Lumion 2025.0
Lumion 2025.0 adds a new AI-based image upscaling system, aimed at users rendering on lower-end machines.
Activating AI Upscale causes Lumion to render at half the target resolution, then use AI techniques – which are performed locally, on the CPU – to upscale the half-size image.
As well as reducing total processing time, the workflow is aimed at users with less powerful GPUs, making it possible to “output an 8K ray traced image, even if your hardware does not support it”.
The feature is currently still in beta, and may result in loss of detail in fine textures, and does not currently upscale other rendered output, like depth, specular and material ID maps.
The hybrid ray tracing system introduced in Lumion 2023.0 has been extended to support water and fog.
The Water Material now supports ray tracing, with the water surface now appearing in reflections for all of the ray traced materials in a scene, and vice versa.
The update also introduces support for ray traced volumetrics, for effects like environment fog.
As well as standard light sources, ray traced fog can be illuminated by emissive materials, volumetric lights and volumetric sun light, and can interact with volumetric clouds.
The feature is still in beta, and is described as resource-intensive, with some known limitations.
Workflow improvements include a new Scene Inspector, for searching for objects, layers and hierarchies in a project, making it easier to manage complex scenes.
For performance troubleshooting, the title bar gets a color-coded ‘speedometer’ showing the current fps of the project, with more info displayed when hovering over the icon.
Lumion’s accompanying asset library gets 200 new objects, with 68 new nature assets, including seven high-detail photogrammetric trees; plus 14 new materials.
The update is compatibility-breaking, so projects saved in Lumion 2025.0 cannot be opened in older versions.
Lumion has also changed the pricing and licensing for the software.
The old $749/year Standard subscription, which provided access to Lumion’s core features and around half the total library assets, has been discontinued.
The price of the Pro subscription has been reduced to $1,149/year, down $350/year, although the old floating licenses have been replaced by named-user licenses.
However, there is also a new $1,499/year Studio subscription – the old price for Pro subscriptions – that includes a floating license of Lumion Pro, plus a named-user license of Lumion View, Lumion’s new SketchUp plugin.
https://lumion.com/news/lumion-2025-release
https://support.lumion.com/hc/en-us/articles/19336065135516-Lumion-2025-0-Release-Notes
Kiri Engine 3.14
The 3.14 update extends those Lidar capabilities, introducing an extra processing step to refine the raw scan data, which is usually much lower-quality than that captured with a professional laser scanner.
It makes use of two new machine learning models: StableNormal, for estimating surface normals from source images; and Prompt Depth Anything for depth estimation.
The extra step reduces noise in the scan data, and improves resolution of small details: you can see before-and-after comparisons in the video at the top of the story.
AI processing is primarily intended for use with Kiri Engine’s Scene Scan mode, for capturing entire environments – for example, for quickly scanning a set during a live shoot as later reference for VFX work.
Although Lidar scanning, including Scene Scan, is available with free Basic accounts, the cloud processing requires a paid Pro subscription.
Kiri Engine is available for Android 7.0+ and iOS/iPadOS 16.1+.
The app itself is free to download. Free Basic accounts include photogrammetry, Lidar scanning, and Object Capture, and can export three 3D scans from the cloud per week.
Pro accounts cost $17.99/month or $79.99/year, and make it possible to export an unlimited number of scans, and unlock advanced features, including the 3DGS toolset.
https://rdk2hgu4np.feishu.cn/docx/UUh5d31PhoNVScx9mJfcZpl5nuf
Marvelous Designer 2025.0
Widely used by games and animation studios, Marvelous Designer lets artists design 3D garments in the same way as real-world clothes, by stitching virtual 2D pattern parts.
Users can import an animated character model, drape clothing over it, then export the result back to a 3D application in Alembic, FBX or USD format, as an OBJ file sequence, or as a Maya cache, PC2 or MDD cache.
Key changes in Marvelous Designer 2025.0 include the new keyframe animation system.
The software already had basic keyframe animation capabilities, but they were primarily intended for editing simulation caches: to fix artifacts, or to blend or retime simulations.
The 2025.0 update extends those capabilities to keyframing the position of a 3D avatar’s joints, the properties of the fabric or the simulation, and keyframing the properties of wind animations.
Other animation-related changes include IK joint mapping for imported 3D avatars.
