SPEC Graphics and Workstation Performance Group, has reached version 15. And the update finally adds what many artists in VFX, animation and real-time graphics have quietly cursed its absence for years: dedicated benchmarks for Blender and Unreal Engine 5.

The new Blender and UE5 bring two of the most widely used production tools into the Specviewperf ecosystem. While previous versions already supported software like Maya, 3ds Max and Solidworks, this release marks the first time Blender and Unreal Engine get their own dedicated GPU punishment routines—sorry, we mean performance tests.

Blender: Geometry Nodes and a Whole Lot of Hair

The Blender benchmark uses an animated forest scene rendered in Blender 3.6 LTS. It includes geometry node-based grass and scatter systems, camera motion, animated characters, and—hold onto your render budgets—3 million hair particles. It’s a pure viewport test using Material Preview shading mode (based on Eevee) and runs on the default OpenGL backend. Eevee’s full capabilities aren’t stressed here, but the setup does reflect common layout and lookdev workflows. No compositing, baking or final render performance is included—this is strictly about interactive viewport performance.

UE5: Nanite, Lumen, and Deferred Rendering on Parade

The Unreal Engine 5 viewset is based on Epic’s own Lyra Starter Game, rendered with UE5.3. The benchmark scene contains geometry from the City Sample demo, including high-resolution Nanite meshes, dynamic lighting via Lumen, and UE5’s deferred renderer. Like the Blender test, UE5 focuses purely on real-time viewport interaction. This includes dynamic shadows, global illumination and LOD transitions. Developers, shaders and lighting artists looking to gauge GPU performance in UE5’s editor will finally get a baseline for how badly their cards sweat.

Expanded GPU Support: Ada, W7900, and Intel Arc Join In

Specviewperf 15 also expands GPU support. It now includes:

• Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada
• AMD Radeon Pro W7900
• Intel Arc Pro graphics

While the software doesn’t ship with in-house test results, vendors are expected to publish official scores soon. Until then, comparisons between different GPU architectures must wait—although there’s nothing stopping you from running your own benchmarks. Just brace yourself for the hair particles.

Still Free, Still for Windows Only

Specviewperf 15 is available for free on Windows 10 and 11. There’s no Linux or macOS version, which is standard for the benchmark. No mention of changes to existing viewsets like Maya, 3ds Max or Solidworks was made in the update.

Bench First, Render Later

As always: just because your GPU survives the Blender stress test doesn’t mean your next production render won’t melt it. These benchmarks are useful for gauging comparative performance, but they do not guarantee production-ready stability, especially in edge-case-heavy workflows typical for post-production and VFX environments. Use the data for buying decisions or bragging rights, not for trusting that 300 million hairs won’t crash halfway through a late-night export.

Where to Get It

You can download Specviewperf 15 from spec.org. There’s no price tag—it’s free—but it may cost you some ego points if your GPU ends up underperforming.

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The post Specviewperf 15: Now with Extra Blender and a Dash of Unreal first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

NVIDIA has made a splash by releasing its renowned PhysX Flow engine as fully open source. This move marks a watershed moment for simulation in film production and postproduction workflows. The transition to an open source model is not merely a licensing change; it gives artists, technical directors, VFX supervisors, riggers, shadower enthusiasts, modellers, and even game developers an unprecedented opportunity to dive into the very code that powers next-generation fluid simulations.

The Technical Anatomy of PhysX Flow

The core of PhysX Flow is asystem tailored for high-performance fluid simulations, optimized to run on modern NVIDIA GPUs. Built to support real-time graphics and powered by advanced algorithms specifically designed for grid- or particle-based fluid dynamics (numerical methods enabling accurate simulation of complex fluid behavior), the engine lends itself well to heavy-duty tasks in both feature films and video games. NVIDIA’s choice to open source this robust engine was driven by the need to foster innovation and collaboration in the digital production arena. With its modular architecture, PhysX Flow allows VFX artists and simulation engineers to integrate or adapt the software into bespoke pipelines, ensuring that the engine can be finely tuned for tasks ranging from intricate water simulations for blockbuster visual effects to large-scale interactive simulations in the gaming world.

