Autodesk’s Maya 2026.3, now available through the Autodesk Account portal, delivers substantial mid-cycle additions. The update introduces new animation management tools, Bifrost rigid bodies, expanded USD support, and deeper integration with Autodesk Flow 0.11.0.

Animation: Channel Sets and contextual tools

Animators gain new control with Channel Sets in the Graph Editor, which allow grouping and sharing collections of channels for cleaner scene management. A new toggle lets artists hide or show pins, shifting focus toward organised channel groups. Animate in Context now includes a demo project showcasing its capabilities, and the MotionMaker Editor gains a contextual right-click menu for faster access to character key operations.

Technical rigging: Dynamic Geometry Attributes

Dynamic Geometry Attributes give technical artists per-vertex analysis tools to identify rigging problem areas and improve deformation quality. They can also drive procedural effects such as animated wrinkles. Example scenes are available in the Content Browser under Animation > Dynamic Geometry Attributes.

Camera Sequencer: refined shot creation

The Camera Sequencer now offers a more intuitive and flexible shot-creation workflow. Autodesk describes this as an expansion of existing functionality rather than a major overhaul, focusing on smoother editing and management of camera sequences.

LookdevX 1.10.0: refined look development

LookdevX 1.10.0 brings colour-management updates, improved generative-texture APIs, and clearer documentation. These refinements aim to stabilise the framework for shader and material development across pipelines.

USD 0.34: new Asset Resolver

USD for Maya 0.34 introduces the Asset Resolver, simplifying asset loading and improving portability between different production environments. The update refines asset referencing and streamlines project structure handling.

Bifrost 2.15.0.0: rigid bodies debut

Bifrost 2.15.0.0 delivers its first implementation of rigid-body dynamics, adding simulation capabilities for solid objects alongside the existing fluid and aerosol solvers. It also brings fracturing, Boolean modelling tools, and a range of general stability improvements.

Rendering: Arnold for Maya 5.5.4

Arnold integration advances to MtoA 5.5.4, adding a new Inference imager, enhancements to Global Light Sampling, and various bug fixes.

Autodesk Flow 0.11.0 integration

Flow 0.11.0 now installs automatically with Maya 2026.3, connecting Maya to Autodesk’s collaborative ecosystem. It supports Animate in Context and other Flow-based features through a background desktop service.

The post Autodesk launches Maya 2026.3 & Creative 2026.3 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

When a group of architectural illustrators set out to test Chaos Vantage, they planned a few small real-time experiments. Instead, they built Unbox, a fully animated short film where an architectural cube folds open like a mechanical puzzle. From “a few little minis,” it grew bigger – there are worse outcomes for a stress test.

DP: What was the initial spark for testing Chaos Vantage and why risk it on a narrative short instead of a comfy archviz sizzle?

Peter Stulz: Honestly, at first we intended to do a few little minis in Vantage… and then the second test spinned out of control and grew bigger each day. But no regrets, we embraced the prospect to develop a narrative architectural piece ourselves.

You see, we are architects and not an animation studio. So this was a massive learning journey for us: sequencing shots in an attractive manner, telling a story, how to reveal information and how to retain it… Vantage was fantastic, because it allowed us to be quite experimental here, make mistakes and learn while working on it.

DP: Give us the pipeline in one breath: DCC(s), renderers, interchange (Alembic/FBX/USD), and the editorial path from storyboard/animatic to picture lock.

Peter Stulz: Natively we use 3ds Max in our studio, still the main tool for architecture. Our studio mostly renders in Corona Render, but I feel very home in Vray. For asset creation I use Blender which then sent to Max via FBX. The animation was rendered in Vray CPU – 5 months was tight enough and I know Vray as an engine that delivers without funky surprises.

For the creative part, I drew initial sketches and the storyboard in Procreate. We were lucky to have my friend and cinematographer Olaf Aue (LinkedIn) on board, who was kind enough to share some of his Know-How. The storyboard was straight away sequenced in Resolve with some stand-in SFX and music, just to get a feeling for timing. The stills were then replaced with Vantage Previz shots; the iteration frequency could be kept fastpaced due to Vantage, that was a tremendous relief. Finally for that project we also familiarized ourselves just enough with character creator and Iclone to pull off a somewhat decent protagonist – which then is mostly kept out of focus anyhow :).

