For those who don’t know the event: ICE.ART is a webinar-style conference for people who build 3D worlds, with sessions published on YouTube for on-demand catching up.

After the fact

ICE.ART 2026.I has published its full set of presentation and panel recordings for free streaming. If you could not make the live dates on 7 and 8 April 2026, the recrodings now turn the whole event into an on-demand playlist you can dip into between dailies.
The archive covers both conference days, including intros, individual talks, and panel discussions. As always, test any new workflow ideas before you put them into production, even if the speaker makes it sound like it will fix your envrionment pipeline overnight.

The Videos

ICE.ART 2026.I Day I Intro
A quick warm-up that sets the tone before the pixels start doing push-ups.

ICE.ART 2026.I Day I Christian Tanner | Toyota City Hunt Physics: A behind-the-scenes look at the project, with physics as the main character and the first steps into Unreal realtime smoking tires. Strap in!

ICE.ART 2026.I Day I Goran Pavles Art directing Physics Simulations for Hollywood Blockbusters: A talk for anyone who has ever argued with gravity and lost.

ICE.ART 2026.I Day II Andrey Lebrov Gaussian Splat Environment Pipeline for Octane Render: A pipeline-focused session that connects splats, environments, and renderer reality checks.

ICE.ART 2026.I Day II Tobias Hauck Geospatial Gaussian Splats 3D Maps of Large Environments: If you know how much fun can be had in large-scale data and larger-scale scenes, this one is for you.

ICE.ART 2026.I Day II Prof. Dr. André Thomas Planning Physical Studios Business and Creativity: A business and studio-planning angle that still remembers artists need working chairs and working budgets.

https://www.ice.art/

The post ICE.ART 2026.I recordings are now live first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Chaos has launched V-Ray for Blender Community Edition, a free version of its Blender renderer aimed at students, educators, hobbyists, content creators and freelancers working on smaller-scale projects. The release is live now through Chaos’ official product page and gives Blender users direct access to the same broader V-Ray for Blender ecosystem, just with a deliberate set of caps for production use.

Free, but not magically unrestricted

The relevant detail is that this is not just a short-lived trial in a different hat. Chaos says the Community Edition license runs for 90 days and can be renewed an unlimited number of times by completing a short survey. That makes it a recurring free-license model rather than the usual evaluation copy that disappears the moment a user starts relying on it,.

Chaos positions the edition for learning, teaching, content creation, portfolio building, personal projects and smaller freelance tasks. According to the launch announcement, Chaos is also allowing certain freelance commercial uses, including initial test renders and client concept presentations. That pushes it beyond pure classroom bait and into actual early-stage professional use.

What Blender users get

On the feature side, the Community Edition includes the core V-Ray rendering functionality and access to Chaos Cosmos, a library of more than 14,000 assets, giving Blender users a proper starting point for look development, scene building and rendering without immediately having to assemble half the universe by hand.

Chaos is pitching this as a real on-ramp into the V-Ray workflow inside Blender, not a separate side project with the interesting parts removed. The main V-Ray for Blender product pages also link to recent additions, such as V-Ray Decal, V-Ray Displacement Material, and V-Ray Toon Material, on the What’s New page. So the Community Edition sits on top of a renderer Chaos is actively expanding, even if the free tier does not get every part of that stack.

Where the free version stops

The limitations are clear enough: Output is capped at 2K square, meaning 2560 by 2560 pixels. Image output is limited to 8-bit. Users do not get official Chaos support, cloud collaboration or AI-powered tools. That means the free version is useful, but it is not pretending to be a full production license.

Chaos also makes clear that the commercial plans remain the option for larger-scale work, team collaboration and broader pipeline integration. In other words, the free edition is best understood as a serious learning and portfolio tool, plus a workable option for smaller freelance concept jobs, not a replacement for a studio seat.

A more serious Blender push

The release also matters because it shows Chaos treating Blender less like a side experiment and more like a real platform. The main V-Ray for Blender page now gives the Community Edition a prominent place alongside the paid version and current updates, while also connecting users to Chaos’ wider ecosystem.

For artists already working in Blender, the move lowers the barrier to learning V-Ray inside a familiar DCC. For educators, it reduces procurement friction. For freelancers and students, it offers a route into V-Ray without immediate subscription pressure. For Chaos, it is also a neat way to get more Blender users comfortable with the renderer before they eventually need the paid version. Strange coincidence.

