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DragonFly 3.2 The update adds support for additive recording, making it possible to combine multiple passes into a single take: for example, to override a focus pull while preserving a camera movement. Users can also now freeze camera movement or rotation on individual axes. For pipeline integration, the software can now connect directly to Vicon as well as OptiTrack motion-capture systems, and gets beta support for OSC (Open Sound Control) server input, making it possible to control DragonFly remotely from devices like Elgato’s Stream Deck. The Companion app gets UX improvements, including multi-device support; and viewport streaming from Unreal Engine to the app now supports WebRTC as well as the NDI protocol. DragonFly 3.2 is compatible with Maya 2020+ and Unreal Engine 5.1+. Rental now costs $129/month or $850/year for node-locked licences, up $160/year since the release of DragonFly 3.0; or $149/month or $990/year for floating licences, up $40/year. Perpetual licences cost $1,350 for a node-locked licence; $1,836 for a floating licence. https://glassboxtech.com/products/dragonfly#latestRelease Howler 2024.3 The release extends the new render engine, adding the option to edit the material properties of imported 3D models, as shown in the video above, and 4×4 antialiasing. There is also a new halftone painting mode. http://www.pdhowler.com/WhatsNew.htm Black Ink 2023 First released in alpha a decade ago, Black Ink is a GPU-accelerated digital painting app. It is capable of creating professional-quality illustrations and concept art, supporting 64-bit linear rendering, and a maximum layer resolution of 64,000px. It also has a number of unusual features, including a brush shader language for creating custom brushes, and a node-based system to control how layers are composited. The first major update to the software for four years, Black Ink 2023 is a significant release, overhauling the rendering engine and user interface. The UI now has a more standard Photoshop-style configuration, with key tools accessible from a vertical toolbar to the side of the image canvas. Black Ink 2023 also updates brush-management workflow, with a redesigned Brush Manager, and the option to preview brushes in the Windows File Explorer. Color selection has also been overhauled, with a Global Colors panel separating foreground and background colors, and the option to define presets for favorite colors. The update also fleshes out Black Ink’s selection and image-editing features, with standard Magic Wand and Paint Bucket tools, and a Tiling operator for creating repeating patterns. In addition, the release introduces initial support for the PSD file format, making it possible to exchange files with Photoshop and other digital painting software. Although the import process preserves layers and masks, layer effects and groups are currently not supported. Black Ink also now supports Windows Ink as well as Wacom’s WinTab API, which should improve drawing performance on non-Wacom devices, and provides an editable pressure curve, letting users customize the way that brush strokes respond to stylus pressure. Black Ink 2023 is available for Windows 7+. New Personal licenses now have a MSRP of €59 (around $65); Enterprise licenses cost €99 ($110). https://blackink.bleank.com/Support/Changelog/#first-release Red Giant 2024.1 Magic Bullet, Maxon’s colour correction tools for compositing and editing software, gets a quality-of-life update, simplifying color management worklow. The update also adds support for Unreal Engine 5.3, the latest version of the real-time renderer, with the Movie Render Queue now supported natively rather than via a plugin. With the exception of Form, all of the tools in Trapcode, Maxon’s motion graphics and VFX plugins for After Effects, get updates to their Asset Browsers. Users can now search for assets by keyword, and search for cloud-based assets provided through Maxon’s regular Capsules releases, as well as assets on their local machine. Particle tool Particular gets new sets of pixel art and emoji sprites, and optimizations for After Effects’ Multi-Frame Rendering system, improving playback and rendering speed. Universe, Maxon’s online library of effects and transitions for editing and compositing software, gets a new Bokeh plugin and Bokeh transition. Both mimic bokeh lens defocus effects, and provide controls for bokeh shape, focal area and focal length, and support custom blur and depth maps. Maxon is also rolling out a new higher-performance framework for the Universe plugins, currently used by the new Bokeh plugin and the existing uni.Blur plugin. Neither the Bokeh tools or the underlying framework are yet available for Apple or Avid software, only Universe’s other host applications. VFX, Maxon’s After Effects plugins for common visual effects tasks like chroma keying, camera tracking, blemish removal and precomposing gets another update to Real Lens Flares. A new Obscuration system accurately mimics the deformation of flares as a light source passes behind foreground objects, with users able to reference the luminance, alpha or RGB values of a layer to create obscuring elements. There is also a new core projection type, Light Ball, which renders a physical representation of a light source. Suggested use cases include the sun, street lights, and car headlights. In addition, position