For those who don’t know the tool: The Pixel Farm makes PFTrack, a node based matchmove and reconstruction tool that exports to DCCs like Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, SideFX Houdini, Blender and Unreal Engine, with improved dense point clouds via OpenUSD.

Hero Cloud is a new reconstruction node

PFTrack Build 26.05.19 adds Hero Cloud, a node that generates a measured dense 3D point cloud from a single tracked plate. It sits in the Geometry category and runs downstream of a solved camera, turning an ordinary camera solve into spatial data you can actually measure against. Hero Cloud claims to be through-the-lens reconstruction, meaning it extracts depth from the camera movement in the shot rather than relying on a separate photogrammetry set or a LiDAR scan.

The node targets a familiar production reality: you get a brief that needs measured 3D, but the the on-set… people…. said “Fix it in Post, heheeheeh” and did not capture the extra data for cases like set extension, CG integration, lighting reference, forensic analysis, architectural measurement, and archival footage where you cannot go back and reshoot reference. If the plate is all you have, Hero Cloud aims to make that plate pull double duty.

Hero Cloud works on plates PFTrack can track and solve, and works footage sources that include cinema cameras, drones, body cams, dash cams, action cameras, mirrorless and DSLR cameras, CCTV, and archival film. Basically, every type of video. Camera metadata can help but it is not required, and the Camera Sensor Database can cover common cameras automatically, with the Camera Solver able to estimate parameters when metadata is missing.

There is a catch, and it is the same catch as every method that tries to infer depth from motion: the shot needs parallax. Locked off shots or shots with very little movement can produce sparse or unreliable results. Most production footage, including handheld stationary shots, can still have enough movement to produce usable reconstruction, while deliberate camera motion tends to produce richer results.

A cleaner route into splat training

PFTrack 26.05.19 adds a Postshot export option that writes Hero Cloud point clouds and associated tracked cameras in COLMAP format. In other words, matchmove and reconstruction can stay in the same app up to the point where you hand off to splat training.

If you already live in the Gaussian Splatting world, COLMAP is a common interchange format and COLMAP itself has both GUI and command line workflows. The practical value here is that you do not have to glue together separate tracking, reconstruction, and export steps before you ever open Jawset Postshot. You track the plate, generate the cloud, export in COLMAP format, then train the splat.

This is an artist friendly route into a workflow that has historically leaned on command line tooling. That is a reasonable and recommendable goal, but it still deserves the usual pipeline skepticism: try it on a real shot and verify your coordinate frames, scaling, and camera consistency before you let it anywhere near a deliverable.

USD point clouds now carry more than positions

The same build extends USD export to support dense point clouds with per point normal and colour data, because a point cloud that only carries XYZ positions often becomes a dumb scaffold the moment it leaves its origin app. Normals and colour help downstream tools treat the cloud as more than a vague spatial fog, and can make it easier to use for measurement, placement, modelling reference, and lookdev decisions.

Improved integration with USD aware tools including Unreal Engine, Maya, and Houdini. It also claims (!) improved FBX export reliability for very large dense point clouds, aimed at users who previously hit issues exporting big clouds via FBX.

If your pipeline already standardises on USD, this is the kind of unglamorous export detail that can decide whether a new feature becomes a daily tool or a demo-only party trick. Still, test it on your actual asset scale and on your actual DCC import settings. Export support is never a substitute for shot-based validation, and you only find the sharp edges when production hits them, much like furniture at night can only be found with toes and shins.

Photo Mesh gets a single shot input path

Studio and Enterprise editions receive an update to Photo Mesh that enables it to consume Hero Cloud point clouds as input. That creates an internal single-shot path from tracked plate to dense cloud to surfaced textured mesh, without leaving PFTrack. The Pixel Farm describes Photo Mesh as the highest fidelity route when you have a planned photo set, while Hero Cloud covers the case where you only have the hero plate.

In practical terms, this puts a reconstruction option closer to matchmove, and it reduces the number of handoffs in the middle of a cmaera tracking job. Whether it replaces any external reconstruction tooling depends on what you already trust for meshing, texturing, and scale fidelity, but the internal integration is at least a coherent story: generate the cloud, feed it into Photo Mesh, then export into the rest of your pipeline.

The viewport tweak you will actually use

26.05.19 also adds an Active Camera viewport option in viewer windows, with a snap to active clip toggle. It sounds minor, and it is, which is why it will get used: quick visual verification against the source plate tends to catch mistakes faster than hunting through node outputs. The release notes pitch it as useful for checking Hero Cloud reconstruction, but the feature applies anywhere you want a fast way to see what the tracked camera saw.

Trial and licensing notes

Solo trial mode now enables full export functionality for seven days. The release notes describe this as enough time to take a plate from track through Hero Cloud and out to Postshot or USD, rather than being limited to evaluating the toolset without export.

For Studio, the release notes state it is available on rent to buy for 5 or 30 days, or as a perpetual purchase. The PFTrack Creator Program page states PFTrack Solo licenses sell for £699. Treat that as a price reference for Solo licensing, not a promise of regional pricing or bundles.

What this changes in real work

Hero Cloud aims to shift PFTrack from a pure matchmove and survey friendly reconstruction hub toward a single shot scene reconstruction step that can be used even when the onset data plan fell apart. The strongest parts of the release are not flashy, they are connective tissue: COLMAP export for Postshot, denser USD point cloud payloads, and a meshing path that stays inside the same graph.

It is also a reminder that the industry has started to treat point clouds as a first class asset, not only a temporary byproduct. When point clouds export with colour and normals and survive the trip into USD aware DCCs, they become reusable poitn based reference that can support layout, set extension decisions, and reconstruction driven previs.

https://www.pftrack.com/post/pftrack-build-26-05-19-is-now-live

https://www.pftrack.com/post/hero-cloud-tutorial

The post PFTrack gets Hero Cloud first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Dash runs inside Unreal Engine as an asset browser plus world-building toolkit. The Fab build ships the Content Browser only, while the website installer can also unlock the wider toolset with a paid license.

Two installs, one idea

Polygonflow now offers Dash in two distinct ways: as a free plugin on Fab and as the full Dash installer from the Polygonflow website.

The Fab listing calls the package “Dash – Advanced Asset Manager” and in this version, it is “just” a content browser that lets you search and drag and drop local assets into any UE5 project. It includes tagging for your own assets with a stated limit of up to 1,000 assets tagged per month, plus a Smart Collection System for organizing assets.

The website installer route matters more, because the Dash Content Browser itself has been available for free since Dash version 1.9.0, but the free license is limited to the Content Browser side of the toolset. The free license includes the supported libraries, the tagging system, and the centralized browsing experience across UE5 projects, but not other Dash tools such as Easy Scattering, Procedural Meshes, Physics Tools, or Material and Atmospheric Tools.

What is actually different between Fab and the website build

The Fab version includes the Content Browser only, and explicitly points to the website download if you want the full plugin toolset. The website build splits into two experiences. The free license stays content-only, meaning you use the Content Browser, library integrations, tagging, and centralized asset browsing. A paid license can unlock the other Dash tools, Easy Scattering, Procedural Meshes, Physics Tools, and Material / Atmospheric Tools. So the practical difference is not the content browser UI, it is how far you want to go beyond asset browsing once you are inside the same plugin shell.

Included libraries, and why that matters more than the tagline

Both the Fab listing and the Dash docs have the same core set of integrated libraries: Quixel Megascans via Fab or Quixel Bridge downloads, Amazon Berkeley Objects with 6,900 models, ambientCG with 2,300 textures plus HDRIs and decals, Poly Haven with 1,900 assets plus textures and HDRIs, The Base Mesh with 1,400 models, and the IES Library with 1,300 lighting presets.

On the website side, the Dash Asset Marketplace lives inside the Content Browser, with the Dekogon library and a Sierra library entry that includes one free pack.

Polygonflow also supports browsing and importing content across multiple UE projects from inside the project you are currently working in. The docs add a warning on version compatibility for external browsing: UE5 projects are forward compatible but not backward, so you can browse content from the same or older UE5 versions, not newer.

Custom assets, right now

In the Project Library tab, you can currently add your own static meshes, textures, and blueprints. The tagging flow focuses on making assets searchable beyond filenames and folder names, and the content browser adds collections for grouping assets into reusable sets.

Pricing and the usual production warning

On Fab, Dash – Advanced Asset Manager is free. Commercial pricing for paid Dash licenses is 8€ for students, 20€ per Month for professionals below the 250.000$ barrier, and 95€ per month for bigger studios. Test any new browser, tagging, or library workflow on a non-critical project before it touches production depots and shared team setups.

https://www.fab.com/listings/865301e9-2d26-425d-8f3c-e0aadf35da61
https://docs.polygonflow.io/advanced/free-content-browser

The post PolygoFlow Dash asset manager goes free on Fab first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

With *Das szenische Portal RT*, Andreas Resch has developed a real-time system for live events that combines a physical stage, virtual scene spaces, camera feeds and musical inputs to create a hybrid performance environment. The approach is primarily aimed at live formats featuring improvising musicians and is conceived as a modular virtual stage extension rather than a mere background projection.

Andreas Resch works in a field where one is usually expected to choose between art and technology. He has evidently chosen both, and this is no disadvantage for this project. Classical music training on the piano and church organ, coupled with an early start in programming, later work on SGI Onyx-based training simulators in Munich, followed by stints in animation, simulation, tracking, projection mapping, virtual physics and mixed reality.

This combination of music, imagery and technical development has long been a recurring theme in Resch’s work. Since 2020, he has demonstrated in several projects how audiovisual staging, virtual spaces and live performance can be combined. Das szenische Portal V1.0 already relied on a form of live performance in which Resch played the piano whilst a surreal, distorted virtual reinterpretation of a physical painting exhibition was projected onto a large screen as an endless film. This was presented live on several occasions and ultimately served as the precursor to what is now being continued as a real-time system.

At present, Das szenische Portal RT is primarily an art project, a prototype and a technical development. However, according to Resch, project-based applications are conceivable: anyone requiring a suitable configuration for an event can, in principle, integrate him and his software. Enquiries? Questions? Idea? Sent them to innovation@virtual-paradises.org. Resch can also envisage further development with a partner from the product or events sector to expand the existing prototype into a robust production or rental solution.

Unreal Engine as the basis for the stage extension

With the scenic portal RT, Resch revisited the concept from 2024 onwards and completely redeveloped the system in Unreal Engine. The first working version was created in 2025. The aim is a virtual stage section that does not simply hang behind the real stage like a particularly ambitious backdrop, but forms a hybrid production together with the physical structure. The ambition is therefore greater than mere decorative projection. The virtual scene is intended to become part of the stage space.

The bigger, the better, of course. LEDs, a good projector etc. with a screen, … The prototype has so far only been tested on an 85-inch monitor. The size also depends on the actual stage dimensions to ensure a good overall design. Every event here is unique. 

The effect is based on a geometrically structured overall concept that closely interlinks physical and virtual image elements. Resch describes this as a form of hybrid stage, in which objects from the virtual projection appear to extend into the physical stage space. This approach becomes particularly relevant where improvising musicians are involved. Audio signals, whether from digital or acoustic instruments, can spontaneously trigger events in the virtual scene, thereby directly influencing the visual narrative. The stage, in other words, listens in. Something that rarely happens even in everyday life.

Live input, triggers and virtual events

For the prototype, Resch first developed several three-dimensional stage sets in Unreal Engine. He then implemented real-time communication between the computer and a Korg KRONOS workstation, which serves as an external trigger source for scene events.

In the test configuration, three live webcams and the KRONOS were continuously fed into a specially developed Blueprint system. This interprets audio and video data and translates it into dynamic events within the virtual scene.

The Blueprints

Nevertheless, this allows for artistic, surreal constellations to be achieved with the video
projection surfaces, such as embedding a performer into a picture frame, which, as shown here, begins to float alongside the concert grand piano. A triggered Niagara system could then be attached to the picture frame, for example, which reacts to the music and scatters sheet music around the room, etc.

The live video of the performance on the keyboard could, for example, be superimposed over the virtual grand piano’s keyboard to make the artist’s hands visible in the virtual representation.

These include object transformations, cloth in the wind, collisions, Niagara effects, camera control, choreography, scene changes and other VFX actions. Central control is handled via Unreal Engine’s sequencer, in which specific sequences are defined in an endless loop, such as camera paths through the scene. Technically speaking, this is the point where performance, event logic and scene organisation converge.

What goes into the pipeline?

A pipeline that integrates external tracking processes can run on anything that communicates with Unreal Engine. Tools such as VooCAT, 3ds Max, C4D, Houdini, Blender, Datasmith, and Unreal Engine itself form the basis for tracked image sequences (or AI-generated image spaces as virtual environments), for example, via a camera backplate or a projection map. An imported 3D point cloud serves not only as a spatial reference but also provides coordinates for the placement of additional events.

The real space is not surveyed, as there are no parallactic references, as in a virtual production. Ideally, however, the real space is photographed so that the virtual worlds can be constructed to ‘inherit’ surfaces and geometric features from the real space. The real stage can then also be furnished with haptically appropriate objects to create visual harmony.

Unfortunately, a comprehensive “field test” of the system’s behaviour is still pending. The Blueprint system must always be adjusted to the target instrument’s requirements and signal strength using appropriate parameters.

A key structural feature is the separation between internal and external triggers. Within the 3D scene, an audio source selected by the artist can be statically positioned and function as playback. These internal signals trigger defined processes within the scene, such as Niagara effects or other pre-prepared reactions. External audio signals from microphones or digital stage signals, on the other hand, activate other types of events.