The post Chaos launches free V-Ray for Blender Community Edition first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: KeyShot turns CAD into photoreal renders fast, and this roadshow pairs it with DOSCH DESIGN 3D services for a practical workflow sanity check.

DOSCH DESIGN and KeyShot go on the road

If your pipeline includes the words “faster,” “cleaner,” and “less guesswork,” there is a free event series that may be worth a calendar slot. DOSCH DESIGN is on the road tour to two German cities in May, built around KeyShot and a very practical question: does this rendering setup actually fit the way your team works.

The format is straightforward. One afternoon. Plenty of time for live demos, direct Q&A, and some hands-on testing with specialists on site. The goal is not a stage show. The goal is to leave with a better feel for the tool, the workflow, and what it would take to use it inside a real production environment.

Two cities, one afternoon each

The tour dates are set.

On May 6, 2026, the 3D-Experience Day lands in Düsseldorf from 14:00 to 17:00 at Design Office Kaiserteich.

On May 12, 2026, the same program runs in Nürnberg from 14:00 to 17:00 at Design Office Nürnberg Hauptbahnhof.

Both events run in German, and participation is free. Registration happens through the contact form on the event page. Seats are limited by the simple laws of room size and physics, so registering early is the sensible kind of productivity.

Event page and registration: https://doschdesign.com/3d-experience-day.php

What the program actually covers

The schedule leans into the classic production pain points: getting from CAD to something that looks like a product, quickly enough that the iteration loop still feels like iteration and not archaeology.

One talk focuses on how KeyShot can shorten product development cycles and reduce costs. The useful part for artists and production folks will be the details around what changes in the handoff, the lighting and material setup, and where the time savings come from in a typical day.

Another segment is “New in KeyShot 2026”. If you are the person who maintains studio tooling or sets internal standards, this is the part where you listen for changes that affect import, material handling, output, and anything that touches review and approvals.

There is also a live demo that goes from CAD model to convincing rendering in minutes. Seeing the render chain in real time makes it easier to judge where the speed comes from, and where your own assets, naming conventions, and shading standards will either cooperate or fight back.

The agenda also includes DOSCH Key-Optimize and an overview of 3D services, plus time for Q&A and a networking slot. The networking part is not just small talk. The setup explicitly mentions the option to sit with laptops and run through individual questions, which is usually where the real workflow truth shows up.

Who should actually go

This afternoon is pitched at three groups: beginners, switchers, and the happily curious. That tracks well with how many studios and product teams are operating right now.

If you are new to photoreal, it can be hard to know what fast means until you see it. If you are switching tools or inheriting a pipeline, you want to measure the tool against your existing constraints, not against a perfect demo scene. If you are already experienced, the value is often in the small things: what imports cleanly, what breaks, what you need to standardize, and what you can leave flexible without getting burned.

Either way, the most productive mindset is to treat this as a fit test. Bring the right questions. Think about where assets come from, how you version work, and what your review loop expects. In other words, bring your workflow, not just your curiosity.

How to register

Participation is free, and registration happens through the contact form on the event page. The events take place in German.

Register here: https://doschdesign.com/3d-experience-day.php

The post DOSCH DESIGN and KeyShot hit the road in May first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the thing: OpenPGL plugs into path tracing renderers to guide sampling. It already shows up in Blender via Cycles, and now lives under Academy Software Foundation governance for broader adoption.

A new home for guided rays

OpenPGL just became a hosted project under the Academy Software Foundation. It enters at the sandbox stage, which is the earliest entry point for young projects and comes with a stated goal of graduating to incubation within one year.

The project targets a specific kind of pain that every lighting TD knows by feel: path traced frames that need more samples because the sampler keeps spending effort in the wrong places. OpenPGL focuses on path guiding, an importance sampling strategy that uses additional information about a scene’s light distribution to make better sampling decisions. The result is higher rendering efficiency because the renderer spends more samples where they matter.

Path guiding has a deep academic history, but production teams rarely get value from a PDF alone. Integrating path guiding research into a production renderer can be tedious, and the implementation details often become a long-term maintenance tax. OpenPGL positions itself as a production-ready open source library aimed at lowering that cost by offering well-tested, robust implementations of state-of-the-art path guiding methods.