Characters whose joint naming conventions match Marvelous Designer – including those from Daz 3D, Adobe’s Mixamo library, Reallusion’s Character Creator, and Unreal Engine MetaHumans – can be converted automatically.
Other characters can be converted manually, by mapping joints in the user interface.
A separate Auto Convert to Motion feature automatically converts imported FBX files to Marvelous Designer’s MTN format.
The update also introduces experimental support for fur. The Fur Strand material is supported in the viewport and test renders, and the fur moves automatically with the underlying fabric.
Users can adjust the shape, length, thickness, curl, color and variation of the fur strands; and can export the strands to other DCC appliations and game engines in USD format.
There are also a lot of updates to existing features, including Auto Sewing, Auto Fitting, the Sculpt tool, UV Editor, and Avatar Editor.
Highlights include the option to automatically generate UVs for the sides and back of a garment, not just the front, and better auto-conversion of garments to all-quad meshes.
It is also now possible to recolor the base color map when exporting PBR textures, to create two-way zippers in garments, and to export data in USDZ format for use in AR apps.
Workflow improvements include a new modular library, making it possible to save parts of garments as modular building blocks, making it possible to quickly create style variations.
The new library window is integrated with the CLO-SET online collaboration platform and its Connect asset marketplace.
The UI has also been updated to streamline workflow and support the new features.
Marvelous Designer 2025.2 is available for Windows 10+ and macOS 12.0+.
The software is rental-only. Personal subscriptions cost $39/month or $280/year.
Enterprise subscriptions cost $199/month or $1,900/year for a node-locked license, and $2,000/year for floating licenses.
https://www.marvelousdesigner.com/learn/newfeature?v=2025.0
Vantage 2.8
Key changes in Vantage 2.8 include support for light linking, via include and exclude lists.
The change makes it possible to choose which lights affect which objects in a scene, making it easier to art direct renders, particularly the position of shadows and highlights.
Vantage also now supports the Lens Effects from the V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB), including bloom and glare, and mimicking the effects of dust and scratches on the lens.
Vantage also now supports the V-Ray Switch Material, used to switch quickly between variant materials on an asset during look development.
It is also now possible to use source videos as bitmap textures: for example, when rendering TV screens or animated billboards. Vantage supports the H.264, H.265, AV1, VP8 and VP9 codecs.
The update also adds support for the parallax room shader used by third-party architectural visualization asset providers wParallax and Evermotion.
Performance improvements include support for Shader Execution Reordering (SER) providing “performance gains of up to 80%” on current NVIDIA Blackwell and Ada generation GPUs.
Vantage also now supports new AMD integrated GPUs with 16 or more compute units.
Chaos Vantage is compatible with Windows 10+ and DXR-compatible AMD, Intel or NVIDIA GPUs. The software is rental-only, with subscriptions costing $108.90/month or $658.80/year.
https://www.chaos.com/blog/vantage-2-update-8-is-now-available
https://docs.chaos.com/display/LAV/2.8.0
Uniform 1.4
It’s a major update, adding a complete new SDF modeling system.
Also used in Adobe’s Substance 3D Modeler, Signed Distance Fields make it possible to quickly create 3D forms by performing Boolean operations on volume objects.
In Uniform, users work on the new SolidVolume object, which can later be converted to a standard GeoMesh for final editing, and to export the 3D model.
Other key changes in Uniform 1.4 include new features for users aiming to use the app to create models for 3D printing.
They include the option to set the world scale, measure tools for checking real-world dimensions of models, and exporters for the STL and 3MF file formats.
There are also new tools for UV unwrapping and packing models manually. You can see the workflow in the video attached to this post on X.
Workflow improvements include a new customizable input system with support for Apple Pencil Pro gestures, and the option to export directly to iCloud.
The UI rendering code has been rewritten, and now supports light and dark UI themes.
Performance improvements include GPU batching of brush strokes, improving drawing performance, particularly on narrow strokes and symmetry passes.
Uniform is compatible with iPadOS 18.0+. It is designed for use with the Apple Pencil, so some features may not be accessible through touch gestures alone. It costs $49.99.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/uniform-3d-editor/id6472727759
Photoshop 26.6
Photoshop 26.6 updates the software’s AI-powered Object Selection tool to make it easier to select and edit people within images.