Depth of field and lighting are crucial in linear storytelling formats. Vantage allows for having these available during the early layout phase, enabling us to evaluate the flow and precise timing of edits early on, resulting in fewer iterations and more streamlined communication, features that Olaf, as a cinematographer, found lacking in the animation feature films he previously worked on.

DP: Hardware reality check: what exactly were the two workstations (CPU/GPU/VRAM/RAM/storage), and how did that cap scene size, proxies, and iteration speed?

Peter Stulz: There are two parts to this, the GPU and CPU specs: For working with Vantage, I had a 4060TI with 16GB. It was mainly the ground displacement in Vantage that was the key factor for VRAM necessity. Otherwise Vantage is smart when scaling to smaller GPUs. You don’t need massive GPUs to get started with Vantage.

For the final CPU rendering – we have several AMD 9950x in our studio with 64GB Ram, totally unspectacular workstations. In fact rendering moved between machines, whatever was available, the bottleneck was that we had just two render licenses available. Another thing, that I really appreciate about Vray CPU – it stays pretty consistent even if you throw in an older architecture.

DP: How did you keep the master scene nimble?

Peter Stulz: 3ds Max can become a real chore, when scenes get too heavy. I wholeheartedly hate unresponsive scenes – anything that breaks the creative flow has to be solved. Technically, there are several approaches: obviously using Proxies for heavy assets is a must; staying parametric if possible also keeps my scenes small; my modifier stacks can get quite impressive and I avoid baking them.

I xref wherever it makes sense, especially if parts of your scene are used in different settings. If I find the time, I localise heavy textures and reduce them – tedious but worth the effort later. Ideally the Master Scene only contains the camera, the lights and a few key assets. All the heavy load is loaded from external files. These scenes mostly are only a few MB in itself – helping with autobackups.

DP: Camera language before pixels: how did boards/animatic evolve once you could “walk the set” in Vantage?

Peter Stulz: It was important to develop a storyboard outside of 3D first to avoid thinking as a 3d designer. The environment was conceived like a sandbox, so we could freely explore the set with different lenses and angles. The superfast iterations we could do with Vantage really helped to test alternatives. That felt very powerful. Obviously some storyboard shots were then adapted or omitted. Vantage was great to secure we are on the right path.

DP: Lighting in Vantage: What translated 1:1 to finals, and where did parity crack?

Peter Stulz: At first it is scarily impressive how close Vantage can feel to the final look. We did a few final shots directly in Vantage and realised afterwards we could have done more in Vantage to prove the point. The extra turntable animation is done 100% in Vantage, but we really had to go deep in the settings to get rid of some flickering.

You have to understand, Vantage works like this: It downscales automatically to achieve close-to realtime speed and then gradually refines the look. But that logic causes limitations: For example GI depth in tricky setups might cause visible flickering. If you want to get rid of unwanted artefacts like these, you have to go deeper into the settings; and then you get these Vray 2010 vibes again :). Apart from that the denoiser might create some artefacts, textures are getting blurry, VDBs were not possible etc.

DP: Materials & lookdev: which shader features were non-negotiable, and what did you simplify for real-time parity?

Peter Stulz: Since we decided to use Vray CPU for finals, we just accepted that some stuff for Previz looked different – we knew it would be ok in the finals. But to answer the question we used Vantage for a another client project and it became clear again: If you want to produce in Vantage you can not set stuff up in Vray and hope for the best. In that case we had a semitranslucent ocean setting and that looked quite diffferent in Vantage and had to be especially adapted.

DP: The moving house: How was it rigged , and what broke first under real-time playback?

Peter Stulz: The architectural cube is in fact one scene with 2000 frames of animation. No cheap tricks – nothing appears magically out of thin air – it’s all in there. Only the initial cube with the rough surface is a different prop because it had a tricky blending shader which was animated ( animating materials in 3ds Max is a disaster …).