Two Niagara systems were present at the demonstration, triggered internally via a stored scene sound. With two additional webcam inputs and an external signal from the KRONOS workstation, the system ran stably on the aforementioned “small computer”. The latency times were “noticeably” correct. Geometrically, this took place in a 3D model of the Colosseum, after all.

In this way, an internal beat can underpin the basic structure of a sequence, whilst external impulses additionally influence, shift or disrupt the scene. This makes sense for live formats because it mediates between predictability and reaction – that is, between show control and what musicians simply love to do: something unexpected.

Modular structure and live video

The modular blueprint structure is designed to allow the appearance and behaviour of the virtual stage section to be freely adapted to the artist, song or event format. The project is therefore not conceived as a rigid show package, but as a flexible framework within which specific logic for individual pieces or client requirements can also be implemented.

Ideally, a large LED wall is provided on the physical side, though projection via a projector is also possible in principle. The prototype was tested on a Windows PC with 16 GB RAM and an RTX 3060, running Unreal Engine 5.5.4. Depending on the complexity of the scene, two to four webcams can currently be integrated in real time. Their live images appear on defined projection surfaces within the virtual stage section. In this way, both artists and audience become part of the virtual world, not as a post-production effect, but as an ongoing component of the production.

It is precisely this integration of live video that is one of the more interesting aspects of the concept. When the audience appears, for example, as a background projection within the virtual stage section, the viewer may get the impression that the real stage opens up at the back into another room. This is more than an animated background and less than a completely virtual production. It is precisely in this intermediate zone that the appeal of the project lies.

A ‘field test’ is still needed here. During the prototype demonstration, the room was quite dark. The pianist was locally lit and clearly visible. The camera image of the audience was “normalised” using a blue screen, i.e. the brightness was adjusted so that the people on the projection screen could be clearly recognised. A test in a larger, much better-lit hall is still pending.

First presentation on a small scale

An initial live presentation took place in a small, private setting with selected guests. It was deliberately not aimed at a specialist audience, but at interested visitors, including visual artists. A photorealistic 3D model of the Colosseum served as the simulated stage set, displayed on an 85-inch monitor in Full HD at 70 fps. Resch himself took on the role of the live-performing artist at the KRONOS workstation, simultaneously controlling the behaviour of the virtual world.

Two live cameras (Full HD Rapoo webcams, i.e. very affordable equipment) captured him from the side and from above, with a view of the keyboard; additionally, the audience was integrated into the event-driven 3D world as a video projection. 

For Resch, this presentation is proof that traditional stage technology and a responsive virtual universe can be meaningfully combined. The audience reacted with clear amazement. This is not yet a technical acceptance test nor a production benchmark, but at least a useful test of whether the basic idea works on a perceptual level. That, too, is not entirely unimportant in the live sector.

Between prototype and production tool

The scenic portal RT is continually evolving. With current gaming hardware, 4K output and higher frame rates should also be possible in the future. In parallel, Resch is working on a musical project that is being developed partly using AI platforms. He defines the musical structures himself, whilst AI is used for arrangement and instrumentation.

For performers, narration and singing in fantastical worlds, he cites HIGGSFIELD AI. Whilst this is a separate project, it points the way forward: real-time, virtual staging, music, simulation and AI-assisted content creation are increasingly merging here. To what extent does the availability of online AI content generators depend on the ‘current state of things’? Which platforms will still be available by the end of the year (see SORA) and which ones have working APIs, must be checked again before each performance. The checklist is getting longer.

The bottom line is that the RT scenic portal is neither a classic media server product nor a ready-made event graphics package. It is a custom-developed real-time system based on Unreal Engine, trigger logic, live input and modular scene control. Whether this will become a widely applicable tool for the events sector ultimately depends, as is so often the case, not on the idea itself, but on robustness, workflow suitability and scalability. The idea itself is certainly technically interesting. Not every stage needs a surreal real-time parallel universe. But it would also be a shame if it were always just an LED wall with wave animations.

Want to know more? virtual-paradises.com and here is the associated YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@VirtualParadises

The post Das szenische Portal RT: When the Stage Starts Listening to the Music first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Unreal Engine is a realtime 3D engine and editor used for games, VFX, and virtual production, with tools like MetaHuman, Nanite, and procedural systems like PCG built in.

The preview nobody should install on Friday

Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview is available now to download via the Epic Games Launcher, GitHub, or for Linux. Epic Games positions this Preview around performance advancements and systems meant to feel more reliable, scalable, and intuitive.

That Preview label still means what it always means: The build is not quality tested, it remains under active development, and it can and propably will be unstable until the final release. Make a copy of your projects for testing rather than converting your mainline work.

Mesh Terrain goes full 3D, experimentally

The headline feature in 5.8 Preview is Mesh Terrain, flagged as Experimental. It uses a 3D mesh based architecture for building massive environments and it works natively with the Procedural Content Generation Framework. If your pipeline already leans on procedural layout, the idea is straightforward: terrain becomes part of the same graph driven worldbuilding conversation, instead of a separate special case that artists tiptoe around.

The practical impact depends on what you need out of terrain today. The announcement calls it a “novel architecture” (Scaaaary words) and keeps it at the overview level, so details like feature completeness, interchange expectations, and performance characteristics remain a guesswork.

PCG gets edits without losing the recipe

5.8 Preview also updates the PCG framework to allow manual edits directly on procedural output while keeping the underlying procedural logic intact. That matters because it targets a classic production pain: the moment an artist has to hand fix something and the whole setup turns into a one way bake.

In plain terms, you can push results around without instantly severing the link back to the graph. The sources describe this as an improvement alongside other iterative changes, but they do not specify which nodes, asset types, or editor workflows get the most love in this Preview.

Vegetation: more biology, more Nanite, more questions

The Procedural Vegetation Editor receives significant enhancements in 5.8 Preview. The goal here is building high quality, biologically correct, Nanite ready vegetation assets directly inside the editor. The sources also say you can import meshes from external DCC tools, which points at less time spent rebuilding base shapes just to satisfy an in engine authoring workflow.

Currently, we are about to get the following features:

• Growth Node
• Seed Generation
• Skeletal Extraction from 3D Mesh or 2D image/Atlas
• Foliage Grafting
• Object Avoidance and Carving
• Trimming- branch loops, displacement tessellation
• Mesher Improvements
• Visualization Modes
• Trunk Material Compositor

Real world artists will appreciate that this tool stays honest about what it is trying to do. It aims at fast iteration and authoring inside the editor, not at replacing dedicated plant tools overnight. The community replies in the same thread also report issues and broken behaviors in specific cases, which fits the Preview warning label. Treat it as a sandbox build, not as a deadline build.

MetaHumans scale up, and they get less picky about input meshes

Crowd work gets a bump through the MetaHuman Crowd plugin. The sources describe scaling from tens to thousands of characters for populating realtime worlds. If you have ever tried to sell a crowd shot without a crowd system, you already know why that matters.

On the creation side, the Preview also expands the ability to transform almost any human mesh into a MetaHuman, now with simultaneous head and body conforming. Epic Games calls this as a workflow improvement, but the current sources do not spell out constraints, quality expectations, or edge cases for stylized characters.

Lights, rigs, faces, and a grab bag of everything else

MegaLights reaches full production readiness in 5.8 Preview. Control Rig Physics moves to Beta, and the face rigging and morph target editing tools expand to support in editor sculpt driven facial workflows and shot sculpting. The sources describe this as strengthening blend shape authoring for stylized characters, custom skeletal meshes, and MetaHumans, plus pose corrections.

Rigging also gets Direct Mesh Controls, an Experimental system that lets Control Rig controls sit directly on sections of a skeletal mesh. If you like your controls where your hands are, that sentence probably reads like a small miracle.

Past the hero items, the Preview notes further work across production rendering and virtual production workflows, plus updates to Dataflow and Chaos Physics.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-5-8-preview/2721597

The post Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview rolls in first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Character Control Rig targets a very specific pain point: imported MetaHuman bodies inside Blender look like a rig, feel like a rig, and still do not behave like an animator-friendly rig. The add-on generates a Rigify control rig for an existing MetaHuman skeleton in Blender. The workflow starts with a generated metarig that snaps to the source skeleton using an automatic matching process, then moves to a one-click control rig generation step that binds the controls to the original skeleton and hooks into the existing MetaHuman evaluation stack. In other words, it tries to turn a MetaHuman import into something you can actually pose without getting another carpal tunnel.

Requirements

There are three requirements: Blender 4.5.0 or later (tested through 5.1), the Character DNA add on installed and enabled, and Rigify enabled in Blender preferences. If your studio-standard build is earlier than Blender 4.5, that becomes the first pipeline discussion. If Rigify stays disabled in your templates, the add on does not magically enable it for you.

The UE 5.7 detour is the retargeting trick

The workflow takes motion-capture-style animation from Mixamo, retargets it onto MetaHumans in Unreal Engine 5.7, then moves the results into Blender to animate on top of FK controls. Unreal Engine 5.7 matters here because the workflow uses retargeting features new to 5.7, including templates for popular skeletons. Unreal is basically selecting a Mixamo template for the source skeleton by reading bone names and matching them to the template, then retargeting it to each MetaHuman body.

The tutorial creates two MetaHuman characters with slightly different skeletal proportions, retargets the same animations onto each, and exports per character animation assets. This is the part where you should assume nothing and verify everything, especially if your show already standardized on a different Unreal point release.

Blender side, you get a metarig first and control rig second

Once the MetaHuman DNA files exist, the tutorial imports the characters into Blender via the Character DNA add on, then uses Character Control Rig to generate Rigify rigs per character. The add on exposes view options that let you turn off rig logic evaluation on head and body components and toggle related elements like RBFs, texture masks, shape keys, and bone transforms. It then lets you choose a rig framework. The tutorial states that it currently supports Rigify only, while the design leaves room for other rig frameworks later.

MetaHuman DNA add-on for RBF editor

From there, the add on generates a metarig on the selected rig instance. It is snapped into position and fitted to the bones, with manual adjustment available before committing. After that, generate control rig produces a functioning control rig that updates while RigLogic evaluation runs. That is the core pitch: two clicks and you are ready to animate. Yes, that is a marketing claim, and you should still budget time for checking deformation, constraints, and naming collisions.

The multi-character part matters too. The developer says each rig is namespaced to avoid collisions, and the tutorial demonstrates generating separate rigs for two characters with different proportions using an auto snapping algorithm. Somewhere around here, your anmiation lead will ask if the rig behaves predictably under shot specific scale hacks. The only honest answer is to test your own worst habits.

Getting motion onto the FK controls

The tutorial imports body animations from Unreal into Blender and bakes them onto FK controls for the Rigify rig, using the Rigify tools for FK IK switching and baking from FK to IK in actions.

Animation support includes face board import from Unreal to Blender, face board export from Blender to Unreal, and body FK import and export in both directions. It also lists body FK auto retargeting from animation marketplaces, but that feature does not appear in the material we could find.

The add on also positions face board animation export as a direct path from Blender to the MetaHuman Control Rig in Unreal Engine. If you live in Sequencer, this is the part you will care about: you can keep your final runtime character in Unreal while still doing keyframing and clean-up work in Blender, then round-trip the result.

Pricing

An individual perpetual license is at $29.99 and team licenses starting at $99.99. The Character DNA Addon page does provide specific pricing. Since you also need the Blender Character DNA Addon, you’ll also need an Individual license at $79 one time and an Indie Dev Team license at $259 one time, with platform support for Windows, ARM MacOS, and Linux. The code for the addon is available on GitHub, while separately describing a purchasable build tool workflow and a compiled module related to the bone auto fitting algorithm. Depending on how you want to add all of it to your specific pipeline.

So plan for two purchases if you start from zero, and confirm licensing terms in your legal review before you roll it into a studio wide tools image.

What to test before you trust it on a deadline

Rig generation pipelines fail in predictable ways, and none of them care about your delivery date. Test how the generated Rigify controls behave under layered animation, constraints, and shot specific offsets. Test export and re import with your exact Unreal project settings. Test a multi character scene with your usual naming conventions and collection layout. Test any facial workflow claims with your real range of motion, not a polite demo clip.

https://www.polyhammer.com/character-control-rig-addon

The post Poly Hammer brings MetaHumans to Blender Rigify first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: KitBash3D sells themed 3D asset kits and delivers them through Cargo, with downloads for DCCs like Blender and engines like Unreal Engine.

A set dressing kit that actually knows set dressing

KitBash3D just shipped Lights, Camera, Action!, a 3D asset kit built around the behind the scenes world of filmmkaing. You get sound stages, grip gear, light stands, sandbags, and monitors intended to sell the idea that something got shot here, even if it was just your previz. The kit has 139 models, 112 PBR materials, and a total poly count of 6.3 million. If your scene still feels empty, you can now add more stuff that looks expensive, without having to explain why your hero prop budget went to folding tables.

Here’s part of the set:

• Apple Box: The ancient on-set unit of measure. Also the quickest way to “fix” an eyeline without touching your camera solve. Actor ego not included.
• Dark Apple Box: Same apple box, but in “this has seen things” edition.
• Bathroom Toilet: For those hero shots where the realism budget includes plumbing. Also useful for sim reference when compositing a bad day.
• Boom Microphone: The object your roto artist will definitely have to paint out, no matter how many times someone promised “it’s out of frame.”
• Box Truss Scaffolding: Because every virtual set needs at least one structure that screams “temporary,” even when it will live forever in a master scene.
• Camera Tripod High: The “we swear it’s locked off” rig that still mysteriously jitters just enough to ruin your matchmove.