falloff graphs, previously only available for the Ring core projection, have been added to most other core projections. Blemish removal tool Spot Clone Tracker gets a Shape Roundness slider for tracking shapes, and a new Tracker Only mode, which hides all non-tracking-related parameters in the interface. The Red Giant 2024.1 plugins are available for Windows 10+ and macOS 11.0+, and are compatible with After Effects 2023+. Some products are compatible with other host applications, including DaVinci Resolve. All of the products are rental-only, and are available via Red Giant subscriptions, which cost $79/month or $599/year, or Maxon One subscriptions, which cost $149/month or $1,199/year. Individual Universe subscriptions cost $30/month or $199/year. https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/8642200680604-VFX-Suite-2024-1-0-January-17-2024 https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/8642048466716-Universe-2024-1-January-17-2024 https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/8642154839580-Trapcode-2024-1-0-January-17-2024 https://support.maxon.net/hc/en-us/articles/8642257818396-Magic-Bullet-Suite-2024-1-January-17-2024 Ayon 1.0 Ayon has been around for some time, albeit under different names, with the codebase itself beginning life as Pype, the in-house production platform of a boutique Czechian creative studio. The company formed to develop and promote it was initially called Pype.Club, before rebranding as Ynput, while the platform changed its name to OpenPype, and then to Ayon. Initially adopted mainly by small-to-medium-sized studios – early users include Dazzle Pictures and Method n Madness – it has recently been used in production by larger facilities including Blue Zoo and the DNEG Group’s ReDefine. Ayon connects a studio’s existing production tools into a coherent pipeline. Via a web-based dashboard, users can track the artists assigned to a project, versioning and approvals for shots, and see a visual overview of the progress of the project as a whole. It integrates with key CG applications, including 3D content creation tools like 3ds Max, Blender, Houdini, Maya and the Substance 3D products; compositing and editing tools like After Effects, DaVinci Resolve and Nuke; and 2D animation software like Toon Boom Harmony and TVPaint. For production tracking, Ayon integrates with ftrack Studio, ShotGrid and Kitsu. It follows the VFX Reference Platform spec, supports emerging standards like OpenTimelineIO, and supports workflows based around USD and real-time rendering in Unreal Engine. Ayon is designed to be usable out of the box, with Ayon Pipeline releases providing pre-configured pipelines for 2D animation, 3D animation or VFX projects. Studios with dedicated technical staff can customize platform via its RESTful API, which supports Python and GraphQL. Ayon itself is free to install, and the source code is available online, with Ynput making its money through services and paid add-ons. Although Ayon has been publicly available for almost a year, Ayon 1.0 is the first official production-ready release. As well as moving Ayon out of beta, it is the first release available via Ynput Cloud, Ynput’s new cloud-hosting platform, intended for studios that want to avoid the complexities of managing their own hardware infrastructure. Unlike on-premises installation, it’s a paid service, available via quarterly or annual subscriptions. Ayon 1.0 can be deployed on Windows, Linux and macOS. You can find detailed system requirements here. The source code is available under an open-source Apache 2.0 licence. Cloud Starter subscriptions cost €1,080/quarter or €3,480/year and support 10 active users; Cloud Pro subscriptions cost €3,330/quarter or €10,680/year and support 20 active users. https://ynput.io/ BCorona 2.0 Released in 2021, initially as a free tool, and later as a paid add-on, BCorona makes it possible to render scenes created in Blender with Corona instead of its native Cycles render engine. Its main use case is in architectural visualization, for artists who have switched to Blender as an open-source solution for 3D modeling, but want a renderer focused on architectural work. Rather than the commercial version of Corona, it works with Corona Standalone, the GUI-less edition of the renderer: free to download, but last updated in 2019. As Corona Standalone isn’t intended to be used with a GUI, it doesn’t provide accurate previews of materials in viewport renders, although they should render correctly in final-quality output. It also only supports path tracing, not the UHD Cache, Corona’s biased global illumination solver, often used to speed up renders of interior scenes. In addition, BCorona has limitations of its own, the main ones being that it doesn’t support Blender’s popular Geometry Nodes or particle systems. However, it’s capable of generating some nice-looking renders, as shown by the images shared in the support thread on the Blender Artists forum. BCorona 2.0, the latest version of the plugin, adds an experimental new converter for converting Cycles shaders to Corona: you can see a demo of an early version here. The update also introduces support for Blender 4.0, the current version of Blender. BCorona 2.0 is compatible with Blender 4.0+, running in Windows only. It costs $40. Version 1.9.5 of the plugin, which supports Blender 3.x, is still available, and costs $25. https://blenderartists.org/t/corona-renderer-for-blender-3-0-bcorona-3se-v1-6-is-out-for-blender-3-2-0-alpha/1345600 MaterialVault for Unreal Engine MaterialVault is intended to streamline materials workflow in Unreal Engine, consolidating Unreal’s native tools for viewing, editing and applying materials into a single interface. Rafferty, who has previously worked in automotive visualization and for VFX facilities like MPC, compares it to the material browser interfaces available in offline render engines like V-Ray. For browsing materials, the plugin automatically generates folders matching content folder structure, and in-engine-rendered thumbnails of material instances. Once selected, materials can be applied to individual meshes or multiple meshes simultaneously, with the option to apply materials to a specific Element ID. The plugin also opens up new possibilities for version control of materials during look dev, supporting metadata tagging, and automatically identifying texture dependencies for a material. In the initial release, support for displacement is disabled, but Rafferty says that it is in active development. MaterialVault is compatible with Unreal Engine 5.3. Source code is available under a MIT license. https://github.com/ScottRaffertyCG/MaterialVault Gigapixel 7 Originally known as Gigapixel AI, Gigapixel is designed to enlarge digital images while preserving their sharpness, using machine learning techniques to fill in the missing details. Its algorithms are trained using a data set of “millions of photos of all subjects and styles”, and can enlarge photos by “up to 600%” before image quality starts to drop visibly. Although it’s marketed primarily at photographers, it can also be used on rendered imagery, and has had a dedicated AI mode for CG images since version 5.3. As well as upscaling low-res renders to generate high-res images more quickly, users can remove residual noise from renders by upscaling them, then reducing them to their original size. Gigapixel 7.0 features a “massive amount of changes”, albeit largely under the hood, including an overhaul of the AI engine to make it “faster and compatible with newer GPUs”. Topaz Labs has also rolled out version 2 of two of the software’s AI models, Standard and High Fidelity, improving consistency of deblur and grain preservation operations. The update also refreshes the software’s UI, which now supports panning and pinch-to-zoom gestures in previews, and before/after comparisons in split-screen and side-by-side views. Users can now drag to move the file list up and down, and use keyboard shortcuts to select or deselect all of the images in the list. In addition, handling of previews of camera RAW images have been updated to be closer to Photo AI, Topaz Labs’ dedicated photo-enhancement software. Gigapixel 7.0 is available as a standalone application for Windows 10+ and macOS 11.0+; and as a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. New licences cost $99. The software is OpenGL-based, and supports AMD, Apple Silicon, Intel and NVIDIA GPUs. https://community.topazlabs.com/t/gigapixel-7-0-0/60649 Auto-Terrainer 2 for Blender Auto-Terrainer is an intuitive tool for converting low-poly meshes into detailed, customisable 3D terrain, capable of creating “mountains, valleys, islands, deserts, forests, and more”. It uses a combination of subdivision and displacement to convert the low-poly guide geometry into a plausible-looking ground surface, with users able to control the overall form and details with simple slider controls. The add-on comes with a smart material that textures the terrain according to surface gradient, with instanced vegetation generated on flatter surfaces. Francis comments that Auto-Terrainer is “not a magical preset for all your terrain needs”, but it does look to be a quick way to get to a pretty impressive base terrain that can then be customized manually, Auto Terrainer 2 is compatible with Blender 4.0.2+. It is provided as as a demo .blend file containing the terrain modifier, smart material and node groups. The base Lite edition is free. There are also two commercial editions: a Pro edition, with higher-resolution textures and more foliage options, and a Desert edition, for generating desert environments. Both cost $5. https://unicornhunter.gumroad.com/l/AutoTerrainer Colourlab Ai 3 First released in 2020, Colourlab Ai is an AI-based colour grading system. The software is capable of matching the grade of a sequence of shots to a reference shot or image to a quality described in reviews as equivalent to the first pass by a human colorist. Co-developed by colorist Dado Valentic, founder of training provider Colour Training, the technology has been adopted in the broadcast, VFX and games markets. Users of Colourlab Ai and its sibling tools, looks design plugin Look Designer and film grain generator Grainlab, now include Disney, Electronic Arts, HBO and Netflix. Color Intelligence describes Colourlab Ai as a “complete reimagining” of the software, rebuilding the AI colour engine from scratch. The updated engine “incorporates encoding, decoding, and tokenizing systems from LLM in a novel way” and is described as having “10 times the precision” of that in Colourlab Ai 2. At the time of writing, there is no feature list for version 3 in the online documentation, but other features listed on the product webpage include Balance and Region