What OpenPGL actually does in a renderer

OpenPGL learns a representation of a guiding field during rendering and updates it on a per-frame basis using radiance and importance samples generated during rendering. During path generation, the renderer can query the guiding field at vertices along a path to get a local distribution that can guide sampling decisions, including which directions to pick next.

The practical promise is simple: better sampling quality, less noise, and more efficient renders for the same sample budget. The project also carries an explicit caution flag: its current versions are still pre v1.0, the API is still in flux, and it should be used with caution in production related environments. That is a polite way of saying the interface may change under you, so build your integration like you expect to revisit it. A lot. any times. Remember what you did for USD.

There is also a performance angle baked into the design. The implementation is optimized for recent Intel processors with SIMD instruction support listed as SSE, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512. OpenPGL also states support for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

If you are the sort of person who reads build flags for fun, OpenPGL includes a CMake superbuild option that pulls dependencies and builds a full install directory. It can also build extra tools named openpgl_bench and openpgl_debug when enabled.

Who is already using it

OpenPGL is not arriving as an untested science project or white paper. It is already integrated into several big-name production renderers, including Blender’s Cycles, Chaos V-Ray, SideFX Karma, and Disney Animation Hyperion.

Disney Animation describes OpenPGL as an important building block in the second generation path guiding system of its Hyperion renderer, calling out a simple API and faster iteration on production challenges. The statement also says the studio used a new path guiding system using OpenPGL in the production of Zootopia 2, including shots with difficult lighting setups and complex volumetrics.

Illumination Studio Paris is using OpenPGL to bring advanced path guiding techniques into its production renderer in a robust and practical way, citing more efficient handling of complex lighting, reduced need for labor-intensive hacks, and more freedom for natural lighting setups. The statement also says OpenPGL proved especially valuable on its latest production, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, for tackling challenging lighting scenarios.

Chaos describes performance gains in production scenes with complex lighting and calls the integration into V-Ray relatively straightforward. But V-Ray always has all the tools in it.

Governance, now with more grown-up shoes

As a sandbox project, OpenPGL is set up for open community participation under the foundation’s hosted-project framework. Separately, the Technical Advisory Council meeting notes for the project proposal capture additional context around the move, including that the proposal presentation was delivered by Sebastian Herholz, listed there as ex-Intel and soon Blender, and that the sponsor is Kimball Thurston at Weta.

The same meeting notes also include examples discussed in the proposal materials, such as comparisons showing less noisy results with path guiding enabled at the same samples per pixel, and an example that describes a V-Ray timing comparison of 50 minutes with path guiding off versus 34 minutes with path guiding on. Those examples are presented as part of the proposal materials, not as independently reproduced benchmarks here, so treat them as directional evidence rather than a guarantee.

Licensing, access, and the practical reality check

OpenPGL is released under the permissive Apache Software Foundation Apache 2.0 license. The code is available on GitHub, and the repository labels the current release as v0.7.1. The project is distributed as open source software under its stated license.

If you are considering bringing it into a pipeline, the most important detail is not the headline. It is the warning label: pre v1.0 and API changes are on the table. Plan for integration work, version pinning, and regression testing across scenes that stress your sampler. So, don’t put it into a production pipeline, and if you are writing your own render engine, please, be careful.

https://www.awn.com/news/academy-software-foundation-adds-openpgl-new-hosted-project

https://github.com/openpathguidinglibrary/openpgl

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/open-path-guided-rendering-made-easier.html



https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/videos/path-guiding-with-blender-and-intel-open-pgl.html

The post OpenPGL joins ASWF first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Gaussian Splat Studio brings Gaussian splat point data into Cinema 4D as something you can actually work with, not just stare at. The tool is built to import, view, render, and export Gaussian splats directly inside the host app, while keeping viewport controls and render controls in their own lanes. That separation matters because splats tend to swing between two extremes: either they look great and crawl, or they move fast and look like a snow globe during an earthquake.

The core exchange format here is obviously PLY, the same file type commonly produced by mobile capture and processing services. The workflow shown starts with a real-world capture from a phone or camera, then a reconstruction step in a service such as Polycam, which outputs PLY splat data for the plugin to ingest. The result inside Cinema 4D is a splat object you can navigate around, tweak, and eventually render or export back out again.