The open source release means that professionals now have full access to the underlying algorithms that manage the simulation of thousands of fluid particles in real time. The engine’s capacity to handle high-resolution scenarios with minimal performance overhead is achieved through rigorous optimization on NVIDIA GPU hardware, making it an attractive tool for those who demand both speed and precision. For those who were previously confined to proprietary black boxes, this release opens a window into how simulation stability and performance meet cutting-edge technological sophistication. While many may joke that “if you can’t solve it, at least make it open source,” NVIDIA’s decision ensures that even the quirkiest error can be debugged by a global community of experts, not just an in-house team.

The code is now available for scrutiny on NVIDIA’s GitHub repository, and while the engine itself comes free of charge (thus making price discussions moot), the true cost is measured in the time and effort required to master it. For many studios and freelancers alike, the potential return on investment is high—provided that all new modifications are rigorously validated in the context of actual project requirements. In other words, while it’s tempting to get swept away in the waves of open source enthusiasm, as always, Fact Check: any innovation should be checked before being used in current projects.

The post PhysX Goes Open: Fluid Dynamics Unleashed first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

iRender presents a cloud render farm solution specifically designed to address the hardware constraints encountered by Redshift users in demanding VFX and post-production environments. The platform provides remote access to high-performance GPU servers, effectively replicating a high-end local workstation experience without the associated capital expenditure.

Hardware Specifications and Performance

The platform employs NVIDIA RTX 4090 cards, with some configurations incorporating RTX 3090 options, to ensure efficient handling of intensive Redshift projects. This GPU-centric architecture is intended to reduce render times significantly, thereby improving workflow efficiency under stringent production deadlines. The system’s performance metrics, as highlighted in the sources, are geared towards meeting the demands of modern VFX pipelines, where precise computational power is essential.

Integration with Cinema 4D

iRender extends its utility by offering Cinema 4D licenses within its cloud service. This integration, backed by an official partnership with Maxon, simplifies software management and ensures a seamless connection between the render farm and the popular 3D software suite. This inclusion is particularly valuable for users whose pipelines rely on Cinema 4D for modeling, animation, and rendering tasks.

Software Compatibility and Workflow Flexibility

Beyond Redshift and Cinema 4D, iRender demonstrates broad software compatibility, supporting additional 3D applications such as Houdini, Blender, and Octane. This flexibility enables professionals across various departments—from rigging and shading to editing and color grading—to integrate the service into diverse production workflows without compromising on stability or performance.

Considerations for Implementation

For production professionals, the adoption of any new technology warrants thorough evaluation. Users are advised to conduct trial runs with iRender to ensure that the cloud render farm aligns with the specific technical and operational requirements of their projects. It is critical to verify that the platform’s capabilities meet current production standards before full-scale integration.

iRender’s cloud render farm solution thus represents a technically sound option for Redshift users aiming to mitigate hardware limitations. Its combination of advanced GPU hardware, seamless Cinema 4D integration, and broad software support makes it a noteworthy consideration for enhancing rendering efficiency in professional VFX and post-production settings.

The post iRender Cloud Render Farm Enhances Redshift Workflows first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Maxon has unveiled Redshift 2025.3, the latest iteration of its GPU renderer, bringing a suite of enhancements tailored for professionals in film production, VFX, CGI, and post-production. This update focuses on refining lighting controls, volume rendering, and expanding compatibility with industry-standard workflows.

Enhanced Lighting Controls

In this release, Redshift reimagines the behavior of Area and Dome lights. Now, these lights can be configured to be visible within a scene without casting shadows, or conversely, to remain invisible while their effects are perceivable through transparent materials. This flexibility offers artists more nuanced control over scene illumination, ensuring that the light behaves as intended without unintended visual artifacts.

