For those who don’t know the tool: Vantage is a real-time ray tracing renderer that can sit beside Enscape and slot into USD and MaterialX heavy pipelines when you want fast lookdev without a nap.

Chaos Vantage 3 update 2 comes with a focus on practical scene-side control: new post looks, more object shapes, deeper simulation tweaks, and workflow glue that keeps artists in the viewport longer.

The headline addition is a Toon post effect. It adds a stylized look as a post step, which means you can push a non-photoreal pass without rebuilding materials or rerouting a full shading graph. The feature is presented as a post effect, so it lives where you would expect to audition looks quickly, then iterate.

Water got attention too. The Water surface object now supports Circle, Infinite, and Custom shapes, making it easier to fit a surface to a set or shot without faking scale. The watre surface animation can also be previewed in real time, and Wind picked up an Affect water option in the Environment tab to toggle that preview on or off.

VR workflows also moved forward. There is support for VR joysticks teleportation and object manipulation, aimed at navigating and adjusting scenes more directly inside a headset. If your review culture leans on immersive approvals, this is the kind of change that reduces mouse time and increases useful gestures. If your review culture leans on never touching a headset, nothing breaks.

Splats and smoke get more production-like controls

Gaussian splats gained explicit support for creating and importing Gaussian splats objects, and those objects now have editable properties. That makes splats feel less like a read-only curiosity and more like a scene element you can actually manage.

The Fluid simulator object also expanded in ways that map cleanly to shot polish. Smoke expansion and Temperature expansion properties were added, giving more control over how sims evolve. The simulator can now export OpenVDB cache files, which matters because it turns an internal sim result into something you can hand off, archive, or try elsewhere.

On the quality side, micro vorticity generation and detail improved, and the default pivot moved to the bottom center of the grid container. These are the sorts of adjustments that make an effect feel less like a demo and more like a tool you can steer.

There is also a performance angle. Multi GPU performance improved, and the fluid simulator performance improved. A temporary memory usage spike was removed when changing resolution with NVIDIA DLSS.

UI changes that reduce scavenger hunts

Update 2 added a new Create Objects button in the toolbar that centralizes all available object creation in one place. The Scale type-in dialog gained an object size in scene units property, which helps when you need a known dimension and do not want to eyeball a gizmo. Background Image in Screen mode can now be offset on X and Y, and first person navigation gained an option to move along the camera view direction instead of horizontally. That navigation option is a global preference set in Edit then Preferences then Interaction, which is a very specific breadcrumb trail, but at least it is now a breadcrumb trail that goes somewhere. Creation behavior also improved in a small but meaningful way: creating a fluid simulator object now automatically sets selected objects as emitters.

Enscape 4.17.0 quietly patches the sharp edges

Enscape 4.17.0 shipped with a mix of performance and workflow changes, plus a long list of targeted bug fixes. On the improvements side, NVIDIA DLSS was updated to version 310.5 with bug fixes and stability improvements. Light clustering behavior improved in orthographic view so lights group and separate more predictably while zooming and navigating. The Visual Settings Presets panel now starts expanded by default.

For Archicad, all-user installation support improved by registering Enscape in the AddOns folder. On Windows, users created after installation will also have it installed.

There are also fixes for clearcoat handling in light reflections, a sky that can appear pixelated in video previews and exports, and Billboard geometry disappearing when the camera gets very close. Asset Library placement performance improved in older placement modes. The Material Editor feedback button for the AI Material Generator was fixed. The V-Ray Scene Export path was addressed too: large scene files caused by duplicating geometry of asset instances, plus a case where Scene Export could crash.

Batch Rendering got a crash fix when canceling while Light Management is active. Enscape Impact fixes address energy performance results display when reopening after a successful analysis run, and invalid Impact Report data in imperial units.

Pricing and where this lands on your budget spreadsheet

Pricing for Vantage is specified as $54.90 per month for Vantage Standalone when billed annually, shown as $658.80 for one license billed annually.

Pricing for Enscape is specified as $47.90 per month for an Enscape Solo plan when billed annually, shown as $574.80 for one license billed annually.