The rig for the unfolding was very basic and was built out of a lot of nested helpers. That was the most simple way to avoid the “locked axis” problem. What is this? Well, rigging a rubics cube is in fact not so straightforward as it seems: after a few twists the individual parts start to move quite unexpectedly – try it yourself, it’s actually pretty hard. The nested helpers solved this, now it was a matter of adjusting the right timing; how fast is the right speed for a massive 12m cube? You want to correspond a certain weight without boring the viewer. At the end we sprinkled some subtle secondary movements on top.

DP: Performance metrics: What were typical FPS for look-dev in Vantage and per-shot render times? Both for Vantage previews and V-Ray finals?

Peter Stulz: We could render out playblasts in Vantage (+/- 200 frames) over a toilet break in 1.5k resolution at 1:2.39. For finals in Vray I attempt to stay around 10 minutes / frame. If you want to use Vantage for final quality in FullHD, you crank up the settings to 1 minute / frame. If there was any noise left, the Resolve temporal denoiser is the last polish.

DP: The famous 95%: where did Vantage land “close enough” to V-Ray and what are the missing 5%?

Peter Stulz: Every “resolution” in Vantage is more coarse. I am not only talking textures, but sampling, atmospherics, global illumination. Obviously the denoiser also tends to smear everything. Everything is just lower definition than in Vray / Corona. That’s why oldschool rendering is still very valid to achieve that crispy level of detail.

DP: Editorial rhythm: how often did you re-cut while “shooting in engine,” and what told you a shot was edit-locked before triggering finals?

Peter Stulz: In our case that answer is quite simple: the presentation date was coming up, so we had a very strict timeframe when shots had to be done. Only thing we updated in the last days, we extended a few shots by 30 frames, because they felt rushed in the beta cut. That little change improved the rythm quite substantially.

DP: Pitfalls & fixes: three things that wasted time before you found the trick and what was the trick?

Peter Stulz: Vantage is built in a way that it actually could be used as a standalone loading in VrayScenes. Since I had my friend Olaf Aue as a cinematographer on board we tried to use it in that way. Theoretically that works, but with a lot of drawbacks and very limited editing and getting the changes from Vantage back into 3dsMax is hard.

We omitted that concept and resorted to live link only with 3ds Max. But actually that standalone option is not so bad – Chaos could really focus there more.

DP: If you rebuilt “Unboxed” today at 100% Vantage, what would the delivery plan look like? QC, shot classes that stay real-time, and the shortlist that still goes offline?

Peter Stulz: I know, that there are more shots that could be realised in Vantage directly. But if you plan this, it is smart to set up the whole project more focused on Vantage directly. Switching to Vray, if needed, is easy, the other way can be frustrating.

DP: What did “Unboxed” change in how you scope, price, and pitch real-time narrative work to clients?

Peter Stulz: We can offer fast animation works more easily which don’t need very high quality or are visually suitable for Vantage (clay shots).

DP: Wishlist to Chaos: What are the top parity/features that would let you ship more shots straight out of Vantage next time?

Peter Stulz: I would like easier quality settings if you intend to use Vantage as final renderer. We had to do a lot of tweaking for specific scenes or even change the 3d scene to avoid artefacts. Additionally Vantage ships with specific assets like a water surface or animated plants. These are great, but in LiveLink they are hard to be used, because there is not way to insert them in your Root Scene.

DP: For Vantage newcomers: What is your “first-day” checklist?

Peter Stulz: Familiarize yourself with the basic UI and do some stress tests to find the limits. Additionally I would look for a study project that comes close to a client environment. There is no point in having all the bells and whistles, if in a real production case you are missing the crucial components.

DP: One more hypothetic: with one extra week or one extra GPU, which single area would you invest in—and why?

Peter Stulz: Funny alternatives. As described above a half-decent GPU is good for previz which was the main usage in “Unbox”. Having a week extra is always great – so I would opt for that!

DP: Where exactly did you keep the “cube layer” for the whole piece: did we start life on the Blender Default Cube, and how much of that origin survived?