Viewport control that admits splats can be ridiculous

Splat scenes vary wildly in scale and density. Different captures can come in at very different sizes (D’uh), so the plugin exposes world scale controls to get a scene into a sane range.

It also acknowledges the other common splat reality: point counts can be enormous. A referenced example uses 12 million points, and the plugin includes options meant to keep navigation responsive. One of the visible tactics is interactive splat reduction in the viewport, where quality deliberately drops while you navigate, then returns when you stop moving. The reduction can be turned off, but it exists specifically to keep the editor usable.

There is also a fast preview mode intended for heavy scenes, letting you switch to lighter display settings for camera setup, animation work, and general layout without changing the underlying splat source. The idea is simple: keep interaction smooth while you work, then restore full settings for final output.

Three looks, one splat

The plugin exposes multiple viewing and rendering looks for splat data. True Gaussian splat mode aims for a scan-faithful result. Point cloud mode is presented as both a stylized look and a faster way to iterate, with circular dot rendering as a deliberate aesthetic option. There is also a proxy geometry view described as a way to see what is happening under the hood, rather than a default look.

Alongside those modes, the plugin provides controls for splat size and for the minimum and maximum pixel radius of splats. The workflow frames these as practical dials for balancing detail versus fill. Smaller splats carry more detail, larger splats help fill larger areas. Push the balance too far and thin features can disappear or areas can open up into holes, so the controls exist to tune a capture into something that holds together under motion and framing changes.

A notey: not every PLY is oriented the same way. When a non-Gaussian splat PLY comes in on the wrong axis, the plugin includes a YZ flip option to correct orientation. That kind of messy reality is exactly what a production tool should deal with. If a format is technically correct but visually wrong, artists still have to ship.

Rendering paths and why the viewport can be the honest one

Gaussian Splat Studio supports rendering through the viewport as well as through Cinema 4D render modes, including Redshift and the Standard and Physical renderers.

The workflow shown treats the viewport render as a useful path for accuracy, while also outlining limitations. Native viewport rendering does not provide an alpha channel, so the tool includes an alpha mode that changes what the viewport output looks like. The result is not a perfectly white matte, and the explanation is that this is expected because semi-transparent values are part of how the splat output should composite more accurately. If a comp pipeline needs a harder matte, the suggestion is to adjust levels in the compositing step.

For Standard and Redshift rendering, the plugin builds what it needs in the background when you enable rendering, including generating a shader setup for the geometry it creates. Enabling rendering is off by default and is making the system a little slower while you work, so it is something you switch on when you actually need those render paths.

Relighting as a dial, not a fight

Splat captures often come with baked lighting characteristics. The workflow shown adds a relight blending control in the Redshift render appearance settings, letting the render transition between a fully luminescent look that preserves the captured lighting and a state that responds more to Redshift lights.

MoGraph-friendly splats are the real headline

Once a splat lives in Cinema 4D as something editable, it becomes available to the same ecosystem of tools artists already use to art direct motion graphics and look development. The plugin supports MoGraph-style controls through Effectors, Forces, and Fields, with a workflow that matches common object setups: select the splat object, add an effector or force, and it registers into the plugin’s control tabs. If you add tools out of order, the workflow shown notes you can drag them in manually.

This is the point where splats stop being a novelty and start being a production asset. If you can isolate, animate, and stylize parts of a capture with the same tools you use everywhere else, splats become another piece of the pipeline rather than a special-case import.

Export, cleanup, and downstream handoff

Gaussian Splat Studio supports exporting results back out as PLY, including exporting cleaned results and exporting as splat PLY.

If your pipeline depends on strict interchange, it is also worth remembering that PLY is a general container format used across different kinds of point data. The workflow explicitly differentiates between Gaussian splat files and regular splat files that can both be PLY, which is why orientation fixes and viewing modes exist in the first place. If you need a reference for the file format itself, the PLY format specification is hosted by Stanford.

Price and platform support

The price for Gaussian Splat Studio is $59.99. The product page lists compatibility for Cinema 4D versions 2024, 2025, and 2026, on Windows and Mac. As always, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, especially when they touch rendering, caching, and export handoffs that can ripple through an entire shot.

https://alphapixel.net/products/c4d-gaussian-splat-plugin/

The post Alpha Pixel adds Gaussian Splats to Cinema 4D first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.