Improved Volume Scattering

Volume rendering sees a significant upgrade with the introduction of the Extinction Falloff parameter in both the Standard Volume and classic Volume shaders. This feature reduces scattering and transmittance with successive bounces of volume rays, enabling the simulation of numerous bounces without compromising performance. Additionally, the Standard Volume shader now includes a unified Displacement input, allowing simultaneous application of volume displacement to both the volume and emission channels.

Expanded USD Procedural Support

Redshift’s USD (Universal Scene Description) procedural capabilities have been extended to Autodesk Maya, complementing existing support in Houdini and Katana. Artists can now load and render USD files using the RS Proxy, ensuring that USD assets are only loaded at render time, resulting in a more streamlined and efficient scene file. The USD Procedural also now supports UsdPreviewSurface materials, as well as denoising and post effects, further integrating Redshift into modern production pipelines.

Experimental GPU Compatibility

For those eager to leverage the latest hardware advancements, Redshift 2025.3 introduces experimental support for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, based on the Blackwell architecture. As these GPUs become commercially available, users can anticipate enhanced rendering performance, though it’s advisable to validate this innovation in test environments before deploying it in active projects.

Platform and Pricing Details

Redshift 2025.3 is compatible with Windows 10+, glibc 2.28+ Linux, and macOS 13.3+. Integration plugins are available for 3ds Max 2018+, Blender 3.1+, Cinema 4D R25+, Houdini 18.5+, Katana 4.5+, and Maya 2018+ (Maya 2022+ on Linux). The software is offered on a subscription basis, priced at $46 per month or $264 annually. For a comprehensive list of changes and detailed information, visit the Redshift forum.

As always, while these enhancements promise to elevate your rendering workflow, it’s prudent to thoroughly test new features in your specific production environment to ensure stability and compatibility.

The post Redshift 2025.3: Lighting the Way to Better Renders first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In a release that reads like a well-oiled changelog for the production geek in all of us, OpenUSD 25.02—detailed in the official GitHub changelog—delivers a series of technical enhancements that should put a smile on the face of technical directors, VFX supervisors and artists with a penchant for finely tuned pipelines.

Enhanced API Functionality and Robustness
At the heart of version 25.02 lies a set of API refinements designed to streamline interactions with core USD components. The update tightens API definitions, which not only reduces ambiguity but also enforces stricter type and reference checks during scene description and composition. The refined API now provides more predictable behavior when dealing with asset references and payloads, making it easier for production tools to interface with USD data without running afoul of subtle bugs. In other words, if your production pipeline has been occasionally temperamental during those edge-case compositions, this update promises a steadier hand.

Performance Optimizations for Demanding Pipelines
OpenUSD 25.02 introduces optimizations in the internal memory management and parsing routines, including improved handling of composition arcs and more efficient processing of scene graph data. This means faster scene assembly and reduced latency in multi-threaded environments—a critical upgrade for professionals juggling simultaneous VFX, CGI, and realtime graphics tasks.

Multi-threading and Stability Improvements
One of the unsung heroes of this release is the bolstering of multi-threading support. The update incorporates modifications that enhance thread safety across various USD modules. These changes are particularly welcome for technical directors who rely on parallel processing. By addressing race conditions and synchronizing access to shared resources more effectively, OpenUSD 25.02 reduces the potential for crashes and erratic behavior during high-intensity production tasks. It’s a bit like giving your production pipeline an espresso shot—everything runs faster and more reliably.

Refinements in Memory Management and Error Handling
Stability in production tools is non-negotiable, and the new release addresses this by refining memory allocation routines and error-handling mechanisms. Specific improvements include better cleanup of transient data and more robust error propagation when unexpected conditions occur. Such changes might seem dry, but for those who have ever spent an afternoon debugging a memory leak in a critical render pass, these tweaks are as welcome as an extra cup of coffee during a crunch. The tighter control over memory management means that production systems can now better handle the rigors of large-scale scene manipulations, reducing downtime caused by unexpected crashes or memory overruns.