Peter Stulz: It sure was great that we could hire the mighty default cube as a support role. It didn’t even mind too much to be shipped into another 3d-suite – what a humble character and it really outshined itself in our short. 3d-artists should show more appreciation to have it per default all free!

DP: The cube’s side text: What does it say, and why?

Peter Stulz: The cube text gives instructions how to mix the perfect Daiquiri as it is served on Kepler 5 but it is quite explicit so I can’t go into depths here. But if you look for easter eggs, we have hidden various personal items in the architecture. Talking about audio my friend Olaf had a lot of fun browsing through his SFX library and pull out quite unusual sounds for the cubes inner mechanics.

The post The Cube Moved: Go for the Chaos (Ad) Vantage first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The Blender Foundation has released version Blender 4.5 LTS (Long-Term Support), the final LTS in the 4.x series, while the 2024 user survey sheds light on community needs, and the upcoming 5.0 beta offers a first look at the next major version.

Modelling, sculpting, and precision updates

A new Manifold Boolean algorithm replaces the old “Fast” option, providing much faster and more accurate results on watertight meshes. Snapping now respects the 3D cursor’s rotation, and objects can be parented to specific vertices without entering edit mode. Curves editing gains new operators, while the point cloud object type is now fully supported with its own edit mode. In sculpt mode, brushes such as Draw, Clay Strips, and Plain now respond to pen tilt, with Clay Strips around 22 percent faster.

Artists can mask by colour, and brush jitter controls for hue, saturation, and value have been added. Performance improves when using small brushes on large meshes. UVs can now be previewed in object mode, even across multiple selected objects — a small but meaningful workflow enhancement for texture artists.

Geometry Nodes overhaul

Geometry Nodes receives its biggest expansion since 4.0. There’s a new Set Mesh Normals node for manipulating tangent-space normals and storing sharpness data. Six new import nodes allow direct reading of external data types — OBJ, STL, PLY, VDB, CSV and TXT — and files can be dragged straight into the editor to create the corresponding nodes automatically.

Additional nodes include Match String, BitMath, and Camera Info, along with new field utilities like Field Average, Field Min/Max, and Field Variance. Geometry Nodes now supports drag-and-drop creation of input sockets from the sidebar and nested frame colouring for complex networks. Grease Pencil also gains three node types, Set Grease Pencil Colour, Set Softness, and Grease Pencil Depth, bringing 2D animation closer to procedural workflows.

Animation, rigging, and shape keys

Pose mode adds quick selection of children, parents, or siblings via Shift-G. Playhead snapping has been standardised across all timeline-based editors, including the Graph Editor and VSE. Keying Sets now behave consistently, and individual bones can override their display type. Shape-key workflows benefit from two long-requested tools: Duplicate Shape Key and Update from Objects, allowing direct refresh of multiple shape keys from mesh changes. Script authors should note an API rename from graph.keyframe_jump to screen.keyframe_jump.

Grease Pencil 3.0 integration

The version integrates Grease Pencil 3.0 more deeply with Blender’s render passes and compositor. A new Grease Pencil Render Pass enables per-layer compositing with proper alpha handling, and new supersampling anti-aliasing produces cleaner line art in final renders. Modifiers can now target specific layers or groups, and boundary strokes (Fill Guides) can be drawn interactively to close gaps during fills. Several legacy operators, including outline stroke generation, return for compatibility.

Rendering and lighting

Lights now include colour temperature and exposure controls, plus a normalisation option that keeps brightness consistent regardless of light size. The Cycles and EEVEE engines both gain a new Volume Coefficients Shader for physically accurate scattering, absorption, and emission.

EEVEE introduces shadow-terminator controls to fix self-shadowing on low-poly assets, a new reverse-Z algorithm for large scenes, and initial Vulkan backend support, offering smoother viewport performance and GPU subdivision.

Cycles receives a major boost to adaptive subdivision, now multi-threaded and roughly 10–15× faster. Normal-map filtering has been improved, and scripted OSL cameras allow physical lens simulation. AMD GPUs now use HIP ray-tracing acceleration by default.