Both sets of numbers are the kind that make producers ask whether you can do it with screenshots. You can, but you will not like it.

https://forums.chaos.com/forum/chaos-vantage/chaos-vantage-announcements/1245724-chaos-vantage-v3-2-0-released

https://forum.enscape3d.com/index.php?thread%2F31054-enscape-4-17-0-released%2F=

The post Chaos Vantage 3 update 2 adds Toon first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Blender is the free all in one DCC for modeling, animation, rendering, and export tasks like USD, with Eevee for realtime previews, Cycles for finals, and a Compositor that keeps quietly expanding its job description.

The release vibe: refine, then refine again

Blender 5.1 arrives with a clear theme: make everyday work feel lighter. The focus sits on quality of life improvements, stability, and polish, following a “Winter of Quality” push that solved 350 important issues and also cleaned up code to make future improvements easier.

That mindset shows up everywhere. Some changes are the sort you notice instantly. Others only reveal themselves after a week, when you realize you have not sworn at a dialog box even once. Progress comes in many forms. It is still the same familiar toolset. The difference is how often it gets out of your way.

Raycast: a shader node that likes to ask questions

A new Raycast shader node lands in the material system, built around a simple idea: shoot a ray, get useful surface information back, and use it to drive looks. That unlocks effects that rely on the closest point on a surface from the ray source, or the distance to it. There are demo files showing setups like toon shading and an X ray render effect.

There is also a practical warning: Raycast can be computationally expensive, and baking its output is suggested as a way to improve render times when needed.

Rendering: faster compiles, leaner memory, quicker frames

On the realtime side, Eevee speeds up material compilation by pre processing shader sources. In the standard Barbershop text scene benchmark, GPU shaders compile 25 to 50 percent faster across operating systems. Memory also gets attention. Eevee reduces texture memory use via texture pooling, helping scenes fit into less VRAM.

Cycles picks up performance gains too. GPU rendering improves by about 5 to 10 percent for many scenes, and HIP RT ray tracing is enabled by default on AMD GPUs. If your day includes lots of lookdev iteration, the combined effect is straightforward: fewer pauses between decisions.

Animation and rigging: the biggest speed win in the room

If you care about playback, Blender 5.1 comes with a headline worthy improvement: actions and shape keys evaluate significantly faster, with reported gains ranging from 4 percent to 304 percent in frames per second depending on the file. For cleanup work, the Graph Editor adds a Gaussian smoothing modifier that smooths curves non destructively. It is also explicitly described as resource heavy, with guidance not to use it on too many curves at once.

There are also small but practical timeline and editor touches that help animation feel less fiddly, like interpolation line colors indicating interpolation type in the Dope Sheet and menus.

Compositing and editorial: nodes that earn their keep

The built in Compositor adds a Mask to SDF node. It converts a mask into a Signed Distance Field by computing the distance of each pixel from the mask edges. That supports effects like edge glows, eroding or dilating mask edges, and distance based effects like procedural blurs.

The compositor also gains utility nodes including Boolean, Integer, Vector, and Index Switch, plus support for the existing Radial Tiling node. Speed matters here too. Several key nodes are faster, including Blur, Directional Blur, Vector Blur, Glare, Lens Distortion, and Anti Aliasing, described as 1.2x to 2x faster.

In the Sequencer, the Blade tool adds a box gesture that supports ripple editing, aimed at quicker cutting. Taken together, the message is clear: the VFX and video toolsets are being treated like first class citizens, not the side quest you only visit when your shot count gets scary.

Modeling and sculpt: a pile of small wins

Modeling sees a mix of performance and wrokflow tweaks. Filling for text objects improves, expanding the types of fonts that behave well as 3D text. Filling in general is up to five times faster, especially for n gons with many sides. Snapping adds an option to snap to the center of faces. In sculpt and paint, one visible addition is a Blur brush for blurring surface colors in Sculpt mode.

Grease Pencil: holes, at last

Grease Pencil gets notable workflow improvements, including better handling of strokes and fills and new ways to cut holes in shapes. Holes in fills can be created either via new operators that perform Boolean style operations or via the SVG importer. The draw here is practical: importing SVG and PDF content becomes easier to integrate without the same fill weirdness described in the feature overview. If you have ever built a workaround stack just to preserve negative space, this one lands with a satisfying thud.

Geometry Nodes: more rig friendly, more volume friendly

Geometry Nodes adds a Bone Info node that makes it possible to access bone position data. There are also new nodes for working with volume grids, including nodes for dilating, eroding, and clipping volume grids.