While these technical improvements are certainly designed to integrate seamlessly into production environments, it is always recommended to conduct thorough tests within controlled pipelines before deploying any new version into active projects. As always, any innovation should be checked before being used in current projects.

For those eager to dive into the specifics, the detailed changelog provides a comprehensive list of modifications and fixes. As always, while the technical merits of these improvements are impressive, ensure that the new release is validated within your workflow. After all, even the best tools require a bit of cautious integration before they can be trusted with your most demanding projects.

Happy rendering—and may your API calls always return the expected results! (Link to the Github)

The post OpenUSD 25.02: Technical Tweaks for the Speedy Frame Wrangler (Yes, Really) first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For artists who’ve ever rolled their eyes at AI tools designed for meme-makers and hobbyists, ComfyUI continues to stand out as the artist’s AI—a robust, node-based compositing tool that’s now armed with support for NVIDIA Cosmos. This isn’t another app for teenagers to spin up low-res text-to-image monstrosities. ComfyUI has brought NVIDIA’s AI-driven “World Models” into its sophisticated workflows, turning text-to-video and image-to-video into serious tools for professionals.

NVIDIA Cosmos integrates seamlessly into ComfyUI’s modular environment. Cosmos offers state-of-the-art diffusion models—available in both 7B and 14B versions—that allow users to generate videos from text descriptions or extend still images into animated sequences. These models are tailored for the high expectations of artists working in real-time graphics and complex simulations, not for casual dabblers. And unlike gimmicky AI tools, Cosmos is optimized for 121-frame videos at a resolution of 1280×704 pixels—just the kind of precision and quality needed for actual production use.

But let’s talk specifics, because Cosmos brings some heavy machinery to the table. First, there’s the text encoder and VAE (variational autoencoder) required for this setup, which might sound like jargon but are essentially the brains and lungs of the AI operation. The encoder, oldt5_xxl_fp8_e4m3fn_scaled, is a special version designed specifically for Cosmos workflows. Unlike the version 1.1 encoders used elsewhere, this one’s still on version 1.0—yes, even AI tech has legacy quirks.

Once the models are configured, the fun begins. The text-to-video workflow lets users type in detailed prompts that Cosmos translates into animated sequences. For the more visually inclined, image-to-video tools can transform static frames into fully animated scenes, breathing life into concepts with eerie precision. And while these models were trained mostly on realistic videos, they seem to have an odd knack for handling anime-style imagery, proving that AI still likes to keep its sense of humor.

Of course, with great power comes great GPU demands. Running Cosmos is not a casual affair—on an NVIDIA RTX 4090, generating a single 121-frame video can take over 10 minutes. And no, Cosmos isn’t here for shortcuts; trying to veer off the recommended 121-frame length or supported resolutions (minimum 704×704 pixels) could result in results best described as “experimental.” It’s also worth noting that the AI prefers longer, descriptive prompts—so no, “cool explosion” isn’t going to cut it.

ComfyUI, staying true to its identity as a serious tool for professional artists, provides detailed workflows for both text-to-video and image-to-video setups. These JSON-based workflows are ready to download directly from the ComfyUI Cosmos page, and they make sure anyone with the technical chops can dive right in.

The takeaway? ComfyUI’s integration with NVIDIA Cosmos is not just another flashy AI feature—it’s a real step forward for VFX and post-production pipelines. But as always, the mantra remains: test before you trust. AI tools are fun, sure, but professionals need stability, precision, and results they can actually rely on. If you’re looking for a prompt toy, go elsewhere. If you’re ready to explore the bleeding edge of AI compositing, ComfyUI’s got you covered.

The post ComfyUI + NVIDIA Cosmos: AI for Artists, Not Teenagers first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.