Compositor and VSE improvements

The compositor now starts with a Viewer Node by default and can share compatible nodes with Shader and Geometry editors. A new Image Info Node exposes pixel dimensions; Relative to Pixel ensures resolution-independent blurs; and boolean inputs appear as checkboxes. GPU denoising and gizmos for Box and Ellipse Masks make compositing more intuitive.

In the Video Sequence Editor, playback performance is improved, metadata-rotated clips play correctly, and the Slip Tool is now smoother with synced keyframes. HDR previewing is supported, and several obsolete effects and the old cache system have been removed.

Asset browser, import/export, and file I/O

Screenshots can now be used as custom asset thumbnails with transparent backgrounds. Asset labels support multi-line text, horizontal lists improve node browsing, and import settings for geometry collections have moved to a central panel.

File import/export has expanded considerably: Geometry Nodes can now load and save PLY, OBJ, STL, VDB, CSV and TXT directly. USD import adds animated camera support, dome lights, and new primitives; FBX import is rewritten in C++ and is 3–15 times faster. GLTF export gains options for vertex colours, workbench materials, and AO baking.

UI and usability

Pen tablet support is improved with clearer region highlights, larger hit-boxes, and consistent pen-tilt response. Number-field scrolling now works on text boxes, and mouse-wheel fine-tuning behaves uniformly. The Outliner, Properties and Spreadsheet editors all received readability tweaks and new layout options. The light theme, icons, and scrollbars have been refined; Linux users get sharper Wayland cursors, macOS gets text-editing shortcuts, and Windows users will notice fewer white flashes during startup. On the housekeeping side, the developers confirmed that Intel macOS builds and COLLADA import/export are being deprecated. These removals simplify maintenance but may impact legacy pipelines. As always, Digital Production recommends testing the update in your own environment before deploying it in ongoing projects.

What the user survey reveals

The user survey is stil going – take part now!

Blender user survey 2025 – time to tell the team what you really think

What to expect in Blender 5.0 and the beta

Blender 5.0 entered public beta in October 2025. The current schedule foresees a release candidate around 5 November and a final release approximately a week later, on 11 November 2025. The beta already showcases some substantial changes to rendering, colour management, and user experience.

The most visible shift is expanded support for HDR and wide-gamut colour workflows, including improved ACES handling for compositors and colourists. Geometry Nodes continue to mature, with new modifiers, curve improvements, and better import support for external data. The user interface has been streamlined; over 300 theme settings were removed to unify the appearance and simplify customisation.

For technical directors, the key takeaway is that Blender 5.0 will mark a major version jump, and it may introduce breaking changes. Some add-ons and Python scripts may need updates to remain compatible. As of press time, not all release notes are complete, and several API changes remain undocumented, so early pipeline testing is strongly recommended.

What studios should consider now

For productions currently in progress, Blender 4.5 LTS should be considered the stable baseline. Its two-year support cycle makes it a safe anchor for long-term projects. Technical directors should also note the dropped support for Intel macOS builds and the gradual phase-out of COLLADA, to prevent unexpected pipeline breaks.

At the same time, teams can use the beta phase of Blender 5.0 to begin parallel testing. Doing so will identify add-on incompatibilities and prepare asset libraries for the Vulkan-based rendering core that will eventually replace OpenGL entirely. The Blender 2024 survey results offer valuable insight: stability is now the community’s strongest demand. Adopting the LTS version while cautiously evaluating 5.0 beta aligns with that philosophy.

The post Blender 4.5 LTS lands first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The online edition of the ICE.ART 2025.II conference, held 1 & 2 October 2025, has released all presentation and panel recordings. They are now freely available via the website and the YouTube channel.