When hovering over a person, Photoshop now automatically identifies individual details that can be selected, as shown in the image at the top of this story.
They can include facial features like the eyes, mouth and teeth; facial skin; hair – with facial hair and eyebrows coming up as separate details; and individual items of clothing.
Once selected, the details can be edited independently of the surrounding image: for example, to quickly change the color of someone’s eyes or clothes while retouching.
The functionality can also be accessed via a new Select People button in the options bar.
Generate Image, the Firefly-powered generative AI feature rolled out in Photoshop 25.11 last year, has also been updated.
As well as typing in a text prompt to guide the image that Photoshop generates, users can now upload an existing image to act as a composition reference.
Photoshop then generates a new image in the style of the text prompt, but with a composition – or in the case of images of people, a pose – matching the reference image.
Other new features include Adjust Colors, for making quick color adjustments to images.
Accessible from the contextual task bar, it launches on-canvas controls for adjusting the Hue, Saturation and Lightness of colours within an image: either the six Prominent Colors that Photoshop has identified automatically, or the color selected with the eyedropper tool.
The same controls in the Properties panel for Hue/Saturation adjustment layers have also been redesigned, with larger sliders and swatches.
In addition, it is now possible to do the processing for the Select Subject and Remove Background tools in the cloud, for “faster, more precise” results.
Outside the stable release, the beta build of Photoshop features a reimagined Actions panel.
As well as letting you record your own macros, it now suggests five multi-step edits that can be applied to the image or previewed on the canvas.
It is also now possible to search for actions – both the readymade ones bundled with Photoshop and your own custom actions – using natural-language text prompts.
Photoshop 26.6 is compatible with Windows 10+ and macOS 12.0+. In the online documentation, it is also referred to as the April 2025 release or Photoshop 2025.5.
The software is rental-only, with Photography subscription plans that include access to Photoshop costing $239.88/year.
Single-app Photoshop subscriptions cost $34.49/month or $263.88/year.
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/whats-new/2025-5.html
Corona 12
Solo subscribers now get access to Chaos Scans as part of Cosmos, for use in rendering, but only Premium subscribers can edit the scans.
The update also includes 18 new LUTs created by visualization artist Iraban Dutta.
Workflow changes common to both host applications include a per-camera Global Volume override in the Corona Camera, for more control over volumetric effects like fog and haze.
The experimental DOF Highlights Solver, which increases the speed at which depth of field effects render, at the expense of slower rendering of other effects, now gives correct results when highlights are seen in reflections or some refractions.
3ds Max users get faster timeline scrubbing when interactive rendering is enabled, and an update to the live link to Vantage, Chaos’s real-time renderer.
Cinema 4D users get support for for more objects and material types in the Scene Converter, which automatically converts scenes originally created for the V-Ray renderer.
That includes common objects like V-Ray Proxy and V-Ray Clipper; the V-Ray Triplanar, V-Ray Two-Sided, and V-Ray Blend materials; and the V-Ray Decal and V-Ray Enmesh systems.
There is also new minimap in the Node Material editor, helping to navigate complex materials.
Outside the core application, functionality for creating immersive virtual tours has been added to Chaos Cloud, Chaos’s cloud rendering platform.
Corona is also compatible with Anima 6, the latest version of Chaos’s crowd animation system for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, which added a new traffic simulation system.
Corona 12 Update 2 is compatible with 3ds Max 2016+ and Cinema 4D R17+.
The software is available subscription-only. Corona Solo subscriptions are node-locked, and include access to the Chaos Cosmos asset library; Corona Premium subscriptions are floating, and also include Phoenix, Chaos Player and Chaos Scans.
Corona Solo subscriptions cost $59.90/month or $394.80/year. Corona Premium subscriptions cost $72.90/month or $514.80/year. Additional Corona Render nodes cost $172.
https://www.chaos.com/blog/corona-12-update-2
https://docs.chaos.com/category/corona
Open-sources PhysX’s GPU
NVIDIA has fully open-sourced the SDK for PhysX, its real-time physics system, and Flow, its gaseous fluid simulation system.
Whereas previous releases came with compiled binaries for GPU acceleration, the releases of PhysX 5.6 and Flow 2.2 include full GPU source code.