• Chroma Stage: Your favourite shade of green, now available in “why is the spill that colour” format.
• Clapperboard: Classic clapperboards, which the onset personnel always mark in unintelligible handwriting, and VFX always tries to read like it’s a 20-times AI-translated-OCR-enhanced ancient manuscript.
• Coffee Cup: Continuity’s greatest enemy and the comp team’s most common set extension.
• Coffee Trailer: The real production hub. Put it in your scene and everyone instantly believes there was crew there.
• Dolly Rails: For that smooth move you will still stabilize because somebody stepped near the track.

• Extended Camera Crane: When the shot needs to feel expensive, even if the environment is still a greybox.
• Film Light: A two-lamp unit that screams “stage,” and whispers “watch your speculars.”
• Foam Core Boards: The poor person’s bounce, now available as a rich person’s render asset.
• Frosted Donut: The snack that disappears between cuts. Perfect for continuity tests you will fail on purpose.

• Frosted Donut B: A second donut, because the first one was “too pink in the grade.”
• Gray and Chrome Ball Rig: VFX’s emotional support spheres. Put them anywhere and suddenly you’re doing “proper” on-set reference.
• Macbeth Chart: The colour chart that politely reminds everyone that “we’ll fix it in post” still starts on set.
• Production Slate: The clean slate version, for when you want the prop without the handwriting crimes.

Unreal gets the game ready treatment

For Unreal Engine, the kit gets a Gameplay Ready variant with full Nanite support, custom collisions, Packed Level Instancing, and modular runtime ready assets. If you have been building virtual sets and thinking, this needs more realistic cable chaos, congratulations, you have found your people.

In practical terms, it is also a tidy addition to any kitbash workflow where you want believable production context around your hero environment, not just more neon signs and wet asphalt.

Formats, DCCs, and the inevitable renderer bingo

The supported software list includes Blender, Unity, Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, and Houdini. On the interchange side it calls out FBX, OpenUSD, and MaterialX. Renderer logos shown include Arnold, Cycles, Karma MatX on Houdini, OctaneRender, Redshift, and V-Ray.

Pricing, licensing, and the fine print you should still read

The product page lists a price of $95 and a current price of $47.50. It also shows three license tiers: Individual License for self-employed artists, Small Business License for companies with 50 or fewer employees, and an Enterprise License tier for companies with 51 or more employees. So far, we can see now discounts when you own some of the stuff in real life.

As always, test any new tools and assets in your pipeline before you let them anywhere near a real delivery, especially if your project depends on strict naming, instancing, and performance budgets.
https://kitbash3d.com/products/lights-camera-action

The post FilmSet kit lands in KitBash3D first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Fallout Season 2 asked for more scale and less forgiveness. Rise delivered 244 shots across seven episodes, with the heaviest work landing early, and kept two sites moving as one crew. The playbook stayed familiar, but the demands went feral: closer cameras, heavier mechanical interaction, city-wide procedural destruction, and sand-driven reveals that punished every shortcut.

Fallout!

Andreas Giesen is a Rise VFX Supervisor with a Houdini-heavy background and a track record on FX-intensive shows. He is credited by the Television Academy for a 2024 Primetime Emmy nomination for Fallout in “Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Season or a Movie”. His Rise FX credits include serving as the studio VFX Supervisor on The Matrix Resurrections, as well as work on has worked on X-Men, The Matrix, The Last of Us and the various entries in the Marvel universe, among others.

DP: When we last spoke about Fallout Season 1, you worked on a show that combined large-scale environments, destruction, Vertibirds, Power Armour, and complex integration work. On Season 2, where did the challenge shift?

Andreas Giesen: The challenge shifted purely to massive scale and extreme scrutiny. In Season 1, we were establishing the rules. In Season 2, we took those rules and stress-tested the pipeline. We had a huge jump in scale, like procedurally destroying the entirety of Los Angeles or dealing with the multi-layered sand reveals of Area 51, but we were operating with roughly the same core team size. Brute forcing was not an option. We had to lean heavily on our procedural setups and the USD foundation we built in Season 1 just to survive the shot count.

DP: Did Season 2 feel like a continuation of an established visual language, or more like a technical reset because the demands had changed so much?

Andreas Giesen: Artistically, it was a continuation. We already had that shorthand with Jay Worth and Jonathan Nolan, so we knew what that tactile, grounded Fallout look felt like.

Technically, though, it was a massive upgrade. We did not throw everything away, but we had to rebuild or upgrade many assets because the camera was suddenly much closer or the interactions were much more complex. The Vertibird docking with the Caswennan, for instance, required a whole new level of mechanical detailing that just was not necessary in Season 1.

DP: RISE delivered work across several episodes, with particularly dense work in some of the early ones. How did that affect the structure of the production on your side?

Andreas Giesen: We delivered 244 shots spread across seven episodes, but the bulk of the heavy lifting hit right in episodes 2 and 3. To keep the chaos in check across our Berlin and Stuttgart offices, we operated as one unified team. We ran single VFX dailies so it never felt like two separate facilities. We relied heavily on our in-house production management tool, risebase 3, to keep the sites synced.

Honestly, a massive shoutout to our VFX Producer Annelie Dangel , Production Manager Scott Kunysz, and the coordination team. They were the real firewall keeping the production structured while the artists dealt with the pixel pushing.

DP: You mentioned that the work was divided into more specialised teams. How exactly did that division work in practice?

Andreas Giesen: Instead of splitting the work purely by department, where an asset just gets tossed over the wall, we built small, cross-functional strike teams dedicated to specific sequences. For example, we had a dedicated Area 51 team and a completely separate Caswennan team.

Each of these pods basically consisted of one layout artist, one lighting artist, and an FX artist if the sequence required it. This meant the artists became absolute experts on the continuity, lighting setups, and specific technical hurdles of their assigned sequence, rather than constantly context switching between different environments.

DP: The Caswennan ship has become even more important in Season 2. At what point does a hero asset like that stop being “just a vehicle”?

Andreas Giesen: When you get that close, it absolutely stops being just a vehicle and becomes a massive flying set. The layout has to treat it like a static environment just to block the shots, especially when we are tracking complex character animation and heavy mechanical interactions, like the Vertibird docking, directly onto the hull.

DP: What were the rebuild decisions under the hood?

Andreas Giesen: It was actually a really interesting round-trip process. Since the flight deck scenes were shot on a virtual stage, we received the Unreal Engine asset from production as our starting point. Funny enough, that Unreal asset was originally based on our own Season 1 dirigible model!

So, our CG team, led by Jenny Leupold , took the updated proportions from the virtual stage, brought the asset back into our pipeline, and completely re-engineered all the high-res cinematic details and shading quality.

DP: How did you approach balancing a highly detailed close-up asset with practicality for layout, lighting, and shot iteration?

Andreas Giesen: We relied heavily on our USD workflows and instancing. We had to design functional heavy hydraulics and complex mechanical joints so the lifting arm physically made sense up close, but we could strip that back or use lighter variants for wider layout tasks so the scene would not grind to a halt in the viewport.

DP: In Season 2, there seems to have been a stronger overlap between physical production, virtual production, scans, and final CG. How did that affect the pipeline in concrete terms?

Andreas Giesen: It meant we lived and breathed LIDAR. For the Area 51 reveal and the hangar sequences, production gave us incredible plates and highly accurate scan data. Having that precise spatial data was the only way to guarantee a seamless transition from the practical sets into our massive digital extensions. Once that data enters production, it locks in your scale, distance, and speed, which were crucial for making the flight dynamics feel grounded in reality.

DP: There was also mention of Unreal-based virtual production material related to the airship. How did you manage the relationship between real-time assets, scanned set data, and final cinematic assets?

Andreas Giesen: Again, USD was the bridge. We took the Unreal assets, which gave us the exact scale and spatial relationships from the LED volume, and used them as the spatial framework to build our final pixel cinematic assets over the top. It ensured that when we integrated the final CG back into the live action plates, all the contact points and lighting references matched the physical set pieces perfectly.

DP: Was the biggest benefit from USD technical elegance, or simply that it stopped artists from stepping on each other’s work?

Andreas Giesen: Ha, a little bit of both, but honestly, stopping the file overwrites is worth its weight in gold. On a more technical level, the real elegance was how flawlessly it let us bridge the gap between Maya and Houdini.

For the Shady Sands environment, our Layout Lead Karin Wolf and her team built the pristine, non-destroyed city parts in Maya. We then brought that via USD straight into Houdini to scatter all the granular details and endless cornfields. Being able to mix and match layouts without friction meant artists could just stay in the tool they were fastest in.

DP: The Vertibird work in Fallout has always been interesting because it needs to feel stylised and believable at the same time. What were the challenges for it in Season 2?

Andreas Giesen: The challenge is that it is a massive, lumbering vehicle, but it still needs personality. For Xander Harkness arriving at Area 51, he is a fantastic, slightly cocky pilot, so we had to inject this aggressive precision and specific swagger into the flight path and mechanical braking.

The integration challenge, especially during the Caswennan docking, was finding that fine balance of heavy momentum. We had to ease the mass and simulate procedural micro vibrations to show it buffeting in the air currents. The hardest part was nailing the exact frame where the mechanical arm takes over the full weight and the rotors power down.

DP: How much of selling a vehicle like that comes from animation, and how much from camera language, editorial rhythm, and integration into atmosphere and environment?

Andreas Giesen: Animation gets you the weight and the performance, but the environment integration is what sells the lie. In the hangar landing, the plate was dramatically backlit. Our lighters had to introduce specific light sources to shape the geometry nicely and match the foreground. Then the FX rotor wash tied everything together. We simulated heavy CG dust and debris blowing right past the lens, matching the practical wind from the live-action plate to physically anchor the digital ship into the real set.

DP: For sequences involving scanned practical sets, such as hangar or landing environments, what are the biggest pitfalls once the scan data actually enters production?

Andreas Giesen: The biggest pitfall is that the scan data and the live action plate lock you into absolute physical reality. If the plate has a specific wind direction or interactive lighting, absolutely every piece of CG vegetation, dust, or vehicle integration has to physically react to that exact same environmental energy, or the illusion breaks immediately.

DP: Fallout still has this very specific balance: it is heightened and absurd in places, but the world still needs physical credibility. How does that affect VFX decisions in review?

Andreas Giesen: You have to ground the absurdity in absolute, boring physical reality. For the dramatic dirigible crash, which is inherently a heightened, spectacular moment, we went straight to historical footage of the Hindenburg. We ran intense, clustered simulations starting with plastic deformation for the metal bending, triggering RBD sims for the hull ripping apart, and feeding that into multiple layers of pyro for flames, smoke, and contact sand. If the physics are incredibly strict, the audience will buy into the universe’s stylised madness.

DP: On a show like this, where does proceduralism genuinely save time, and where does it still need a heavy layer of manual art direction to become production-ready?

Andreas Giesen: Proceduralism saves you on the sheer volume, but art direction saves the shot. For the destroyed Los Angeles, we started with basic map data, literally just cubes and planes. Our brilliant TD, Kilian Baur , built a Houdini tool that procedurally converted those cubes into heavily detailed, destroyed buildings. It generated massive amounts of geometry. But you cannot just hit simulate and walk away. We had to manually paint the degree of destruction across different zones for compositional reasons. The tool does the heavy lifting, but the artist still has to compose the frame.

DP: Was there a particular sequence in Season 2 where the real constraint was neither the creative idea nor the client feedback, but simply scene complexity, cache weight, or iteration cost?

Andreas Giesen: The dirigible crash and the Area 51 reveal were absolute beasts for cache weight. For Area 51, we were blending volumetric dust, suspended sand particles, and contact sand actively swirling off the geometry. The dirigible had even more interactive layers, expertly managed by FX TD Arnaud Malherbe under Jens Martensson .

We survived by heavily clustering the sims for faster turnarounds and by relying on deep compositing workflows in Nuke. Our Compositing Supervisor Michael Lankes , Comp Lead Kader Bagli , and Comp Lead Jannik Walzer did incredible work taking those massive datasets and balancing them without bringing the farm to its knees.

DP: What became easier on Season 2?

Andreas Giesen: Things like lookdev for the energy signatures became easier. We reused the core effect for the cold fusion and diode glows from Season 1. But because we had to scale it up to so many more shots, we had to build highly efficient setups in Nuke involving heavy rotomation and complex relighting, since that blue glow affects every shiny metal surface around it. The look was established, but the volume and the necessary integration were significantly harder.

DP: Was there a shot or sequence this season that looks deceptively simple in the final cut, but was technically far more difficult than most viewers would ever suspect?

Andreas Giesen: It has to be the Power Armor enhancements. Production has this absolutely incredible practical suit that a stunt performer wears on set. However, because it is a physical, wearable suit, sometimes individual parts will naturally jiggle or bounce a bit too much during heavy action, which breaks the illusion of solid, heavy metal armor.

In the shot where the massive dirigible is coming down and exploding in the background, we actually had to completely replace the shoulders of the Power Armor while the character is running away. Everyone in the audience is obviously staring at the massive fiery airship crash taking up the sky, but there we are, meticulously tracking and doing invisible CG replacement on shoulder pads just to make sure the suit feels appropriately heavy.

DP: And conversely, was there a shot that looked terrifying at first but became manageable once the right structure or workflow was in place?