UI, file I O, and pipeline glue

The UI picks up just under 100 fixes and feature improvements, including the ability to search for controls by name in Preferences. Other practical UI touches include resizing quad views interactively by dragging the center point, and copying and pasting nodes between separate instances. On file formats, new options include AVIF export. Updates also land for USD, glTF, and FBX, with FBX files now including Shape Key normals for better compatibility with game engines like Unity.

For pipeline integration, support includes Python 3.13 and OpenColorIO 2.5, matching the CY2026 spec for the VFX Reference Platform. For virtual reality projects, the arc teleportation system is described as completely rewritten, and OpenXR is supported on macOS.

Availability and licensing

Blender 5.1 is a free download. The source code is available under the GPLv3 license. That free and open model is not new, but it still matters. It shapes how fast features get tested in the wild, how quickly workflows spread through studios, and how often a random late night fix becomes a shared win by morning.

The only remaining job is the boring one: install, test, validate, and only then roll it into serious work. Even a tool with a good mood still deserves a proper pipeline check. And yes, the Blender Foundation clearly wants this release to feel like a calm upgrade, not a reinvention.

https://www.blender.org/press/blender-5-1-release/

The post Blender 5.1 is here first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Open 3D Foundation has published O3DE 25.05.0 (June 17 2025), a release loaded with technical fixes, renderer overhauls, and infrastructure updates tailored for production-ready pipelines.

1. Atom renderer & multi‑GPU overhaul

Atom receives a major upgrade. Vulkan and Metal pipelines now use sub‑passes, cutting bandwidth by around 40 percent, while specialization constants reduce shader variant bloat. Multi‑GPU support graduates to “mature” status: the refactored RHI multi‑device objects now allow mask handling, CopyPass, and timestamp calibration across devices. A new GeometryView class optimizes memory by de‑duplicating draw packets and items. Vertex‑color support has been added to BasePBR, StandardPBR, and EnhancedPBR materials. Under-the-hood improvements span Vulkan memory allocator, HDR RHI via CVAR, improved DX12/descriptors, and deferred removal of static Atom libraries.

2. TrackView rewritten & Script Canvas stability

TrackView underwent a full rewrite led by Tech‑Round. Now described as “fully operational,” key fixes include corrected example Python scripts and smoother editing.

Script Canvas sees dozens of stability patches: editor‑close crashes, variable‑rename sync, slot updates, graph deactivation fixes, promotions, and invalid‑file load issues.

3. ROS 2 Sim Interfaces Gem & robotics assets

O3DE adds a SimulationInterfaces Gem conforming to ROS 2 simulation standards via Open Robotics, Nvidia, and Robotec.ai. Enhancements include LiDAR segmentation, PID controller revamp, spawner notifications, clock and joint fixes, and restructured asset Gems. For example, WarehouseAssets optimized meshes; legacy ProteusRobot, RosRobotSample, and WarehouseSample were folded into ROS2RobotSamples.

A new Georeferencing Gem and simplified templates ship with updated Panda Franka assets.

4. Platform-specific fixes & Android improvements

Linux receives Python fixes for Shader Management Console and ROS 2 Python conflicts, plus a patch addressing editor hangs when loading levels. Android builds drop APK compression to avoid PAK softlocks, fix AWS SDK 1.11.288 symbols, update build scripts to use Gradle and Android SDK, and address iOS AWS Core non‑public API usage. A fix for mismatched PAL platform names addresses Linux CMake generation errors.

5. AR/VR/XR pipeline improvements

OpenXR integration now uses automated 3rd‑party packaging—no manual Meta Quest SDK install needed. OpenXRVk Gem moves to OpenXR 1.1.41 from 1.0.22. Mobile shaders deliver a 40 percent boost in performance.

6. Documentation hub moves to Hugo modules

O3DE’s API docs now use Hugo’s module system, enabling lightweight contribution workflows. SIG‑docs updated to reflect this change.

7. Core, Networking, Asset, Pass, Validation refinements

Asset Processor now analyzes new and updated assets and dependencies. Mesh visibility flags are restored after level load. Legacy asset tables have been removed to reduce RAM.
Networking sees fixes for player spawn on client-refresh during server load, AWS cloud service Gems moved to a separate repo, multiplayer component autogen compile errors addressed, and improved IP validation.
MovieSystem has been refactored to allow extraction into a Gem.
Multiple fixes span RHI, Vulkan, DX12, pass tree UI, occlusion, light culling, ray tracing, JSON serialization, and PipelineStateCache threading.