NVIDIA originally partly open-sourced PhysX in 2018, adding gaseous fluid simulation library Flow in 2022.
However, in previous releases, only the CPU-side code was fully open-source: GPU support was provided via pre-compiled binaries.
The latest releases – the PhysX 5.6 SDK and Flow 2.2 – include the GPU source code, making both technologies fully open-source.
That means that it would be possible for developers integrating PhysX into their tools to support AMD or Intel hardware for GPU acceleration, although it would be a lot of work to do so fully.
NVIDIA’s blog post notes that PhysX contains over 500 kernels written for CUDA, its GPU compute framework.
The source code for PhysX SDK 5.6 is available on GitHub under a 3-clause BSD licence.
It can be compiled to run on Windows 10+ or Linux, and is tested on Ubuntu 20.04+. You can find build instructions for Windows and Linux on GitHub.
The source for Flow 2.2 is provided in the same repository, also under a 3-clause BSD licence.
https://github.com/NVIDIA-Omniverse/PhysX/discussions/384
https://github.com/NVIDIA-Omniverse/PhysX
LightWave 2025
LightWave 2025 is the third major update to the software since late 2023.
It follows a three-year hiatus during which development was suspended by previous owner Vizrt, which acquired NewTek, LightWave’s long-time developer, in 2019.
The software’s current owner, LightWave Digital, is a start-up whose management team comprises people who were closely involved with the software in its NewTek days, including former NewTek staff, plus key add-on developers and LightWave users.
Major changes in LightWave 2025 include RiPR (Real-time Path Rendering).
The GPU-accelerated path tracing system is available for viewport previews as an alternative to the standard VPR (Viewport Preview Renderer) or GL previews.
RiPR is intended to provide more visually realistic previews for look development or visualization work, supporting HDR lighting, depth of field, and better handling of transparent materials.
It’s built on NVIDIA’s OptiX ray tracing framework, so it requires a NVIDIA GPU – a GeForce 10 Series or Quadro Pascal card or newer – and is currently limited to a single viewport.
New 3D modeling tools include SuperPatcher, for capping holes in quad meshes.
The Displacement Brush makes it possible to paint surface details like wrinkles or cracks, at least onto polygonal geometry: it doesn’t work with SubPatch models.
It is also now possible to edit the normals of meshes on a per-model basis via the new SuperNormals system.
Suggested use cases including fixing model-specific shading artefacts, creating custom edge styles, or for exporting game assets that require specific shading in different game engines.
LightWave 2025 also includes Construct, a new procedural tool for generating structures like “stairs, decks [and] bridges” for architectural visualization or set design work.
Its Stair Calculator can be used in both Modeler, LightWave’s modeling application, and Layout, its scene layout application.
RHiggit!, the modular character rigging system integrated into LightWave in LightWave 2024, gets three new tools: Steppit!, Handdit! and Pickkit!.
Steppit! is an automated walk cycle generator.
It works for both biped and creatures, and its output can be combined with standard keyframe animation, to modify the motion cycles generated, or to add secondary animation.
Handdit! is a dedicated hand- and finger-animation system.
It provides controls for posing hands, either globally or finger-by-finger, and can be accessed within its own tab, or in the RHiggit! and Steppit! menus.
Pickkit! is a rig picking interface.
It provides quick access to commonly adjusted rig points like shoulders and knees, and is “fully compatible” with the Steppit! and Handdit! interfaces.
The LightWave integration for OctaneRender, included with LightWave since LightWave 2023, has also been updated.
Changes include three new gradient nodes, and workflow improvements including updates to the Render Layers panel.
Another headline feature in LightWave 2025 is the new Toon Filter, a “comprehensive post-shading tool” for viewport previews and final renders.
It generates outlines around objects, or polygons within an object, and can be combined with the existing Cel Shader to create cel-animation-style looks.
Users can control the thickness of the outlines, how they are layered, and how they scale with depth in the scene; and can shade and animate individual outlines independently.
As with the previous LightWave Digital releases, LightWave 2025 integrates legacy third-party plugins from the NewTek era: this time, from developer Denis Pontonnier.
The integrated DP Tools include four of Pontonnier’s add-ons, including DP Verdure, for creating polygonal trees, foliage and grass.