Game developer and educator Sam Martino, founder of Dogwood Gaming, delivered one of ICE.ART 2025’s coolest talks with Rebuilding 100-Year-Old Tracks: The Montgomery Raceways Project. His presentation explored how Unreal Engine 5, GIS height-map data and painstaking archival research are being combined to digitally reconstruct long-vanished pre-war racetracks for a historically grounded racing game. Working with small museums and local historical societies, Martino’s team has recreated sites such as the Laurel Raceway board-track in Maryland, the Aquidneck Park circuit in Rhode Island, and the Second Beach course, America’s first recorded beach race. Each track rebuild begins with scans of archival stock brochures, period town maps and surviving photos, which are aligned with real-world topography to ensure geographic accuracy inside Unreal. Beyond the technical craft, Martino framed the project as a form of digital preservation, rescuing automotive heritage from oblivion as museums close and collections disperse. By transforming lost raceways into interactive worlds, he argued, game technology can safeguard mechanical history and remind new generations how ingenuity once roared on wood and sand.

In his talk Capturing the Magic of Automotive Viz in Unreal Engine, Nairobi-based CGI generalist and director Jay H. Patel shared an in-depth look at how he and the Lotus Tech Creative Centre produce cinematic automotive visualisations entirely in Unreal Engine. With nearly 15 years of cross-industry experience, Patel demonstrated how world-building, lighting, virtual cinematography and procedural content generation (PCG) combine to deliver high-fidelity marketing films such as Lotus Type One and Lotus Emira for Drivers. He described Unreal as the team’s “final assembly” tool, integrating assets from Houdini, 3ds Max, Blender, and Substance Painter and emphasised real-time iteration as the key advantage over offline renderers. His breakdowns included real-world techniques such as path-traced rendering for glass accuracy, motion-blur under-cranking for speed shots, and rule-based PCG setups for dynamic environments.

In his presentation Scope City – Procedural Urban Manufacturing, Faruk Heplevent, founder of The Scope, demonstrated how his team has built a fully procedural city-generation system in Houdini to meet the demands of high-end automotive visualisation. Developed over five years, Scope City automates the creation of legally safe, photoreal urban environments for car commercials: cities that feel authentic without copying real-world architecture. The tool ingests OpenStreetMap data and converts it into editable urban layouts, allowing art directors to control scale, style and composition for each campaign. Heplevent detailed the studio’s pipeline from Houdini and Substance Designer through V-Ray, Vantage and Omniverse, with ongoing work toward Unreal Engine and OpenUSD/MaterialX support. By designing “manufactured” cities with strict calibration (six pixels per centimeter), watertight geometry and procedural materials, his team ensures assets can hold up under close scrutiny and serve multiple production needs — from commercials to virtual production and synthetic-data training. At its core, Heplevent described Scope City as an evolving machine for storytelling control: a digital assembly line that lets car brands design their own cities.

Some of Platige Image’s R&D team (Sara Batista and Zoltan Cseri) presented Lights, Camera, Unreal: Redefining the Cinematic Workflow at Platige. The duo offered a technically grounded look at how the studio has standardised Unreal Engine as a core component of its cinematic pipeline. Batista, a software engineer turned production manager, and Cseri, a senior developer specialising in realtime engines, outlined how Platige’s internal Unreal team evolved from early experiments in 2020 (Koala) into a full-fledged department producing over 30 projects across commercials, cinematics and short films. The studio now maintains its own Unreal 5.6 build, develops proprietary tools, and integrates the engine into traditional CG workflows used for productions such as Love, Death & Robots, Crossfire, and Little Ruby.

Their presentation compared two milestone projects. The Aston Martin commercial, produced with Unreal 5 beta, demonstrated procedural materials for marble and crystal shaders and spline-based city generation, but also exposed the need for a dedicated pipeline and toolset. The later Warhaven cinematic, created in Unreal 5 release, showed the results of that investment: realtime fire effects built with EmberGen flipbooks, dynamic slow-motion using Unreal’s time dilation, a custom “turn-to-stone” blueprint replacing Houdini caches, and efficient render-farm integration.

Beyond showpieces, the talk detailed Platige’s in-house automation: Perforce and Git versioning, Deadline render-queue management, custom Python/C++ shot-building and render-submission tools, shared shader caches, and OCIO-based colour consistency. Batista and Cseri also addressed the cultural shift of retraining artists for realtime production, citing optimisation discipline as the hardest transition from offline rendering.