Andreas Giesen: Definitely the procedural destruction of Los Angeles. The idea of destroying a city of that scale is terrifying. But once Kilian’s tool was in place, and we utilised our USD pipeline to block the shots with simple geometry while the high-res destruction updated seamlessly in the background, it actually became a highly manageable, iterative process. We could instance the endless piles of rubble and rusted cars, which kept the massive scale from becoming unrenderable.

DP: What is a technical lesson from Fallout Season 2 that would transfer well to other large episodic shows?

Andreas Giesen: The absolute golden rule is to keep everything as procedural as humanly possible so you can actually survive rapid client changes. That, combined with establishing those small expert strike teams we talked about, is how you manage the chaos. But the real lifesaver that transfers to any heavy show is aggressive pipeline automation. For sequences with massive shot counts, we utilised our proprietary riseflow tools to completely automate the heavy lifting.

We could submit CG renders from one principal master scene across 50 different shots before leaving the studio. By the next morning, the pipeline had automatically generated 50 temporary composites, already perfectly combining the new CG with the live-action plates using deep learning. Waking up to 50 ready to review temp comps instead of a massive rendering bottleneck is the only way to deliver a show of this scale.

DP: What is the next project you are working on, insofar as you can already talk about it, and is there anything from Fallout Season 2 that you are taking with you into that next production?

Andreas Giesen: I am currently working on something very exciting, but unfortunately, it is strictly under wraps right now, so I cannot speak about it just yet. But I am absolutely taking the USD workflows and the procedural pipeline strategies we refined on Fallout straight into this next challenge!

The post RISE: Fallout Destroys LA, Politely first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

What Project Violet is

Project Violet is a tutorial series made in Houdini 21, of the “Intermediate” Level, by Sam Taylor. The series shows new character features and workflows in Houdini 21 while combining the production readiness of Epic’s MetaHuman system with Houdini rigging and simulation workflows to build an approachable full human workflow.

That matters because it narrows the promise. This is not a inspiration reel, but a character pipeline exercise, with the character coming from MetaHuman and the heavy lifting happening in Houdini. If your day job sits anywhere near character setup, deformation, or character-adjacent sims, Project Violet wants to show you how to reuse, get a decent iteration speed, and getting a believable human through a procedural toolset without constantly falling back to manual rig babysitting.

The pipeline pitch: MetaHuman base, Houdini control

The main idea: take MetaHuman as the starting point and use Houdini for rigging and simulation versatility. It calls MetaHuman “production-ready” (we could discuss that, yet, the character is still in intensive care), and it presents that as the baseline you inherit rather than something you rebuild. Everything after that becomes a question of how far you can push Houdini’s character toolset once you stop spending weeks on initial asset authoring.

Houdini 21: Like good wine (Part1, VFX & Geo)

A separate SideFX-side (hehehe) for Project Violet describes it as an evolution of an earlier character-centric project, and it wants to focus on greater realism and expanded capability of the character, to showcase Houdini rigging and animation capabilities updated for new features and efficiencies in Houdini 21, and demonstrate a character pipeline that emphasises proceduralism while using MetaHumans as a base for the workflow.

That language is still a pitch, but it dosn’t widen the scope. The project is about a workflow, not a single solver trick. It aims to demonstrate procedural character work in Houdini 21 with a MetaHuman starting point.

One practical caveat: none of these claims your exact studio constraints, problems and idiosyncrasies of the colleagues get solved. Your skeleton naming rules, mesh structure, and export requirements still exist. Project Violet shows a route, not a universal treaty.

Houdini character tooling under the hood: APEX Autorig Builder

If Project Violet is the show, the APEX Autorig Builder is one of the stagehands. The APEX Autorig Builder SOP is a tool to interactively apply and configure pre-built and custom rig components through the viewport, which aims to make character setup more intuitive and lets you quickly build a complete rig.

SideFX draws a line between the APEX Autorig Builder SOP and the APEX Autorig Component SOP. The Builder can add multiple rig components, supports interactive viewport rigging, and allows modifying a limited set of component parameters in the viewport. The Component SOP adds one rig component at a time, can be used to create custom components, and exposes the full set of parameters in the parameter editor.

Back to Project Violet, because it glues the workflow in Houdini’s modular rig component approach rather than a one-off rig graph built for a single hero asset. Even if you do not adopt the exact tutorial approach, those constraints and mechanics tell you what Houdini 21 expects when you try to scale character setup.

Unreal and MetaHuman side of the bridge

Project Violet ties into Unreal. Epic’s MetaHuman are tools to assemble a MetaHuman character or create MetaHuman-compatible grooms in SideFX Houdini.

That tells you two things. First, the pipeline is not only about ex/im-porting Alembic and hoping for the best. It involves a toolset that lives in the Unreal ecosystem but targets Houdini as the working environment for certain tasks. Second, the workflow depends on version compatibility and installation details that can change across engine builds, pipeline images, and studio IT lockdowns.

This is where the series may appeal to teams that want to get to motion and deformation problems quickly, or to studios that already standardised on MetaHuman for certain classes of characters and now want deeper procedural control on top.

Either way, run a controlled wokrflow test before you bet a show schedule on it.

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/project-violet/

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/character/kinefx/autorigbuilder.html

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/metahuman/metahuman-for-houdini

The post Project Violet links Houdini and MetaHuman first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the event: FMX is a production conference for animation and Visual Effects, mixing craft talks with pipeline sessions. It touches audio post, cinematography, and realtime tools such as Unreal.

Sound design: not an afterthought

Sound Design at FMX lands as a full track, built around immersive, interactive, and animated work where audio carries story weight. The track description positions sound as half the experience, then drills into fundamentals, standout projects, and where AI can help in early creative phases and where it fails.

The program brings in Supervising Sound Editor Nina Hartstone of Cinphonic, with a session on storytelling with sound that centers on recording, design, and editorial choices for film. Her listed credits include Bohemian Rhapsody, Moonage Daydream, Saltburn, and Wuthering Heights. She also teaches masterclasses at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg during the On Campus day, with limited participation and registration handled via program@fmx.de.

Supervising Re Recording Mixer David Fluhr brings a workflow talk tied to Walt Disney Animation Studios and the realities of modern delivery. The session covers sound, music, and mixing workflows that support storytelling, plus worldwide deliveries, language versioning, and the path from temp to final mix using sequences from Vaiana 2 and Zoomania 2.

A third session attacks the handoff between picture and audio. Christoph Groß-Fengels demonstrates an AI driven workflow that watches an edit, extracts key frames, sends them to a vision system via the Google Cloud Vision API, then searches a local sound effects library and assembles a first pass sound bed. The pipeline uses a Python workflow designed to slot into existing post pipelines. Try it, break it, then try it again before you trust it with a worklfow that ships.

Cinematography: where VFX changes the job

The Cinematography track adds Paul Cameron for a career conversation about the influence of VFX on visual design, in conversation with Jordan Thistlewood of Cooke Optics. Cameron’s credits include Westworld, Collateral, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales, and the talk is supposed to circle around collaboration from on set through post.

Spatial Storytelling: XR wants story first

A first time Spatial Storytelling track focuses on XR narrative craft across film, theater, and games, with an explicit mandate to keep story ahead of shiny tech.

Alex Coulombe of Agile Lens and director David Gochfeld present virtual production workflows behind A Christmas Carol VR and R and D with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their talk “Live to Media framework” that captures live performance motion capture and preserves it via the Unreal Engine 5 Replay System, aiming for scalable, repeatable immersive content.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru of NUMENA argues for space as the medium in VR, contrasting references ranging from the Acropolis to Half Life’s City 17, and exploring scale transitions as narrative devices with examples including Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and the Venice Biennale project titled Dear Mother.

Balthazar Auxietre of InnerspaceVR focuses on environmental narrative in immersive experiences and outlines practical design techniques and workflows, including use of Gravity Sketch, with an emphasis on balancing cinematic direction and user agency.

Robyn Winfield-Smith discusses narrative work in Apple’s 180 degree immersive format using the Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive camera developed specifically for Apple Vision Pro. The session description covers story development and previsualisation, stereoscopic workflows, scenic elements to guide attention, spatial audio considerations, and the future of spatial entertainment. The supplied details do not provide technical camera specifications.

Dates, formats, and what you can actually watch

FMX runs On Site May 5 to May 7, with Online and On Campus on May 8, and On Demand from May 9 through June 9. The ticket page has all kinds of pass types including Conference Pass, Business Pass, Combi Pass, Day Pass, Experience Pass, Online Pass, and Press Pass.

Two evening get togethers round out the schedule. Tuesday, May 5 runs 19:00 to 21:00 and is powered by Houdini (Meet your favourite Digital Production Editor there). Wednesday May 6 runs 19:00 to 21:00 and is powered by ROE Visual.

The post FMX 2026 bets on sound and spatial craft first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Natsura, the Houdini foliage toolkit lives inside Houdini, can push assets to Unreal Engine workflows, and now leans harder into assemblies, mapping, and export glue.

What shipped in 0.6

Version 0.6.0.0 landed on March 25, 2026, with support for Houdini 20.5 and Houdini 21.0. The release calls out modular effectors, Nanite assemblies, an assembly decorator, a revamped UI, analytics, scan extension, and Houdini 21 support. The update introduces an Assembly workflow aimed at quickly rigging twig and branch libraries and assembling canopies. There is also a set of tools for Unreal Nanite skeletal assembly support, paired with wind authoring tools. Assembly-related nodes are flagged as experimental in the release notes, though. Be careful.

On the shaping side, the release adds a modular effector system like a bolt on simulation modifiers with no VEX required. Effectors are an extendable stack, and the base effector node supports writing VEX to extend the simulation and respond to geometry and inputs.

Assemblies, decorators, and Unreal export

The release adds new nodes for an assembly pipeline, including an assembly resource node for mesh library import and auto rigging, an assembly decoration node for canopy decoration that can pick modules based on traits and transform instance hierarchies with rigid rotations, and a classify node for trait-based module classification.

Export to Unreal related workflows gets multiple mentions. The export node for Unreal Nanite assembly lists updates including material support, skeletal and static assembly, fixed instance naming, and removal of a transform on points that broke instancing. There is also a LOP node for USD workflows that creates a Nanite assembly for SOP based creation.

Wind support is expanded through new nodes for wind initialisation and validation, wind class assignment for Unreal, a wind preview visualisation tool that is functional but not accurate or meant to look good, and a node that exports UE5 DynamicWindSkeletalData as JSON. If your environment team already has a wind data convention, this is the part to validate early, especially around naming, material binding, and what your in-engine tooling expects.

Effectors, guides, and growth controls

Several new effectors are listed: deflection, magnet attraction, gravitropism, gravity, and noise based growth perturbation. The grow node line gets a long set of updates in this release, including a new spiral parameter with absolute and relative modes, integration with the effector stack, and an updated decorator stack format to match the effector stack.

One practical change is the way mapping and prim construction are described. Map prim construction is deferred to grow, which is described as reducing node count and compile time. There is also an instant colour preview mentioned, plus options for skeleton swapping and custom draw modules. Growth workflows appear to be treated as a family of versions, with backwards compatibility restored across multiple grow versions and various mapping and parameter warning cleanups.

Rig simplification and reskinning

Rig simplification tooling shows up both as a new simplify rig node and as updates to a simplify rig reskin path, as well as multi stem tree support, chaining of simplify nodes, and added carve method and max joints count. If your pipeline needs a predictable joint budget for game ready trees, this is where you will want to spend time.

Analytics and privacy details

Analytics is “opt-in” and disabled by default, with no data collected without explicit user consent. If you work in an environment with strict compliance rules, the opt in default and EU cloud note are helpful details, but you still need to run your own review. Make sure your team knows what is allowed, and that tool telemetry decisions match your facility policy.

The notes also state that 0.7 will be a breaking release, and this 0.6 release includes precursor work such as a standardised mapping architecture, groundwork for decorator cook trigger decoupling, and a foundation for mappable decorator parameters. Read that as a warning to keep a rollback plan, and to budget time for update testing before you touch active porudction setups.

Compatibility notes for Houdini artists

Houdini 21 support is obvious, including mention of an APEX graph schema enforcement fix. The release also claims continued full Houdini 20.5 support, plus compatibility work around Qt bindings.

In practice, this release spans a lot of surface area: SOP level nodes, UI panels, export to Unreal, USD workflow hooks, analytics, and a mapping engine refactor. That is a lot of moving parts for a minor release number, even if the changelog is transparent about what is experimental. Treat the upgrade like you would any node library update: keep a copy of old scenes, validate the graphs, and test exports end to end before shipping anything client facing.

https://www.natsura.com/

The post Natsura 0.6 adds effectors and Nanite export for Houdini Foliage first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Twinmotion is a real-time viz app powered by Unreal Engine, built for quick scene assembly, lighting, and outputs without living in node graphs.

Photo matching, now less of a dark art

Twinmotion 2026.1 adds a photo matching workflow built around a new Match Perspective tool. You load a background image as a backplate, identify vanishing points (Lines or Grid), and the camera adjusts position and focal length to match the image. The goal is simple: get a 3D model to sit reasonably convincingly inside a 2D photo without hand-tuning camera parameters for an afternoon.

The tool also includes shadow projection from 3D objects onto the calculated ground plane. That helps sell integration when the backplate already has strong directional cues. If you do client-facing previz or quick location studies, this is one of those features that saves time. It also nudges Twinmotion closer to the familiar backplate plus camera-match workflow many artists already use elsewhere, just with fewer steps and less guesswork.