The Rman collection is a set of shaders and textures ported from Pixar’s RenderMan renderer, DP Filter provides post-processing effects, and DP Kit is a set of nodes for the node editor.
Other changes include support for Python 3 for scripting.
Python 2 is still supported, although it has been deprecated since 2020, with most other CG applications moving to Python 3 several years ago.
The update also adds a new glTF converter, used for converting assets on the fly for display using RiPR, but which also makes it possible to export models and animations in glTF format.
LightWave 2025.0 is compatible with Windows 10+ and macOS 10.15+ (macOS 11.0+ for Apple Silicon Macs, and macOS 13.3+ to use the Octane renderer).
New licenses cost £795 (around $1,055).
https://lightwave3d.com/information-pages/new-feature/
https://docs.lightwave3d.com/2025/2025-change-log.html
Shapelab 2025
To that, the latest update – Shapelab 2025 came out last year, so it’s officially Shapelab 2025 v2.0 or just the ‘Spring Update’ – adds support for voxel-based sculpting.
The technique, also supported in applications like 3DCoat, represents models as a solid grid of 3D pixels, rather than as polygonal surfaces.
It makes it possible to model without topological constraints, removing the need to subdivide a mesh to add detail, and making it easier to punch holes through objects.
However, it makes it harder to perform other operations, so each approach has its own merits.
Leopoly pitches Shapelab’s new voxel engine as a secondary toolset, intended primarily for quick sketching and form exploration, and for blocking out rough forms for sculpts.
The company describes the release as “laying the groundwork for hybrid workflows that combine the structural precision of polygonal meshes with the fluid sculptability of voxels”.
Users can either sculpt voxel objects from scratch, or convert an existing polygonal mesh to a voxel object for editing.
In the initial release, the voxel sculpting brushes include Voxel Clay, for adding or removing volume from a voxel object; Inflate/Deflate Voxel, which can be used to draw strokes; and Smooth Voxel, for softening geometry.
It is also possible to use voxel shapes as 3D stamps.
However, the toolset is still officially a work in progress, with known limitations including a lack of support for masks or Boolean operations.
Updates to existing features include support for cavity masking, which masks a surface according to its local curvature, making it possible to target only cavities or bumps.
In addition, “most” of the sculpting brushes now include custom falloff properties, enabling users to control the area of a sculpt they influence by adjusting the falloff curve.
It is also now possible to use custom 3D shapes with the Stamp Tool.
Workflow improvements include a new ‘Quick Switch’ shortcut, making it possible to select any object or layer and jump directly into Edit Mode with a single thumbstick gesture.
There is also a new quick cursor repositioning system when sculpting, and the Quick Access Wheel pie menu now supports a wider range of actions.
Shapelab 2025 is compatible with Windows 10+. Find a list of supported VR headsets here.
Perpetual licenses have a standard price of $64.99. Subscriptions now cost $29.99/year, down $30/year since the previous release.
https://leopoly.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/3/article/827260936
https://shapelabvr.com/
Anima 6.0
Anima 6.0 is the first update to the software in over two years, and it’s a pretty big one, adding Vroom: a complete new traffic simulation system.
As with the crowd simulation tools, it’s intended to provide an intuitive way to achieve visually plausible results, without the complexity of more detailed simulations.
According to Chaos, it can simulate “hundreds” of animated vehicles to populate city environments in visualizations, but has “limited scope” for traffic engineering studies.
Vroom uses a straightforward step-by-step workflow to simulate traffic.
The Road tool lets you draw road networks in a 3D scene, then adjust their width and the number of lanes, the direction of traffic flow, and traffic rules.
Vehicles can then be placed manually on the roads, or generated automatically, with options to control their density, the frequency of individual vehicle types, and driver behavior.
Vroom then simulates the motion of the vehicles, including wheel movement and steering behavior, with built-in physics for vehicle inertia and response to bumps in the road.
There are also some major changes under the hood in Anima 6.0, including an overhauled user interface, and a new 3D viewport engine.
It is described as a “modern multi-target renderer” with support for DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and Vulkan – the OpenGL subsystem has been removed – improving performance and memory use.
The library of stock 3D assets available with Anima subscriptions has also been expanded, increasing the cultural diversity of the character models, and adding over 40 animated vehicles.
Anima 6.0 is not available for Maya.