Michael Shelton, a 30 year industry veteran, works as Visual Effects Supervisor, Second Unit Director, and in other roles. Find more about his services on his website and work on IMDB.

In his presentation, Michael talks about his early work starting in the 1980s, ranging from designing, building to help puppeteering practical creatures. The creatures, such as a 1/6 scale Godzilla (Roland Emmerich’s movie in 1997), were moved using telemetry suit, which drove massive, dangerous hydraulics systems.

With time, Michael got into the digital realm, both for 2D and 3D work, using the first versions of Photoshop, Maya, and many, many more. Projects he worked on include Mary Poppins, Star Wars, West World, and many others. We’re all waiting for Michael to publish a book about his work!

How to watch

Recordings are available through the ICE.ART website, in the “Recordings” section under ICE.ART 2025.II, and on the official YouTube channel, making it easy to catch up at your own pace.

Upcoming events

Looking ahead, ICE.ART already lists a special collaboration event with the Visual Effects Society (VES) on 26 November 2025 under the rubric “Beyond VFX”, focusing on AI ethics. Also planned is the next main edition, ICE.ART 2026.I (7–9 April 2026), which maybe will switch to a new presentation platform, and that is going to be great. Be ready to be surprised!

The post ICE.ART 2025.II recordings now live for free first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Ice.Art.

Thinkbox Deadline 10, the long-standing render-farm management software from AWS Thinkbox, will enter maintenance mode on 7 November 2025. In this state, the software remains operational, but AWS will limit future development to security updates and critical fixes. All feature development and innovation are being redirected toward Deadline Cloud.

The AWS product page reinforces the transition, stating:

“Notice: On November 7, 2025, AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10 will enter maintenance mode. We recommend exploring AWS Deadline Cloud for render management.”

AWS specifies in its documentation that existing installations will continue to work “exactly as they do today,” assuring studios that their current workflows, scripts, and configurations remain unaffected. The software will continue to be available for download from the Thinkbox product page, although new features will not be added after the transition.

What “maintenance mode” means for studios

According to the official FAQ, studios can keep using Deadline 10 as they do now, including adding render nodes and managing render tasks through AWS Portal, the Spot Event Plugin, and the Render Farm Deployment Kit (RFDK). The documentation confirms that “your existing Deadline 10 implementation, including all your current workflows, scripts, and configurations, will continue to function exactly as they do today.” AWS also notes that its Usage-Based Licensing (UBL) remains available for Deadline 10 customers through Deadline Cloud UBL.

Why this matters for post-production and VFX pipelines

For pipeline engineers, TDs, render supervisors, and system administrators, the change signals the end of active feature development for Deadline 10. While the software continues to operate, AWS will now concentrate its efforts on Deadline Cloud. This means that new integrations, optimisations, and performance enhancements will appear only in the cloud-based version.

Migration considerations

Studios managing in-house render-farms or hybrid setups should begin testing Deadline Cloud alongside their existing Deadline 10 installation to compare workflows, performance, and cost implications. Migration will likely require reviewing custom scripts, integrations, and plugins to ensure compatibility with the newer system.

Since Deadline 10’s UBL system is now linked to Deadline Cloud UBL, pipeline engineers will need to verify how their licence usage transitions under the new framework. Although no immediate migration deadline has been announced, relying indefinitely on a tool in maintenance mode could increase operational risk if future integrations or dependencies demand newer features. Planning a gradual migration, complete with staff training and pipeline validation, will make the transition smoother.

What’s not changing (for now)

Deadline 10 is not being discontinued YET. It will remain available and fully functional after entering maintenance mode, with ongoing support for security patches and critical updates. AWS has not announced any end-of-life date beyond the shift to maintenance mode.

Teams are advised to begin testing Deadline Cloud or alternatives early, document their workflows, and ensure that custom automation scripts port correctly. As with any production software change, test thoroughly before adopting new infrastructure in live projects.

The post Deadline 10 enters maintenance mode for studios first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.