8. Known issues & upcoming changes

Current known issues include incompatibility with Clang 19 and higher (use Clang 18 on Linux), or revert via CMake config. Lua Editor breakpoints only work when the script tab is focused, and newly created projects may emit console warnings.

Major upcoming breaking changes are expected in 25.10 (October 2025). Material-shader functions will include a new MaterialParameters struct, affecting custom shader code. Ray‑tracing RHI descriptors will migrate to declarative style.

Production advice: O3DE 25.05 offers deep technical improvements across rendering, automation, robotics, mobile, and documentation. However, these changes are extensive—real‑world pipelines should undergo targeted QA. Known issues (Clang, Lua, project templates) should be validated during integration. Map upcoming shader and RHI changes to your roadmap accordingly.

Sources

Release date & binaries // O3DE Release Notes overview
Deep changelog with technical breakdowns // O3DE 25.05.0 Release Notes

The post O3DE 25.05 delivers deep technical refinements: Atom, ROS 2, XR, MGPU and more first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Version 2.19 of the Unigine engine brings improvements and new functions – the most important new features include performance optimisations, improved integration with OpenXR for immersive VR experiences and support for the widely used USD file format. With these features, Unigine aims to make the engine even more flexible and powerful for demanding projects.

Further development of the animation system

Unigine’s animation system is constantly evolving and version 2.19 offers a number of experimental improvements for ObjectMeshSkinned. The most important new features include the implementation of LookAt chains, which enable bones or objects to be automatically aligned in the direction of a target point. In addition, rotation constraints for bones have been introduced, further refining control over animations.

Another update concerns the management of morph targets. This has been adapted for ObjectMeshSkinned to optimise performance and handling. Several interpolation modes for bone rotation have also been added, giving artists more flexibility when animating characters and objects.

One significant change is that ObjectMeshSkinned no longer supports mesh geometry modification. Instead, there is a special procedural mode in which a custom mesh can be set. This change is aimed at improving performance in real-time applications.

Finally, Unigine 2.19 offers the possibility to register the animation retargeting for ObjectMeshSkinned. This is now done by using pairs of animation path and mesh path, which simplifies and speeds up the process of transferring animations to different characters.

Improved performance and new features

The update to Unigine 2.19 focuses on performance optimisations, which are particularly important for artists working in real-time environments. The engine now uses techniques to reduce latency and optimise memory management. These improvements are intended to increase the frame rate in complex scenes and make the overall experience smoother for the user.

One feature of the new version is support for OpenXR. This open interface for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) makes it possible to use Unigine with a variety of headsets and VR setups. OpenXR standardises VR and AR development and makes it possible to seamlessly port projects to different platforms. This innovation should be particularly important for users who develop immersive VR experiences in real time.

In addition, Unigine 2.19 now integrates support for USD (Universal Scene Description), a format that is increasingly establishing itself as the industry standard in 3D production. The USD format, originally developed by Pixar, allows for efficient management of complex scenes and supports multiple layers and variations within a project. Through this integration, artists can now work with USD directly in Unigine, which greatly facilitates compatibility and the exchange of assets between different software environments.

With the integration of USD, Unigine can now natively handle this file format, which is especially important in the VFX and animation industry. USD files are known for their ability to efficiently store and edit complex scenes and animations. This makes them ideal for use in films, games and virtual reality applications.

In addition to the major new features, the update also offers smaller improvements, such as extended script integration options and adjustments to the user interface, which further simplify the operation of the software. However, users should bear in mind that, as always, these new features should be carefully tested before integration into current projects in order to avoid possible incompatibilities.

Relevant file formats and applications

The support of OpenXR significantly expands the application possibilities of the engine in VR and AR projects. OpenXR is supported by many leading VR headsets, including devices from Oculus, HTC and Valve. This extension makes Unigine an attractive choice for developers who want to optimise their projects for different platforms and devices.

Prices and licence models

Unigine offers various licence models that are geared towards the different needs of users. The Free Community SDK is aimed at indie developers and small studios, while the Pro and Enterprise licences are designed for larger teams and companies. The Pro licence offers additional features and support options, while the Enterprise licence includes customised solutions and more extensive support services. It is important to check the licence terms carefully to ensure that the option chosen meets the requirements of the project.

For more information and technical details you can visit the Unigine website.

The post Unigine 2.19: New functions for 3D first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.