Anima 6.0 is available for 64-bit Windows 7+. The integration plugins are available for 3ds Max 2023+, Cinema 4D R26+ and Unreal Engine 5.3+.
The software is now available rental-only, Chaos having discontinued perpetual licenses last year. Subscriptions cost $121.80/month or $717.60/year.
https://docs.chaos.com/display/ANIMA/What's+New+in+Anima+6
https://docs.chaos.com/display/ANIMA/6.0.0
ZibraVDB
A recent wave of restructurings across major VFX studios — including Technicolor, MPC, The Mill, and Jellyfish Pictures — has sent shockwaves through the industry, highlighting the growing need for more agile, modern production pipelines.
Studios face shrinking budgets, tighter timelines, and an ever-growing demand for visual effects that can be rendered or tweaked almost instantly. Legacy OpenVDB workflows, with their heavy storage needs and offline-only approach, simply aren’t designed for real-time iteration, limiting their role in evolving production models like virtual production.
These problems become painfully clear on virtual production sets, where teams require high-fidelity effects in real time rather than relying on slow, resource-intensive CGI workflows.
ZibraVDB offers a future-aware way to render complex volumetric effects in real time without eternal scene processing and enormous hardware requirements. It could be the next standard in OpenVDB workflows for virtual production, gaming, and beyond, dealing with emerging industry problems and establishing efficient new processes at studios around the world.
Volumetric effects once relegated to offline processes can now run in real time, thanks to ZibraVDB. The technology has already been adopted by Dimension, ILCA, and other industry leaders, and SideFX supports ZibraVDB in its SideFX Labs add-on tools for Houdini.
ZibraVDB doesn’t just modernize volumetric data handling: it redefines it for the era of immediate feedback and budget-conscious production. With near-instant preview and iteration, you can incorporate high-fidelity effects in-camera on set, rather than being tethered to an expensive post-production stage.
As the demand for real-time workflows rises, studios need to rethink their pipelines to stay competitive and cost-efficient. ZibraVDB compression reduces the size of traditional OpenVDB files by up to 98%, drastically cutting down storage requirements and bandwidth overhead.
The new free version of ZibraVDB now offers up to five compressions for free, making it possible to convert up to five VDB sequences into .zibravdb format. This means that smaller teams can test real-time volumetrics without up-front licensing fees. It’s ideal for those on the fence, or simply curious about bridging offline and real-time pipelines.
The Houdini plugin is included in the standard subscription, ensuring that everyone can use ZibraVDB for advanced volumetric effects directly within the leading procedural software, and bringing an instant drag-and-drop workflow between Houdini and Unreal Engine.
For larger companies needing an even more tailored approach, ZibraVDB Studio subscriptions offer enterprise-level flexibility. This includes custom feature development, offline licensing, high-touch support, and SDK integrations that adapt to a range of specialized workflows.
Whether you’re dealing with substantial data sets or more complex real-time requirements, this tier ensures you have direct support, pipeline consulting, and flexible licensing to match enterprise-scale needs.
https://www.zibra.ai/zibravdb-pricing?utm_source=article&utm_medium=cta&utm_campaign=cgchannel
These advantages resonate powerfully in virtual production, where compressed data keeps GPU loads light and enables real-time rendering by removing bandwidth bottlenecks. Filmmakers and on-set artists can tweak atmospheric or pyrotechnic effects in seconds, letting them finalize complex shots without endless back-and-forth.
CGI pipelines see parallel gains: large files move easily across networks, speeding up work on multiple render nodes. While data is compressed, shifting or archiving assets becomes simpler. This is especially crucial for remote teams or those relying on cloud servers.
In gaming, developers can compress volumetric effects for real-time usage, enabling cinematic-quality clouds, fog, or fire to appear without ballooning build sizes. And it’s not just for cutscenes any more: ZibraVDB can also be used for live gameplay.
ZibraVDB represents a bold move forward, offering seamless real-time volumetric rendering for virtual production, efficient OpenVDB compression for CGI, and optimized asset sizes for games, cementing its position as a new standard in OpenVDB workflows. With flexible pricing options and extensive opportunities for studios, it is the last missing piece in the Unreal Engine pipeline.
https://www.zibra.ai/?utm_source=article&utm_medium=cta&utm_campaign=cgchannel
Howler 2023
Originally released over 20 years ago, Howler – originally Project Dogwaffle – is an idiosyncratic, inexpensive digital painting and content creation tool.