Autosoft edge: a band-aid, in the best way

CG edges can read too sharp, especially when you are chasing photo-like results in a simplified lookdev context. Twinmotion 2026.1 introduces Autosoft edge, a rendering effect you can apply to selected objects to soften hard edges to a specified radius.

Autosoft Edge works in Standard, Lumen, and Path Tracer modes. That means you can keep one scene and one intent while switching render modes, without losing the edge treatment that helps prevent the razor-cut silhouette look. This is not a replacement for proper bevels when the model needs to withstand close-ups or be exchanged with other tools. It is a pragmatic option for when the scene is already in motion, the imported geometry is what it is, and you want a controllable, consistent soften in teh renderer.

Lighting channels: finally, selective light sanity

Twinmotion 2026.1 adds support for lighting channels. Lights only affect objects assigned to the same channel. In practice, this gives you the abiility to isolate what a physical light influences, which is a staple control in many pipelines.

A concrete example: you can keep your background lighting from touching a hero object in a product or fashion setup. That is useful when you want a clean key and fill on the subject, while the environment stays moody or stylised without contaminating the hero’s exposure and specular response.

Lighting channels do not magically solve bad lighting decisions, but they do let you build a scene that behaves more like a studio rig. You can steer light contribution with intent instead of compensating with endless tweaks to intensity and position.

Camera and lens effects: focus breathing for people who enjoy pain

Twinmotion 2026.1 adds Auto focus for depth of field. With Auto focus enabled, the focal point can automatically adjust to the centre of the screen, effectively following the camera’s look-at point. You can set how long it takes to adjust focus.

There is also a hunting behaviour option. The setting lets you choose whether hunting happens occasionally, frequently, or not at all. That is a very specific kind of realism knob, and it is nice to see it treated as a creative control rather than a bug you have to hide.

Depth of field bokeh gets two new characteristics: Anamorphic oval and Petzval. These affect the blur quality in out-of-focus areas, including elongated and swirling bokeh looks. The two can be used individually or combined. Holga-Hipsters, eat your heart out :P

A Barrel distortion slider rounds out the lens pack, curving straight lines near the edges of frame like real lenses, especially wide-angle ones. All of this points at a consistent theme: Twinmotion is leaning harder into camera language, not just lighting and assets. Which is excellent, if your deliverable is stills and clips that need to read as photographs rather than renders.

Particle VFX: more control, less waiting

Twinmotion 2026.1 revamps the particle-based effects in the Twinmotion library. The update optimised performance and visual quality, and it adds new examples.

More importantly for day-to-day work, the particle effects now have exposed parameters, so you can customise them. The examples called out include fire, fog, smoke, and water.

If your scenes lean on atmospherics to sell scale or mood, parameterised VFX is much more useful than locked presets. It turns the library from a look-up table into something you can art-direct.

European trees, and the stuff you only notice when it breaks

Twinmotion 2026.1 adds a European tree pack: 10 new species of photorealistic European trees, each with three variations, added to the Twinmotion library. If you build outdoor scenes for European contexts, that is straight-up practical content, not just another generic “coloured blob” set. And we are not making any political jokes here; we are talking about trees.

The release also changes how asset libraries live on disk. Twinmotion now manages the location of all asset libraries, including user libraries and user-generated content, in a persistent folder structure. This replaces the previous per-version folder structure.

The point is to stop making you copy, move, or redownload content each release. The persistent structure is intended to enable content to be shared across future versions and simplify file paths.

This is the kind of improvement that rarely makes a reel, but it absolutely shows up in the daily friction budget. Fewer duplicate paths also tends to mean fewer broken links, fewer “where did that go” moments, and less time spent doing file system archaeology. N oinformation yet hopw that integrates with existing asset management systems, like das element or others.

Availability and pricing

Twinmotion 2026.1 is available to download. Existing users can download it via the Epic Games Launcher, and subscribers can also download via the Developer Portal.

Pricing depends on who you are and what you need. Twinmotion is free to use for individuals and small businesses under $1 million USD in revenue in the past 12 months, educational institutions, and students. For individuals and businesses over $1 million USD in gross annual revenue, and/or requiring access to Twinmotion Cloud, Twinmotion seats cost $445 per seat per year.

There is also an Unreal Subscription option listed at $1,850 per seat per year, which includes upgrades for Unreal Engine, Twinmotion, and RealityScan for one year, plus access to Twinmotion Cloud. The All-in-one-thingy sub :)

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/twinmotion/twinmotion-2026-1-release-notes

The post Epic Games ships Twinmotion 2026.1 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Cargo is a desktop asset browser that connects to Blender, Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, and more, so you can browse, download, and send models and materials straight into scenes without spreadsheet cosplay.

One app, two libraries, fewer tabs

KitBash3D made the app as the “front door” for discovering and importing its kits, with the bundled library concept now expanded to cover both catalogs.

Two previously separate collections now live side by side inside the same interface, with one sign-in and one search. The combined catalogue includes kits and models alongside scan-based materials, textures, and surface imperfections, all presented as a single system meant to keep structure and surface close together.

That unification also shows up in how content gets packaged. The app emphasizes a consistent pipeline based on OpenUUSDSD and MaterialX, aiming to keep hierarchies and instances intact while translating materials into native shader setups for the target renderer. This is a foundation-level rebuild rather than a cosmetic refresh.

The free starter pack is not tiny

A free account includes a curated set of assets you can browse and download without a credit card. That free set is described as 100 plus assets, and an independent count lists 483 total free items. Its a start :)

245 models, largely building and vehicle parts from two free kits plus a set of semi-abstract biomorphic forms. There are also 189 materials, including fabric, brick, and tile options, plus 44 textures of mostly geometric grids with additional bokeh and dirt textures.

If your day job involves pitching lookdev choices at 9am and shipping frames at 6pm, the free selection matters because it lets you test the pipeline end-to-end. You can confirm how the importer behaves, how instances land, how shader graphs translate, and how your render engine reacts to the material schema before you commit budget.

Search got smarter, and also weirder in a good way

The browsing experience leans hard on discovery features designed to reduce the number of times you type a noun and get punished for it. Smart Search supports natural-language descriptions like “dark industrial”, interpreting intent rather than matching exact keywords. Image Search lets you drop in a reference image and find assets that match its visual style. Show Similar pulls results that share visual DNA with the currently selected asset, encouraging variation hunting without restarting the search. Random Roll reshuffles results within your active filters to push controlled surprise when your brain has gone full beige.

On the surface, these read like creature comforts as they target the most annoying part of asset libraries: you know what you want, but you do not know what the library decided to call it. Natural language and visual matching try to bridge that gap, and the similar and random tools try to keep you moving when the first pick is close but not quite it.

This is also where the unified catalog changes behavior. Similarity searches and random rolls can traverse the combined library rather than staying fenced within a single vendor silo, so discovery sessions can jump between hard-surface set dressing and material detail work without switching apps or accounts.

One click import, persistent connections, and fewer ritual steps

The workflow pitch is straightforward: select an asset, then send it to your scene. The importer is organizing geometry into clean hierarchies and instances, reusing existing assets automatically, and translating materials directly into the native format of the chosen renderer based on render settings. The goal is predictable structure on arrival, so your outliner does not turn into a haunted attic.

The connection model matters as much as the importer. The app supports connecting to installed DCCs and then sending assets through a targeted connector, rather than relying on manual export and import steps for each move. A desktop-based app is available on Windows and macOS including Apple Silicon machines.

Supported host applications and versions are listed in current documentation. The app supports Autodesk 3ds Max versions 2021 through 2024 using a non-USD legacy plugin workflow. It supports Autodesk Maya versions 2024 through 2026. It supports SideFX Houdini versions 20 through 21, including render paths that reference MaterialX. It supports Unreal Engine versions 5.2 through 5.7 using official Epic Games Launcher builds, and it supports Blender versions 4.2 through 5.0 when downloaded from blender.org.

Render engine support is Redshift, OctaneRender, V-Ray, and Arnold. Blender is listed with Cycles and Eevee. Maya is listed with Arnold and Redshift. Houdini is listed with Karma, Mantra, Arnold, and V-Ray.

The practical takeaway is that the connectors and supported versions are specific, not vibes-based. If you live on a source-built Unreal branch or a newer 3ds Max version outside the supported range, you should expect friction and plan your testing accordingly. Also: USD is king here – it might be time to get on the train.

Pricing and membership tiers

Cargo 3.0 is free to download. Subscriptions are three main individual plans and a teams option.
Greyscalegorilla Library plan at $39 per month or $468 billed yearly, which includes 3,500 plus scanned and procedural materials, 1,000 plus models, 650 plus textures, and 600 plus HDRIs.
The KitBash3D Library plan at $59 per month or $708 billed yearly, and includes 20,000 plus textured models, 2,000 plus game ready assets, 300 plus hero props and vehicles, and 200 plus Substance Source materials.
And an Everything Bundle at $79 per month or $948 billed yearly. The Everything Bundle includes full access to every new release from both libraries under one subscription.

There are also Team plans at $99 per user per month billed annually with a four-seat minimum.

What to actually do with this on a deadline

Start with the free assets and run a full pipeline pass in a throwaway project. Test search with a mood phrase, then test Image Search with a real reference frame from your show bible. Send a small cluster of assets into your primary DCC, then verify the resulting hierarchy, instances, and material graphs. Render a quick turntable in your production renderer, then repeat the same asset in a second host app if your studio straddles multiple tools.

If you rely on 3ds Max, treat the legacy plugin note as a sign to double-check compatibility before you promise anything to your producer. If you rely on Unity, the end-of-life date for the older integration means you should map out alternatives now, not when the build breaks the night before a milestone.

Cargo 3.0 sells itself on momentum. The real win is not that it can download assets, every library can do that. The win is whether it reudces the number of tiny interruptions that burn your attention budget. Install, connect, search, send, render, repeat. Then decide if the time saved is real enough to justify the subscription tier you need.

https://kitbash3d.com/pages/cargo

https://kitbash3d.com/pages/pricing
// Quoted info
https://help.kitbash3d.com/en/articles/7833635-cargo-3-0-supported-3d-software-and-render-engines

The post Cargo 3.0 merges two asset libraries first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Feature animation gets performance-obsessed

A new set of feature animation sessions puts character performance front and centre. Supervising Animator Adam Sarophim will present how performance-driven animation gets built at Sony Pictures Imageworks using work from KPop Demon Hunters and GOAT. The session description focuses on crafting emotion, personality, and audience connection through movement, timing, and subtle detail.

Animator Jacob Frey will present The Animation of Zoomania 2 and describe collaboration between art and technology as part of the filmmaking process at Walt Disney Animation Studios. The session description frames the work as an example of how tools and artistic intent meet inside a feature pipeline. Details about specific story beats, pipeline tooling, or shot counts are not specified in the Sources.

Two European-leaning projects also land on the slate: The Last Whale Singer (a teenage humpback whale named Vincent), and a procedural real-time pipeline segment called Trash Island. The speakers listed for that session are Jan Hofmann, a CG Supervisor and Unreal Engine expert at Telescope Animation, and Amir Ashkezari, an FX Supervisor and Technical Director at PFX. The pipeline description centers on Houdini generated assets moving via OpenUSD into both real-time Unreal Engine and a traditional Autodesk 3ds Max and V-Ray workflow, connected by custom tools intended to support daily collaboration between studios in different locations.

Zako is a feature project based on a true story about an Armenian painter during World War II and the Soviet Union. Director Tigran Arakelyan of OnOff Studio will present how VR animation can serve as a core creative tool for sketching, staging, and animating directly in 3D space, as well as practical methods for integrating VR animation into a feature film production pipeline.

AI talks that aim past hype

The Artificial Intelligence track is around practical production use and the question of what AI should do in modern pipelines, with an emphasis on keeping a human artist in the loop.

Ben Grossman of Magnopus is listed for an individual session, followed by a panel appearance. Mohsen Mousavi, Senior Director of Visual Pioneering at Eyeline Studios, is also in an individual session and on the same panel. Hao Li, founder of Pinscreen, is about to present on work spanning computer vision and facial performance technology, having completed AI work on Fallout Season 2. The track is curated by Mike Seymour, co-founder of fxguide.

Cinematography goes deep into the lens mess

The Cinematography track highlights craft from stop-frame production through to photoreal VFX . Cinematographer Dave Alex Riddett will present Work Aard Play Aard, a behind-the-scenes look at decades of cinematography at Aardman and the practical skills involved in stop-frame storytelling.

VFX Supervisor Victor Perez will present GLASS: Capturing the Lens Look for Photorealistic VFX. The session description focuses on lenses having distinct optical characteristics including distortion, chromatic aberration, field curvature, vignetting, iris behavior, and micro-contrast, and on methods to analyze, measure, and reconstruct those characteristics inside VFX pipelines so CGI inherits the visual identity of the camera that shot the plate. The track is curated by Sara Coppola-Nicholson, Director of Research and Education at Cooke Optics.

Partners bring cloud and tools to the conversation

Two newly announced partners add their own angle on production infrastructure and creative tooling. AWS Visual Computing is about cloud-based solutions for visual effects, animation, and 3D content production, including scalable rendering, virtual workstations, and high-performance storage optimised for media workflows. It also highlights AWS Deadline Cloud as a fully managed render management service.

Foundry is … well, if you don’t know the company making Nuke, you should reconsider and read the rest of this website. The partner programming showcases compositing, lighting, look development and texturing, with participating studios named as Industrial Light and Magic, RISE FX, Outpost VFX, and Mikros Animation.