Match. The former automatically adjusts colors in footage to achieve a neutral, balanced look. The latter automatically matches the color grade of selected regions of source and target footage: for example, to alter only skin tones or the sky without affecting the rest of a shot. Other changes since Colourlab Ai 2 is that the software is now available for Windows as well as macOS. In addition, live sync of grading with DaVinci Resolve is now available in the Creator edition of the software as well as with more expensive Pro and Studio subscriptions. In fact, at the time of writing, Resolve is the only third-party application with which Colourlab Ai 3 Creator syncs: support for After Effects, Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro due later this month. The Pro edition is due to be updated to version 3 in February 2024, which will add support for RAW camea files, SDI connections and Tangent control surfaces. Colourlab Ai 3 Creator is compatible with Windows 10 and macOS 13.0+. New perpetual licenses now cost $299. Rental now costs $15/month or $150/year. At the time of writing, Pro and Studio subscriptions have yet to be updated to version 3, and cost $39/month or $299/year and $49/month or $499/year https://colourlab.ai/features/ D5 Render 2023 Wrap-Up What's stealing the show in the new year? Without a doubt, it's artificial intelligence! Ideas, materials, styles, just one click away. D5 has gone live in April 2023 with D5 Hi to help you generate images and get inspiration. Furthermore, the groundbreaking AI features in D5 2.6 play a pivotal role in propelling your rendering productivity to new heights, making visualization effortlessly for you. - AI-Generated Material Texture Maps: Algorithms automatically generates normal, roughness and height channel maps according to the base color map of the material. - AI Atmosphere Match: No need to worry about setting adjustments, upload reference images and snap views, AI will generate similar styles with one click. 2023.2 - D5 2.4 introduced 34 new features and optimizations, including New D5 GI, Subsurface scattering material, Z-depth. 2023.5 - DLSS 3 supported in D5 Render, bringing a new real-time experience to architects, designers and 3D artists, improving the efficiency and overall experience of the creative process. ‍2023.8 - D5 2.5 came with 35 new features and improvements, including Real-time Caustics, LiveSync for SketchUp, Presets in D5 Studio, and Section Tool. 2023.8 - D5 for Teams released. The first real-time collaboartive tool for architecture/design teams to facilitate resource sharing, streamline the entire creative process, and improve team efficiency. Connect, Collaborate, Create, all in one place. ‍2023.9 - D5 for Education allows every student/educator to apply on their own! Once the application gets approved, your account will automatically upgrade from D5 Community to D5 Edu. Free access to all features and over 12,500 free assets at your fingertips. Apply now! 2023.10 - 200+ new Global Plants for Better Landscape Architecture Design. 2023.12 - D5 2.6 integrated 38 features and enhancements, and also included 267 new assets such as HDRIs, Character Models, and Futuristic Particles, designed to provide users with even more creative possibilities. https://www.d5render.com/?_sasdk=dMThkMzg5ZTFmYTQ4YzMtMDU5ZTg0MmRjYWMzNjM4LTI2MDAxOTUxLTIwNzM2MDAtMThkMzg5ZTFmYTUxMmQy

We were very close to deal but the sponsor also had a condition which we could not comply with having best interest of majority of users in mind. It also borderlined clashed with EU gdpr laws. in all honeslty, It was just horrible and refresher on how corporate world works regardless how good willed initial contact and decision maker was. At the end we are here and growing steadily. Would it be great to get a sponsorship and open the forum to masses? Yes, but not at any cost, especially the one that was required. As forum and subscriptions will grow, we will be able to remove the membership fee

Just had a look at c4dzone... This must be a really old forum I completely forgot about... In their forums I don't see any advertisements. The home page does have products but the forums are isolated from them. I wouldn't mind this kind of sitemap here... It would certainly benefit developers and make it more attractive visually as it won't be an "offensive" marketing like popups, constantly changing banners and ad sections all over the place. If you're interested on buying something just go to the easy-to-find section and do so, someone how's not interested won't buy anything no matter how much you fill the screen with ads. In this current form of the forum I have to scroll through MEMBERSHIP INFO, AVAILABLE CONTRIBUTIONS, TOPICS, PLUGINS, TRAINING, MAXON JOBS, and SCENE FILE REPOSITORY until I reach the part of the forum I find interesting (Q&A). It's essentially the same content wrapped in a single line menu in the c4dzone site...

Loved the movie Boyz n the Hood when i was growing up, so when i had the idea to do Homer as Dough Boy, it's a mash up i couldn't resist. wires included, feedback welcome, V

Some AI News: https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright https://www.creativebloq.com/news/from-ai-to-no-code-the-top-web-design-trends-for-2024-according-to-designmodo https://www.creativebloq.com/news/ai-list https://www.popsci.com/technology/openai-copyright-fair-use/