Its core strength is natural media painting, but it also features basic 3D rendering capabilities, primarily for landscapes and foliage, and animation features including a timeline, onion skinning, frame repair, retiming, and an exposure sheet for lip sync animation.
Developer Dan Ritchie himself comes from a 3D background, having worked at pioneering broadcast VFX firm Foundation Imaging on Star Trek: Voyager.
He later began developing plugins for LightWave, some of which were integrated into Howler.
Ritchie comments that “throughout its life, Howler has been more than just software — it’s been a canvas for natural media painting, a robust toolset for animation with features like onion skinning and keyframing, and a powerhouse for image editing and performance optimization.
“Many of these technologies were ahead of their time, reshaping the creative world.”
Although Ritchie continues to release updates to Howler – the latest, Howler 2025.5 – adds a new text crawl system for animated titles – development has recently been hampered by health problems and the recent theft of his main development laptop.
“As I face health challenges and personal hardships, it has become clear that I can no longer sustain this journey on my own,” he wrote in a post on Patreon.
“To preserve Howler’s legacy, I hope to make it freely accessible to the wider community. This is my goal — but it comes with exit costs.”
To give new users a taste of what the software can do, Ritchie has just released Howler 2023 for free, but now aims to raise $3,000 to release the latest version as freeware.
The money will be used to cover back taxes and web hosting for the freeware release.
Anyone who wants to support the effort can back Ritchie on Patreon, or simply buy the software: at the time of writing, you can buy the latest version for just $12.99.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/help-us-preserve-125460793
http://www.pdhowler.com/WhatsNew.htm
Maverick Studio 2025.1
Developed by Arion renderer creator RandomControl and launched in 2019, Maverick Studio is a streamlined renderer aimed at product and automotive visualisation.
It provides a drag-and-drop workflow for assigning PBR materials, and for setting up lighting and a render camera, plus a physically accurate spectral render engine with built-in denoising.
The software is CUDA-based, and supports out-of-core rendering.
It was later joined by Maverick Indie, a lower-priced edition aimed at entertainment work, which lacks support for CAD file formats, plus features like NURBS and cross-section rendering.
Maverick Studio and Maverick Indie 2025.1 expand two of the key toolsets introduced in the 2024 releases: the new animation system and USD support.
The animation toolset gets a new set of easing modes for keyframes, the option to clone keyframes by [Shift]-dragging in the timeline, and undo support for “most” timeline operations.
It is also now possible to import deforming meshes as well as rigid body animation, making it possible to import and render rigged and skinned characters.
USD import – described as still “very preliminary” in last year’s releases – has been improved, and is now the recommended way to import non-CAD data into the software.
The update also revamps the Move tool, updating both the design of its viewport gizmo and its underlying mechanics, “squash[ing] some long-standing bugs”.
Other changes include the option to change the UI theme, and localization of the interface text into 11 languages, including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.
Maverick Indie and Maverick Studio are available for 64-bit Windows only. Both are CUDA-based, and require a RTX-compatible NVIDIA GPU.
You can see a feature comparison table for the two editions here.
Perpetual licences of Maverick Indie cost €395.99 (around $449), up €146 on the previous release; rental starts at €19.99/month ($23/month).
Perpetual licences of Maverick Studio cost €795.99 ($902), up €296 on the previous release; rental starts at €39.99/month ($45/month).
https://maverickrender.com/wp-content/builds/maverick_changelog.html
DaVinci Resolve 20.0
For grading, the Color page‘s Color Warper gets a new Chroma Warp tool.
It is designed to create looks intuitively, with users selecting a color in the viewer, and dragging to adjust its hue and saturation simultaneously.
Among the existing tools, the Resolve FX Warper effect gets a new Curves Warp mode, which creates a custom polygon with spline points for finer control when warping images.
Magic Mask, DaVinci Resolve’s AI-based feature for generating mattes, has been updated, and now operates in a single mode for both people and objects.
Workflow is also now more precise, with users now placing points to make selections, then using the paint tools to include or exclude surrounding regions of the image.
Another key AI-based feature, the Resolve FX Depth Map effect, which automatically generates depth mattes, has been updated to improve speed and accuracy.