The partner section also includes an in-person day at Raum Mannheim featuring project insights on Fallout Season 2, Netflix’s The Dinosaurs, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey, plus a talk by Director and VFX Supervisor Hugo Guerra.

Dates and tickets, plus the reality check

Tickets are on sale, and the “On Site” runs at Haus der Wirtschaft in Stuttgart from May 5 to 7, Online and On Campus run on May 8, and On Demand runs from May 9 to June 9. See all of you there!

https://fmx.de/en

The post FMX 2026 adds animation, lens talks and of course AI first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Blender To Unreal Live Link is built around a simple promise: push models, materials, and textures from Blender into Unreal Engine without bouncing through a traditional export and reimport loop. The workflow centers on a Blender add-on and Unreal-side Python scripts that sit inside your project so the handoff happens from inside your normal working tools. The add-on supports one-click sending, and it also offers an auto-sync mode for iterative work.

Milad Kambari (Artstation) sells the add-on for $18 on Superhive.

Getting connected without guessing

After installing the Unreal plugin and the Blender add-on, the two applications connect through a Start Live Link action on each side. In Blender, the workflow uses a Start Live Link button. In Unreal, the workflow uses a Blender Live Link menu with its own Start Live Link action.

The first connection can take longer than later runs because the network communication between the applications establishes itself for the first time. A connected status indicates the link is established. If you want to confirm the setup path executes correctly, the workflow suggests checking the log and watching for errors shown in red. If you do not see red errors, that indicates the path was set up correctly, and the instruction is to keep the plugin and scripts in the right place and stay patient while the connection finishes.

Send selected, send full scene, and why one is a trap

Once connected, the basic transfer flow centres on selecting assets in Blender and sending them across. The add-on offers two transfer options: Send Full Scene and Send Selected. Send Full Scene is positioned for smaller to medium scenes, and Send Selected is positioned for larger scenes where you only push what you need.

The usage guidance recommends not leaning too heavily on Send Full Scene because real scenes can be heavy, with a large number of objects. The suggested working method is to proceed with Send Selected so you keep control of what moves over, and to transfer heavier scenes piece by piece. The stated goal is better scene management while avoiding the need for extensive hardware resources.

The workflow description also demonstrates sending multiple objects at once using Send Selected, where selecting multiple objects and running the send results in both arriving in Unreal.

Materials, textures, and the two-lane road

Material transfer is included alongside geometry transfer. The tool is described as able to send materials along with textures, including transferring a model together with its texture. The product listing also states that simple physically based materials transfer automatically with textures for base color, normal, roughness, and metallic.

When materials get more complex, the workflow shifts to a different option. The add-on includes a Bake and Send Selected mode intended for complex materials that need baking before they can be sent. The listing describes complex shader setups using nodes such as the Mix node as examples that can require this path. In this mode, materials are baked into clean textures for transfer, and the workflow is described as non-destructive, restoring original materials after the send. The tool detects whether a model has UV maps. If UV maps exist, it does not alter them and uses them for baking. If a model does not have UV maps, it can generate UV maps as needed for baking.

Live sync, but with a leash

Live sync mode sends changes automatically, but the workflow has a specific rhythm. For edit mode changes, the flow relies on exiting edit mode. After you make an edit, you exit edit mode and return to object mode so the edit becomes visible in Unreal.

Live sync is also framed as “something to use carefully”. The developer does not recommend using it extensively because it can require hardware resoruces due to the different graphical structures of the two applications.

Hierarchies, pivots, and scale sanity

On the scene-structure side, the listing describes parent and child support. Selecting a parent object can include its mesh children automatically, which matters when you are working with grouped meshes or hierarchical scene organisation.

It also preserves pivots. Object origins from Blender are preserved in Unreal, so the pivot behaviour you author in Blender carries through after transfer. Scale handling is called out too. The listing describes a 1 to 1 scale relationship between Blender and Unreal, aimed at avoiding the classic scale mismatch workflow pain. Transforms are part of the transfer. Location, rotation, and scale are sent and applied in Unreal.

What is included and what it needs

The package includes a Blender add-on file and Unreal Python scripts named blender_livelink_addon.py, livelink_unreal.py, and init_unreal.py.

System requirements list Blender 5.0 or higher and Unreal Engine 5.5 or higher, plus Windows 10 or 11, with the condition that both applications must run on the same machine.

Pricing is listed as $18.

Practical takeaways for production artists

If your daily loop includes moving assets from Blender into Unreal for lookdev, lighting, layout, or realtime checks, this tool focuses on reducing the friction in that handoff. It provides Send Selected for controlled transfers, Send Full Scene for smaller setups, and Bake and Send Selected for complex material cases that need baking. It also includes live sync for iterative updates, with workflow notes about exiting edit mode so edits propagate.

As with any new pipeline tool, test it in your own environment before you rely on it for production.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/blender-to-unreal-live-link

The post Real-time Blender to Unreal Live Link first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Atlux λ plugs into Unreal Engine and ships a virtual studio, lights, presets, and automation for fast renders. It is sold on Fab and can also be installed with the Epic Games Launcher.

Fab listing, now with Mac support

Atlux λ is now available on Fab as a visualisation plugin for Unreal Engine. The newest version adds macOS support. The plugin is solo-developed by Jorge Valle Hurtado. The plugin requires account registration. The listing also shows no rating yet, Allows usage with AI set to Yes, and Generated with AI set to No.

The pitch, minus the pitchforks

The core idea: a complete in-editor photo studio-style workflow aimed at speeding up lighting, rendering, and cinematic work inside Unreal Engine. In practice, that means a Virtual Photo Studio, realistic light assets, studio and light presets, camera motion presets, an automated turntable, batch rendering, post-process materials and LUTs, procedural gobos, VFX reference assets, and a simplified render interface.

A key workflow point is automation around sequences and rendering. Rendering takes one click, with everything handled automatically, and no manual Level Sequences or Movie Render Queue setup required. That is a big promise, so treat it as a workflow claim until you validate it in your own scenes and build environment.

One click rendering as a pipeline building block

If you have ever tried to standardise look dev outputs across a team, you know the dull truth: the hardest part is rarely the final pixels. It is the repeatability. Atlux λ leans into repeatability by bundling its own studio environments, lighting assets, presets, and a streamlined render interface, then pushing users toward a single-button render flow. The idea is to keep the shot setup and output consistent, especially when multiple artists work on the same asset library.

That is also where the curated content matters. When a tool ships with production-ready assets and presets, it reduces the number of decisions per shot and lowers the odds that one artist accidentally reinvents the sun at 3 a.m. It also gives supervisors a clearer target for what “correct” looks like in a shared lighting and camera language.

Gaussian Splatting prep, with COLMAP export

The feature list includes COLMAP export for Gaussian Splatting workflows. For teams experimenting with Splatting , the practical value depends on how smoothly the exported data lines up with your existing reconstruction steps and tooling, including COLMAP. The sources do not provide detailed specifications for what is exported or how it maps to downstream tools, so you will need to validate that part yourself.

Atlux λ Live and packaging as a desktop app

The feature list also includes Atlux λ Live, described as a “runtime version” that allows users to package a scene as a fully interactive desktop application, for purposes such as interactive client presentations, sharing scenes without requiring the Unreal Editor, and delivering a controlled runtime experience using the toolset.

If you have ever handed off an interactive review build to a client, you already know why this matters. Packaging is rarely hard in theory. It is hard because it is always the week you cannot afford surprises. Treat the packaging automation as a convenience feature that still deserves a dry run on your target machines and OS versions.

Pricing and licensing, in plain numbers

Pricing is now official: A Personal perpetual license is listed at US$249.99 excluding tax. A Professional perpetual license is listed at US$349.99 excluding tax. Both are perpetual licenses with one active user on any computer, offline access, and full support, updates, and maintenance.

The buy page has a standalone installer for Windows only for the Personal and Professional options, and it also describes purchasing via Fab with the same Personal and Professional pricing, plus availability on Mac and inclusion in the Epic Games Launcher.

Educational pricing is also specified on the same page. An Educational Rental is listed at US$4.95 per month excluding tax, described as cancel any time, one active user on any computer, and support, updates, and maintenance while active, with Windows only and a requirement for school or academy validation.

Support is for Unreal Engine versions 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7.

// Fab listing page for Atlux λ
https://www.fab.com/listings/3c321e8e-f0b0-4235-ba38-02d59299869b
// Official product homepage and feature overview
https://atlux.one/

Atlux λ 2 brings 3D scanning inside Unreal

The post VINZI Atlux λ arrives on Fab first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Epic Games has published Automotive Substrate Materials as a free download on Fab. The pack is built entirely on Substrate and is positioned as a production-ready material foundation for automotive visualization, with the explicit goal of delivering consistent results across Lumen and Path Tracing workflows. In practical terms: it is a big, curated library meant to reduce the amount of time artists spend reinventing “car paint, but again” in every new project.

Compatibility is spelled out, too: the materials are compatible with Unreal Engine 5.7.3 and later. If your studio is still emotionally attached to an older engine branch, this pack is not going to negotiate with you.

What is inside the pack

Epic’s own breakdown is specific, which is always a good sign on a Monday (We prefer small words in the Mornings, and even smaller words and easy, short sentences on a Monday Morning.). Automotive Substrate Materials includes 280 automotive-focused materials covering common vehicle material types. It also includes 150 material setup assets and roughly 50 reusable material templates (Fab’s listing calls this 47 templates).

On top of the materials themselves, there are two maps meant to serve as reference and validation spaces: a “zoo-style” overview map organised by material type, plus a calibrated look-development map built for high-quality automotive rendering.

The pack is not just a dump of nodes and textures. Epic frames it as a ground-truth reference for game development as well, meaning you can use it as a baseline for physically plausible values and repeatable results, even if the end product is not a configurator shot of a hyper-polished BMW coupe turning slowly in a void, without any other cars, which is the preferred state of being for BMW drivers. Otherwise, I can’t explain their behaviour on the streets.

Why Substrate matters here

Substrate is Unreal Engine’s newer material framework, designed to support more modular and expressive material authoring than the older fixed shading model approach. In this pack, Epic leans on that flexibility to cover surface and layering behaviour that was described as difficult or impractical with previous material systems. The examples are the usual automotive suspects, but done with the kind of detail that tends to break “generic” shaders: multi-coat car paints (single-, dual-, and triple-coat), waxed leathers, and advanced translucent materials with renderer-specific behaviour. (Indicators, which is useless if you render BMWs, but useful for all other cars.)

Epic also calls out complex surface responses, including glints and coloured glints, thin-film interference, anisotropy, perforation with masking, plus controlled imperfections such as fingerprints and scratches. There are also production-friendly controls for colour (tint and HSV) and map-driven parameters such as roughness and specular, alongside flexible mapping options, including UV and triplanar workflows. That is a long list, but the short version is: the pack is built to survive close-ups and does not assume your camera will politely stay far away. And this time, we are avoiding the BMW-in-the-rearview-mirror-joke.

One detail that will matter for pipeline sanity is that Epic says the materials are built on a shared library of reusable material functions encapsulating common behaviours such as base colour handling, roughness and specular control, triplanar projection, imperfections, anisotropy, emissive behaviour, and perforation. That modular architecture is presented as a way to keep results consistent and reduce duplication, which is the unglamorous kind of promise that actually saves teams money. Money you could spend on a company car, like a BMW.

Measured data, Blueprint lookup, and the “trust me, it’s calibrated” problem

Epic states that material parameters are derived from lab experiments and real-world measurements, providing physically accurate defaults for automotive scenarios. For metals specifically, measured data is exposed through a Blueprint lookup tool intended to help teams select and compare metal presets while keeping values consistent across a project.

The calibration story continues on the environment side: Epic says the lighting in the look development map has been cross-checked using luminance and colour temperature meters, along with photogrammetry-based measurements, and calibrated for both Lumen and the Path Tracer. The stated intent is that you can use the map as a reproducible validation environment for automotive visualisation and game development.

This is the quiet subtext of the whole release: the pack is not only “free materials” but it is also Epic handing you a reference lab in project form. Your future self, debugging why a clear coat looks different between render modes, may send you a thank-you card. Or a passive-aggressive Jira ticket. And I’ve run out of BMW jokes.

Fab listing: Automotive Substrate Materials on Fab (Fab.com)

Additional Notes:

Uses standard texture samplers (Virtual Textures not enabled by default).

Substrate must be enabled with Adaptive GBuffer.

Separate materials provided where Lumen and Path Tracing differ.

Includes calibrated physical camera exposure based environment for validation.

Emissive values support physically accurate luminance (nits).

Decals suggest using Decal Actors.

The post 280 free automotive Substrate materials for UE 5.7 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

InstaMAT has set out to become nothing less than the holy grail of the material and texture pipeline. To that end, it combines a layer-based painting system with a scalable node-based material and asset editor, adds a mix of innovative features, and builds on InstaLOD’s mesh-processing DNA. We are taking a closer look at this ambitious package to see whether it can earn a place in a real production pipeline, or whether the free version will remain its main selling point.

In the spirit of Substance Painter, we start by texturing an asset. The Element Graph, comparable to Substance Designer, will be examined in detail in a second part. We will not ignore it entirely here, as the tight integration between these areas offers too many interesting possibilities to leave aside.

For our demo workflow, we need a suitable asset. Which object combines all materials in one place? Exactly, the pasta strainer portafilter. Wood, plastic, metal, and something organic. Quickly modelled in Houdini and exported as USD.

PROJECT vs PACKAGE

A bit of differentiation is needed here. The welcome screen first offers the option to create a project, which then leads to a second level of choices. For the sake of simplicity, we loosely map familiar tools to the respective options, but this is only a rough orientation. InstaMAT is not restricted to these boundaries and lives from the interplay between its different areas.

Asset Texturing works much like Substance Painter, allowing you to paint directly onto a mesh or apply materials.

Material Layer Project is closest to Substance Sampler or Quixel Mixer, enabling the creation of a new material by layering pre-made materials.

Materialize Image uses AI-based methods to generate a PBR material from a photograph.

Element Graph operates in the vein of Houdini’s Copernicus or Substance Designer, providing a node-based environment for material creation. InstaMAT goes significantly further here, offering everything from automated mesh processing to terrain generation.

That said, this initial choice is not particularly critical. Afterward, you end up in the Package overview, where you can freely create additional projects and import assets. It is best to think of a Package as a folder structure that contains your projects, such as layer painting setups and node graphs, along with all imported meshes and assets.

UV Unwrapping

For our purposes, “Asset Texturing” is the obvious next step. Unfortunately, the modeller clearly had nothing but pasta on their mind and forgot about the UVs. According to InstaMAT, this is not a problem at all. This is where the mesh functionality inherited from InstaLOD comes into play.

We start with our first small Element Graph, created via File > New Project > Element Graph. The unwrapping itself happens inside this controlled node-based environment. Since we do not want to keep things too simple, we split our mesh into three UDIM tiles for the handle, the strainer, and the noodles. The USD mesh is added to the Package via drag and drop and from there into the still empty node graph.

During import, InstaMAT triangulates the mesh in the background. If issues occur at this stage, for example with non-importable NURBS geometry such as the noodles, it helps to pre-triangulate the mesh in the DCC application. The basic unwrap pipeline consists of adding a Mesh UV Unwrap node via the space bar, and that is essentially it. Different methods are available, including Organic, Hard Surface Axial, and Angle. In our case, we use Hard Surface Axial.

Noodles with UVs

Since the noodles already have UVs and we want to unwrap the handle and metal parts separately, we split the asset using the Mesh Extract by Submesh node. Submesh masks detect connected polygon flows within a mesh. This very useful node is also available in the Layer Painting context.

To generate UDIMs, we offset two of the node branches by one and two units respectively using Mesh UV Transform, then merge the three branches with Mesh Append. Finally, we export the mesh, now equipped with proper UV tiles, as FBX. Details on the export dialog and the rather central export button will be covered later in this article.

Orientation

We drag the FBX we just exported into our Package and can now create an Asset Texturing project. For new projects within a Package, there is a very prominent “+” button. In the project dialog, the key setting to watch is Type set to UDIM, and selecting the mesh from the Package. Templates can safely be ignored for now.

In terms of logic, the interface follows the conventions of established painting applications. You find your way around quickly and, more importantly, actually enjoy working in it. There are a few quirks, but after some quality time in InstaMAT, they stop standing out.

Interface

So we begin with the classic material brawl. We pick suitable materials from the library and happily mix them using all kinds of masks. A first plastic material is selected from the library on the left (A) and dragged directly onto the handle. Even though this is a single mesh, InstaMAT automatically and correctly masks the handle’s polygon flow using the same submesh technique, via Mesh Mask by Submesh. That is genuinely practical.

The library also contains grunge maps, decals, alphas, and similar assets. Navigation is quick, helped by various filters and view options. The additional tabs on the left, above the library, lead to the project settings. These include the UDIM setup, bit depth and colour space per channel, and the underlying mesh. There are also viewport settings, such as tone mapping, AgX in our case, lighting controls like HDR blur and saturation, and render settings. Thanks to optional ray tracing and global illumination, the viewport looks quite presentable.

As expected for this genre, the HDR can be rotated interactively using Shift plus right mouse button. The icon with the open package finally takes us back to the Package overview, listing all projects and assets. The bar above the viewport (B) acts as a quick access toolbar. It contains the baking and export dialogs, as well as a few, partly duplicated, commands for the layer view and the handy option for creating new projects.

The layer stack (C) itself is built in a very traditional way and holds no real surprises in terms of logic. Individual channels such as base colour, normal, and roughness can be selected, their opacity adjusted, masked, and enhanced with effects and generators. Things become more interesting with the “Reference” function, which we will come back to shortly, along with the two different layer types.

Below the layers palette are the layer settings (D). These include options such as projection type, for example decal, triplanar, and UV. More options will likely appear here in the future. This area also holds the material or brush settings, as well as channel mapping, provided the layer is based on an Element Graph. At the bottom, we find the Image Viewer (E) for checking textures, baked maps, and masks.

The Great Noodle Bake Off

Before we really dive into the materials, we need to handle baking. This is where the geometric details of our mesh are “baked” into 2D textures. This is essential because without maps like Curvature, Ambient Occlusion (AO), World Space Normals, or Position, the generators and masks would be groping in the dark later on. For instance, the rust effect used later relies on the Curvature map to locate edges.

The Baking Dialog (accessible via the toast icon in the toolbar) is easy to understand: check the desired maps, select the resolution, and fire up the oven. The finished textures land neatly organized in our Package and are automatically linked by InstaMAT, so we can get started right away.

Material Brawl and Layering

InstaMAT ships with around 1,000 procedural materials covering a wide range of use cases, and they look genuinely good. Additional materials can be created either in the Element Graph using nodes or via Photo2PBR. A few hundred more can be found on the in-house Polyverse platform, even though that ecosystem does not (yet) come close to the breadth of Adobe’s Substance Assets.

For the metal parts, we drag a nicely scratched, used-look material straight onto the mesh. Since all bundled materials are created in the Element Graph, they can also be opened there and adjusted down to the smallest detail. The black plastic is replaced with an oiled wood material from the library.

The materials already come with pleasing imperfections, but they are still a bit too well-behaved. Time to dive into generators, filters, effects, and masks. For the obligatory hint of rust found in any respectable kitchen, we first drop a Rust Iron material onto the strainer and select Edge Wear Mask directly under Mask. To avoid overly regular edges, we multiply in a grunge map using Mesh Project Mask. This workflow will feel familiar.

The Brush Engine

First contact with the brush engine happens through Mesh Mask Painting. Here, we can use a brush and repurposed decals as brush masks to add targeted stains. Once again, the interplay with the node graph becomes apparent. Under the hood, the stain decal is not a simple alpha image but a highly adjustable Element Graph. Parameters such as the number of splatters and the dryness at the core can be tweaked, and endless variations can be generated via the seed.

Need your own micro-scratch alpha? Then you build it in the Element Graph. Using the plus icon in the top bar, we create a new graph and, in fast-forward, turn a thin oval shape generator into a pattern with random rotation, scale, and opacity using the Guided Scatter node, controlled chaos, in other words. Warp and Slope Blur nodes handle distortion and edge bleeding for the individual scratches, driven by procedural noises and grunge maps. A final grunge map multiplies in extra detail, and the result is written out via an Output node to our Package under Paintbrushes and Masks, immediately ready for use in painting.

Proper Scratches

To properly scratch up the nice wooden handle, we create a new multichannel layer, also known as a fill layer, above the wood layer. We enable only the Height channel and set it to Subtract. On the wood layer, we paint a mesh painting mask using the brush we just created, accessed via the Asset Browser, and reference this mask on the new height layer using Mask Reference. Below the wood layer, we drop an Aged Wood material, so that lighter core wood shows through in the scratched areas. The principle is a familiar one.

 A Matter of View

Using the shortcut C, we cycle through the channels. With S, we activate solo mode for the currently active layer, including masks. By right-clicking on a layer and choosing Output for Current Channel, the channel opens in the 2D viewer. A few dropdowns would be welcome here. Viewing a more complex mask is also still a bit cumbersome. If we want to see the combined effect of an entire mask stack, we have to right-click the topmost mask layer and select View Composite Output. The well-established Alt-click on a mask would be preferable here.

That said, InstaMAT is still very young and developing rapidly. These quality-of-life features will likely be implemented sooner rather than later, especially since the team actively listens to user feedback and feature requests.

Multichannel-Element-Layer

In the layer palette, we find four fundamental layer types: Multichannel Layer, Element Layer, Multichannel Brush, and Element Brush. A Multichannel Layer acts as an almost omnipotent stem cell and can essentially become anything. Right after creation, it looks rather unassuming, showing only a colour in the base colour channel. This is where the range of possibilities starts to unfold. Instead of a flat colour (which applies to all channels), we can assign textures, procedural graphics, layer references, or full Element Graphs.

If we want to use texture maps from an external material inside InstaMAT, this is the layer to use. Once the maps are imported into our Package, we assign them to the corresponding channels on the layer and end up with zucchini noodles. Do not forget the mesh mask, we accidentally create the world’s first vegan portafilter. It is best applied to a folder rather than directly to the layer.

An Element Layer is simply an Element Graph applied as a layer on the mesh. Typical examples include materials and noises, but also more exotic options such as BezierCurve, which lets us draw a curve in a separate window and project it onto the mesh as a decal. Following this logic, the Element Brush allows us to paint directly onto the mesh using a material or any other Element Graph-based asset, while the Multichannel Brush represents the classic empty painting layer across all channels.

InstaMAT Unmasked

When it comes to masks, InstaMAT offers a wide range of options. The previously mentioned Mesh Projected Mask can be filled with more than just grunge maps or textures. Any graph, effect, or generator can be used, even those originally intended for something else. For exploration, it is worth typing “mask” into the search field and browsing through options such as Aged Paint or more unusual entries like Circular Scatter.

The Polygon Mask operates using a freely movable 3D cube or sphere in space. These masks can be modified with an arbitrary number of filters. Do not rely solely on the Add Filter menu. Browsing under Pick from Library reveals even more options.

The Volume Mask is a bounding box mask. It treats the entire object as a cube, can be moved freely, and allows for softened edges. A clear highlight is the Mesh Mask, which identifies connected polygon flows. For Houdini users, this corresponds to name attributes or USD paths.

King of Masks

The undisputed king of masks, however, is the Mesh Mask Builder. It allows the creation of highly complex masks within a single layer. It not only accesses baked mesh maps but also, as if internal references were set, picks up on effects previously painted onto other layers. The Layer Ambient Occlusion function, for example, incorporates existing scratches. Directional behaves like a freely positionable spotlight, or aligns itself to normals, and Curvature forms the basis for all edge wear effects. Grunge and scratch layers are then used to break things up again. This starts to look suspiciously like an Element Graph, and indeed, building custom masks of this complexity is entirely possible.

Additional masks can be found in the asset library. Examples include the Mesh Leaks Mask, which simulates dripping fluids, the Light Mask, which allows actual lights, such as area lights, to be positioned and used as masking tools, and the Layer Height Curvature Mask, which takes height information from all layers as curvature input.

And just because we can, we quickly build our own mask in the Element Graph. It generates a Voronoi pattern as a base and distorts it with a few nodes, exposing their sliders as parameters. Saved under Mesh/Mask, it appears immediately in the layer palette and can eventually be used for some painterly look, one day. The important part is that it works, and it opens up a large range of possibilities. This mask look can be extended further into a complex generator or even a full material as an Element Layer.

Generators and Effects and Filters

At their core, generators are practical Element Graphs designed to take the pain out of detail work. A good example is the highly configurable Scratches Generator, which can wreak havoc across low and high frequency damage, complete with per-parameter variation. Numerous additional controls, such as distort and warp, help achieve a more organic look. This should feel familiar from the Element Graph when we built our own scratches brush tip. Helpfully, each generator or graph displays a short description directly underneath it.

Effects and filters have close relatives in any image editing application. At first glance, you encounter the usual suspects like Swirl, Radial Blur, and Warp, along with Levels, Curves, and Saturation. Things get more interesting once we switch to Pick from Library. Here, a more adventurous set reveals itself. Channels can be mixed, HSL values randomised, film grain added, the previously mentioned Edge Detect used for mask refinement, or photoreal textures pushed into a stylised direction via Stylized filters.

Filters and effects are spread across the library a bit. It is worth browsing through different categories such as Image, Mesh, or Material and simply throwing what you find onto the asset to see what happens.

Decals

Logos, icons, bullet holes, and similar details are commonly projected onto a mesh as so-called decals. In InstaMAT, an image is simply dragged directly onto the mesh and positioned in Decal mode. Under the hood, this creates a multichannel layer, allowing us to add a separate roughness or height map, as well as additional masks.

It is also possible to project an entire folder structure containing materials and custom masks onto the mesh by using a Mesh Projected Mask set to Decal mode, effectively turning the whole setup into a decal.

Hand Painted … Look

When it comes to hand painting, InstaMAT distinguishes between actual hand painting and a hand-painted look, however that is achieved. The latter is easy to produce thanks to its procedural approach, with powerful masks and generators. In the most brute-force way, we could build an oil paint effect in the Element Graph and apply it directly on top of a PBR texture, or simply use the Stylize material effect. Conveniently, this need not even happen in the painting context. Everything can be done in the node graph, as effects and filters are accessible everywhere, making it easy to create variations.

So what exactly can the brush engine do right now, and what can it not do yet? At the moment, we have three tools: Paint Brush, Eraser, and Paint Projector. Artists who like to actually swing a brush can set brush size, rotation, position, and flow to be constant, random, or driven by pen pressure, which works very precise and smooth on my Wacom. There are also options for axis-symmetrical and path-oriented painting, along with fundamentals such as falloff and spacing.