For color management across a pipeline, the software has been updated to ACES 2.0, and OpenColorIO is supported as Resolve FX.
For compositing and effects work, the Fusion page gets support for deep compositing.
Deep compositing, long supported in more VFX-focused apps like Nuke, makes use of depth data encoded in image formats like OpenEXR to control object visibility.
It simplifies the process of generating and managing holdouts, and generates fewer visual artifacts, particularly when working with motion blur or environment fog.
Deep images can now be viewed in the Fusion viewer or the 3D view, and there is a new set of nodes to merge, transform, resize, crop, recolor and generate holdouts.
It is also possible to render deep images from the 3D environment, and export them as deep EXRs via the Fusion saver node.
Other new features in the Fusion page include a new optical-flow-based vector warping toolset, for image patching and cleanup, and for effects like digital makeup.
There is also a new 360° Dome Light for environment lighting, and support for 180 VR, with a number of key tools updated to support 180° workflows.
Pipeline improvements include full multi-layer workflows, with all of Fusion’s nodes now able to access each layer within multi-layer EXR or PSD files.
Fusion also now natively supports Cryptomatte ID matte data in EXR files.
DaVinci Resolve Studio 20.0 also features a lot of new AI features powered by the software’s Neural Engine, although primarily in the video editing and audio production toolsets.
The Cut and Edit pages get new AI tools for automatically creating edit timelines matching a user-provided script; generating animated subtitles; editing or extending music to match clip length; and matching tone, level and reverberance for dialogue.
There are also new tools for recording new voiceovers during editing to match an edit.
Workflow improvements include a dedicated curve view for keyframe editing; plus a new MultiText tool and updates to the Text+ tool for better control of the layout of on-screen text.
For audio post work, the Fairlight page gets new AI features for removing silences from raw footage, and automatically balancing an audio mix.
Other key changes include native support for ProRes encoding on Windows and Linux systems as well as macOS.
MV-HEVC encoding is now supported on systems with NVIDIA GPUs, and H.265 4:2:2 encoding and decoding are GPU-accelerated on NVIDIA’s new Blackwell GPUs.
Blackmagic Design also announced two upcoming features not present in the initial beta.
Artists creating mixed reality content will get a new toolset for ingesting, editing and delivering immersive video for Apple’s Vision Pro headset.
There will also be a new generative AI feature, Resolve FX AI Set Extender, available via Blackmagic Cloud.
More details will be announced later this year, but Blackmagic says that it will enable users to generate new backgrounds for shots by entering simple text prompts.
Blackmagic Design has just raised the price of the software in the US to $335 to account for the new US import tariffs. Prices in other countries are unchanged.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/readme/bb72012583234d4bbea9f1ca54acbcb5
Cineware for Unreal
First released in 2021, the Cineware for Unreal plugin streamlines the process of working with Cinema 4D content inside Unreal Engine.
The add-on makes it possible to import a Cinema 4D file into Unreal Engine, edit its parameters, and have the scene update inside Cinema 4D and transfer the changes back to Unreal.
You can find more details in this story on the original version of Cineware for Unreal.
In the initial release, it was possible to transfer geometry, materials, lights and cameras, but support for animation was largely limited to simple object transforms and material changes.
While it was possible to import more complex animations as geometry caches, the workflow did not support skeletal meshes.
That changes with the latest update, which makes it possible to transfer rigged and animated characters via Unreal Engine’s new Interchange Framework.
To do so, you need to be using Unreal Engine 5.5: while the plugin is also available for previous versions of Unreal, those versions use the older Datasmith API.
However, Datasmith currently supports a greater range of Cinema 4D materials, lights and cameras, so it is still available as an option, even in Unreal Engine 5.5.
You can see a detailed comparison table of the types of Cinema 4D content you can transfer using Datasmith and the Interchange Framework in the online release notes.
Cineware for Unreal 2025.2 is compatible with Unreal Engine 5.3+ and Cinema 4D 2024.0+ on Windows and macOS.
https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/19332141082396-Cineware-for-Unreal-Engine-2025-2-April-2-2025?_gl=1*622r9r*_gcl_au*MTIxOTM1NTAyNS4xNzQzNjA5ODAw
https://www.maxon.net/en/downloads/unreal
1
1
1
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now