For now, that is unfortunately all. Tools that are essential for serious hand painting, such as Smudge, Stamp, and Lazy Mouse, are already on the roadmap but not yet available. (Buuuuut: We were able to catch a glimpse of a preview build. It already features many improvements, like Lazy Mouse, mighty Curves for your seam needs, and Radial Symmetry.

The Paint Projector works in a familiar way, allowing us to paint a texture onto the mesh from a camera perspective using a brush, or alternatively apply it directly as a mask. At the moment, only 3D painting in the viewport is supported. 2D painting in the texture viewer is currently in development. The real strength of the current system lies in the ability to design custom brushes, masks, alphas, and effects in fine detail via the Element Graph.

Material Generation from Photos

What if the handle is made from kitchen tiles? Time to test material creation from photos. To turn a simple smartphone photo into a usable material, we once again start a new project via the “+” button, this time choosing Materialize Image and selecting our image. In the next step, we already get a preview of the resulting material. The input image can be cropped or upscaled using neural assistance. The Color Equalizer normalises the image, while Base Color Shadow Cancellation removes lighting influences from the photograph. Individual channels can be adjusted separately. For example, roughness can be broken up using a grunge map. Optional dust and dirt effects can be added directly.

Once the prominent Save button in the top bar is pressed, the material becomes available in both the painting context and the node graph. From this point on, we can freely switch back and forth between the Materialize and Texturing tabs to refine the result.

For more complex materials, the node graph comes into play. Materialize Image appears here as a node. Why does this matter? It allows us to process individual channels using the full power of the image processing engine, combine them with other materials, or push the look in a more stylised direction.

Mesh Changes

Just before finishing these lines, our modeller made a few changes to the mesh. Fortunately, we can simply drag our existing unwrapping graph into a new graph, which gives us a node with exactly one input and one output, and then add the updated mesh. Since the naming and number of submeshes have not changed, the unwrapping is effectively done at that point. We duplicate the project via File > Save Project Copy and replace the mesh in the Project Editor. Re-bake the maps once, and we are done.

But what happened to our hand-painted masks? Did they carry over in the same way as the generators? Thankfully, yes. This apparent magic is explained by the fact that every single brush stroke is stored in 3D space rather than painted onto the 2D UVs. As long as the mesh does not change too drastically, as in this case, the strokes are always projected onto the correct location. Only one decal needed a slight adjustment, which was to be expected given the slightly different mesh orientation. We will take a look at how to implement this in an automated and scalable way within the node environment at a later point.

Performance and Flow

InstaMAT runs pleasantly smoothly and feels modern, admittedly a subjective impression. In some places, you can sense the procedural foundation. Especially when opening a project, it can take a moment for everything to be recalculated, depending on complexity. Helpfully, the UI displays VRAM usage in the bottom right. In this project, four UDIMs at 4096 resolution with 16 bits per channel filled 24 GB of VRAM once, resulting in a crash. Paying attention to the red warning icon and restarting the application promptly would likely have prevented that. For performance optimisation, the project resolution can be changed at any time, for example, working at 2048 and exporting at 4096, or by disabling viewport ray tracing. Or even better: Limit VRAM usage in the settings. This leaves some memory for the system.

Export & Rendering

The Export button, centrally located in the top bar of the UI, opens a clear, well-structured menu. Here, in fairly standard fashion, we can set file formats, resolution, and bit depth, with the latter two configurable per UDIM. Desired channels can be added via simple toggles, and the entire setup can be saved as a template.

When creating a template, we can go a step further and fine-tune the mapping of individual channels and enable output converters. These can, for example, convert roughness into glossiness maps or allow us to choose between DirectX and OpenGL normal formats.

The export itself is quite fast, and the maps are easily picked up by Octane and Karma (and likely by every other engine, too). Here are some rendered examples, it was a lot of fun to noodle around with the maps, putting them through their paces in extreme close-ups and under various lighting conditions

Community and Tutorials

Help, information, and like-minded pioneers can be found on Abstract’s Discord. On YouTube, there is a growing number of tutorials and presentations created by the steadily expanding community and by Abstract and its founder.

Particularly helpful: the application ships with several well-documented example scenes that can be dissected, studied at leisure, or used as a starting point. These well-documented sample projects make it easier to get started and illustrate solution paths for more complex problems.

Good ideas and user feedback are always welcome; feature requests can be posted right here in the forum: https://community.abstract3d.com/c/instamat/features/67

Polyverse

Think of Polyverse as InstaMAT’s extended arm into the web and collaborative workflows. It doesn’t just execute InstaMAT on the server side. It simultaneously serves as a management, versioning, and review tool for assets and materials. This even includes direct download plugins for Unreal and Blender. Beyond that, assets and materials can be processed right in the browser. Tasks like file conversions or turntable generation can be handled directly online

Pricing and Availability

The good news first: InstaMAT is available as a fully featured Pioneer License for free, as long as your revenue stays below USD 100,000 and you mention the tool. Above that threshold, there is an Indie version for revenues under USD 250,000. This is available either as a perpetual licence for USD 489 or as a subscription for EUR 8 per month.
Wait, a subscription? Software development costs a lot of money and needs to be funded somehow. You have to keep in mind that Abstract is not a global corporation. It is a small German developer with fewer than 30 employees. Considering they poured a lot of private capital into InstaMAT, the price is actually more than fair.

Beyond that, there is also a Pro version that offers the same integration with game engines as the Indie license. The Pro license removes the 250k USD revenue cap and includes server-based services, such as a virtual machine for running InstaMAT.

One important detail: the Pioneer License is an always-on licence. When my Wi-Fi dropped out once, InstaMAT immediately followed suit because the licence could no longer be validated. Offline licensing is only available at the Enterprise level or higher. A compromise is the Indie and Pro license that only requires occasional connection with the internet.

Sneak Peak

Just before wrapping up these lines (again), I managed to catch a glimpse of an early preview build. I cannot go into too much detail, but plenty of great things are coming our way. The brush updates include Lazy Mouse, Radial Symmetry, and Curve Tools, alongside a new Mesh Mask from normal and new Materials. The release is already planned for Q1! (Since all brush operations run procedurally in the background, adjustable post-drawing deformers like jitter are also on the roadmap. However, they might not be ready for the very next version.)

Instalove? The Verdict

The seamless and immediate integration of Painting and Nodegraph makes InstaMAT a remarkably fast and flexible tool. The Element Graph is an incredibly powerful instrument with capabilities that extend far beyond pure image processing found in other tools (our journey of discovery promises, among other things, RBD sims, complex mesh processing, automation, and even terrain creation). It can be compared to Houdini: if we are missing a specific effect, tool, or setting, we can very likely build or adapt it ourselves directly in the Element Graph.

The decision to compute brush strokes in 3D space rather than 2D is a clever design choice that directly addresses the reality of changing base meshes and scalability. However, a few brush tools are still missing to fully satisfy dedicated hand-painting artists. Though those who primarily paint masks won’t find this particularly bothersome. Speaking of which, the masks are another major strength: clever generators and the interplay between masks (maps) make complex effects achievable very quickly.

Anyone familiar with the Substance ecosystem won’t take long to feel right at home in InstaMAT. I highly recommend trying out the free Pioneer License to see how you can integrate the tool into your workflow. It is well worth it and will lead to quite a few “Aha!” moments.

What I liked most:

• The integration of painting and node graph, with the ability to intervene and combine procedurally at any point
• The highly customizable masks
• Performance & Flow
• Brush strokes and basically everything else are calculated in 3D space, so its easy to change the modell oder make automatic texture processes.

Room for improvement:

• Channel/Mask viewing is still a bit cumbersome
• Direct brush & painting features such as Clone, Path, and Smear

With the new update on the horizon, many wishes are being addressed. Once released, we will take another close look at InstaMAT. We will also dive deeper into the terrain and scaling workflows then.

The post InstaMAT Test: Painting, Procedurals and Pasta first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Manuel Kotulla.

The new CardCutter add-on for Blender converts texture masks into usable 3D geometry for Nanite-based projects in Unreal Engine 5. Created by developer Philipp Russo, the tool simplifies building game-ready foliage and decals by generating optimised meshes directly from source textures.

CardCutter operates as a geometry generation tool that converts 2D texture data, either alpha-masked colour images or greyscale masks, into fully triangulated 3D meshes suitable for Nanite rendering. The add-on functions within Blender’s Python API and supports Blender 4.0 or higher. According to the developer, the geometry output is designed to conform to Nanite’s mesh constraints, favouring dense, evenly distributed triangles over traditional quad-based topologies.

Each processed mask is interpreted as a binary image, with the alpha threshold defining the polygon contour. The tool applies an internal vectorisation step to trace the boundary of the visible region, followed by a polygon simplification algorithm to remove redundant vertices. It then uses a relaxation solver to re-distribute triangle density uniformly across the surface, creating stable topology for Nanite’s internal micro-polygon clustering.

Automatic atlas splitting

When the user provides a texture atlas (for example, a leaf sheet), CardCutter automatically detects discrete masked regions using connected-component labelling. Each detected region becomes a separate mesh object in Blender’s scene graph. This removes the need for manual cutting or polygon mask painting, which is typically required in foliage production. Each region retains its local UV coordinates, preserving the original texture mapping from the atlas. The output meshes can be exported directly as FBX or glTF, maintaining UV alignment and pivot orientation suitable for Unreal Engine import.

Geometry presets for performance tiers

CardCutter offers several density presets: Low, Medium, and High, which define the target number of triangles per pixel area. The lower settings generate lightweight meshes for background vegetation, while the higher settings produce Nanite-ready geometry that benefits from Unreal’s automatic cluster streaming.

The generated meshes are particularly intended for organic and irregular silhouettes like leaves, vines, ivy, ferns, but the developer also notes suitable use cases in flat debris, stickers, posters, and paper scraps, where alpha planes normally create overdraw problems.

In Nanite rendering, alpha cutouts are computationally expensive since masked fragments are still rasterised. By converting them into actual geometry, CardCutter removes the transparency pass entirely, allowing the GPU to perform visibility culling at the triangle level. This is beneficial for scenes with dense foliage or decal overlays.

Export workflow and integration

Meshes generated by CardCutter can be exported directly from Blender using Unreal’s standard FBX pipeline. The add-on does not alter material data; instead, it preserves UV maps for external shading setups. Unreal users can apply the same texture as an opacity mask or base colour without modification.

CardCutter also supports consistent vertex orientation to avoid flipped normals during export. According to the developer, all geometry is manifold and suitable for Nanite import without further cleanup, though it may require triangulation if the user modifies topology post-generation.

Pricing and licensing

CardCutter is distributed via Gumroad. The Individual/Freelance licence costs €12 and includes full functionality, updates, and one user seat. The Studio/Enterprise licence, priced at €50, allows unlimited installations within one facility and provides priority support for pipeline integration. Both include lifetime updates and are maintained by Philipp Russo under The Triangle Forge label.

Technical limitations and notes

At the time of publication, CardCutter is compatible exclusively with Blender 4.0 or newer. The add-on does not currently support real-time texture-to-mesh previews or batch automation through the command line.

Users should test export consistency when integrating the tool into complex Unreal foliage systems that depend on hierarchical instancing or runtime material overrides. The add-on outputs static geometry only, without procedural modifiers or animation rigs.

The post CardCutter turns texture into Nanite meshes first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Unreal Engine by Epic Games is a real-time 3D engine widely used across film, television, and game production pipelines. The Control Rig system lets artists create and animate rigs directly in-engine without external DCC dependencies. With the A-COM Animation Sample, developed by Agora Studio, Epic demonstrates a full animation workflow entirely inside Unreal.

Free for All: Rigging in UE 5.6

Epic Games has released its “Rigging in Unreal Engine 5.6 Workshop” on the Epic Developer Community, opening up a previously invite-only, five-day training programme to all users for free. The workshop focuses on developing production-ready rigging skills using Unreal Engine’s Control Rig system. Originally designed for professional riggers and technical artists, the course now offers anyone the chance to follow Epic’s structured, studio-grade approach to animation rigging. Participants can access videos, slides, and assets directly through the community platform.

Hands-On Control Rig Training

The workshop guides users through constructing a complete biped rig, starting with simple props and progressing to complex facial controls. It emphasises practical rigging workflows that can integrate directly into real-time production pipelines. According to Epic, the content covers foundational and advanced rigging topics: Unreal Engine basics, animation tool setup, skeletal editing, FK/IK and spline configuration, deformers, blend shapes (morph target animation), and Control Rig physics.The training also includes sections on procedural controls, dynamic systems, and Python-based tools, designed to encourage experimentation while remaining rooted in practical production scenarios.

Built on the A-COM Animation Sample

The course uses the A-COM Animation Sample project, created by Agora Studio, as its base. The sample demonstrates a full animation pipeline inside Unreal Engine 5.6, including rigging, keyframe animation, lighting, VFX, and rendering. The project’s robotic characters and production assets provide real-world context for learning rigging techniques. Both the A-COM Animation Sample and the workshop materials are downloadable from the Epic Developer Community and Fab.

Production Relevance

Epic positions the workshop for mid to senior-level riggers who are migrating to Unreal Engine’s real-time Control Rig system from traditional DCC-based pipelines (such as Maya or Blender). The company emphasises immediate applicability of the techniques in professional environments, though users are encouraged to test and adapt workflows before deployment in actual productions.

And, just saying: with the holidays coming up, there are worse ways to spend a few days :)

The post Rigging for All: Epic Opens UE 5.6 Workshop first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

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

Performance: Solid but No DLSS

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

Content and Availability

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

Context: UE5.7 in the Wild

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

Test Before Production

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

Get your walkies on in Vencie here.

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