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I'm guessing these won't be around forever. The Foundry have provided free download links for the latest version of MODO here https://support.foundry.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019180479-Q100595-Download-links-for-previous-Modo-versions And you can grab the ten year license for it here https://campaigns.foundry.com/modo-eol-license With the officially given license reprinted below in case that link goes. Sad news obviously but some might have fun having another solid app on their desktop to play with. LICENSE foundry modo_i 2025.1107 14-nov-2034 uncounted hostid=ANY share=h min_timeout=30 start=30-oct-2024 issuer=foundry issued=30-oct-2024 _ck=191ec77102 sig="60Q04580QANXKRND9V0D9UG14XXQ NEK71BYF4UVX08AG15XEFJ8GM4DSUJDSPMTNJR9UN3YU7HFY0"

D5 Render First released in 2021, D5 Render is an increasingly powerful architectural renderer with linking plugins for a range of DCC and CAD applications. As well as rendering scenes directly from a linked DCC app, users can import models in FBX, Alembic or SKP format, apply PBR materials, and assign HDRIs, lights and LUTs. Other features include object scattering and shot dressing tools, support for volumetric and particle-based effects, and path-based animation tools for crowds or vehicles. The software supports DXR-based hardware-accelerated ray tracing on NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs, and is capable of rendering 16K still images, and 4K videos. Key changes in D5 Render 2.9 include the new terrain system, which makes it possible to sculpt and paint surrounding landscapes for visualizations using a brush-based workflow. Artists can edit a 4,000m x 4,000m area of terrain, using brushes to move the ground surface up or down, smooth it, flatten it, or erase previously sculpted details. It is then possible to assign textures to different parts of the terrain – ground, slopes and peaks – with the option to blend between up to six separate materials. As well as sculpting terrain manually, it is also possible to import height maps: either custom maps, or preset maps from a new category in D5 Render’s accompanying asset library. The software currently supports up to 10 height maps simultaneously. The update also introduces a new template-based phasing animation system. It is intended to make it possible to create animations showing how a building is constructed or how the components of a product fit together without the need for keyframing. Users can import their models into readymade animation templates and adjust parameters to control the order and direction in which they appear, and the timing and style of the movements. The AI Enhancer feature added in D5 Render 2.8 for adding detail to rendered images has been extended and renamed the Post – AI tool. As well as increasing the image size limit from 4K to 6K, the tool gets a number of new capabilities, including image sharpening and denoising. However, the biggest change is a new AI-based Style Transfer system, making it possible to apply a range of readymade visual styles to a render, or match its look to a reference image. Readymade styles include both photorealistic and stylized looks, the latter including watercolor, pen sketch, pencil sketch, cartoon, scale model and voxel styles. In addition, the Text to 3D system added in D5 Render 2.7 for generating low-poly models from text descriptions now supports voxel looks. Other changes include a new Random Placement feature, which automatically randomizes the size and rotation of 3D plants being added from the asset library. Under the hood, a new FPS Booster for Complex Geometry option “significantly” improves on-screen frame rates when rendering complex scenes with large numbers of assets. Dimension 5 Techs’ launch video cites a 433% increase in frame rate when rendering a scene with 415 million faces at 1080p resolution. There are also a lot of smaller feature and workflow improvements, Outside the core app, D5 Render’s integration plugins have been updated, with the live sync plugin for Blender getting support for camera animations and Blender’s Geometry Nodes. As well as height maps for the terrain system, the asset library gets over 160 new 3D character models, and over 160 new materials, including tiles, flooring, fabrics and ground materials. In addition, users with Teams subscriptions, intended for multi-user collaboration, get a new 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) system. A new 3D scanning method, 3D Gaussian Splatting generates reconstructions of 3D objects or scenes from source photos or video. Interestingly, rather than being for rendering imported 3DGS data, as in the upcoming V-Ray 7, D5 Render’s implementation is for generating 3D Gaussian Splats. It transforms rendered animations, like flythroughs of a 3D scene, into lightweight 3D models that can be explored in a web browser, providing a convenient way to share assets with clients. You can see an example model on the D5 Render website. D5 Render is available for Windows 10+. It requires a compatible GPU: Dimension 5 recommends a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060+, AMD Radeon RX 6000 XT+ or Intel Arc A3+. Integration plugins are available for 3ds Max 2014-2016 and 2018+, ArchiCAD 21+, Blender 2.93+, Cinema 4D R20+, Revit 2018.3+, Rhino 6.1+, SketchUp 2017+ and Vectorworks 2024+. The Community edition is free; the Pro edition, which includes advanced features, frame sequence rendering, and access to the full asset library, costs $38/month or $360/year. Teams subscriptions, which add further features including simultaneous editing and support for 3D Gaussian Splatting, cost $75/month or $708/year. https://forum.d5render.com/t/what-s-new-in-d5-render-2-9/38759 https://www.d5render.com/privacy (The firm is based in China, and is governed by Chinese law) Blender 3.4 The big new feature in Blender 4.3 is Grease Pencil 3, the long-awaited overhaul of Blender’s storyboarding and 2D animation toolset. Originally due in Blender 4.0 last year, it’s a “complete rewrite” of the toolset, intended to lay “a solid foundation for the next 10+ years”, particularly to improve performance on large projects. Although the focus of the initial release is simply to get the updated toolset to feature parity with Blender 4.2, there are a number of new features. The most significant is that Grease Pencil is now compatible with Geometry Nodes, Blender’s procedural modeling, scene layout and simulation system. That makes it possible to modify Grease Pencil objects with Geometry Nodes – “many” of the existing nodes that work with curves have been updated to work with Grease Pencil data. You can get a sense of the new workflows that this opens up in our this story, which includes a demo of Geometry Nodes in use to convert a Grease Pencil animation to claymation-style 3D. Other new features include color-codable Layer Groups, making it easier to manage large projects, a new Fill Gradient tool, and updates to the exiting drawing tools. The changes aren’t backwards-compatible, and a few features have been deprecated, including drawing guides. Although Eevee, Blender’s real-time render engine, got a major overhaul in the previous release with the rollout of ‘Eevee Next‘, there are further updates in Blender 4.3. The biggest is that Eevee now supports light linking, making it possible to set light sources to affect only specific objects in a scene, providing more artistic control over lighting effects. Both conventional lights and emissive materials are supported, as is shadow linking, which makes it possible to choose which objects in the scene cast shadows created by the light. The change brings Eevee in line with Cycles, Blender’s main production renderer, which got support for light linking in Blender 4.0. Cycles itself gets support for a new phase functions in Blender’s Volume Scatter node, traditionally used to add effects like fog or smoke to a scene. Each is geared towards a particular type of real-world scattering: the Fourier-Forand function mimics underwater haze, while Rayleigh scattering is used for skies and ocean surfaces. Two are literally out of this world – the Double Henyey-Greenstein function is intended for planetary atmospheres, and Draine scattering is “mostly use for interstellar dust”. For material authoring, Blender’s Shader Editor gets a new Metallic BSDF node. It’s intended to simplify the process of creating realistic metal materials, exposing existing but “hard to access” shading controls in a single dedicated node. Two configurations are available: the F82 Tint Conductor Fresnel approximation used in the Principled BSDF node, and a true Conductor Fresnel configuration. The latter – previously restricted to custom OSL scripts – provides “subtly more accurate” results, but is harder to use, and is currently only supported in Cycles, not Eevee. Blender 4.3 also changes workflow for managing brushes when sculpting or painting models. Rather than being stored in the main .blend scene file, brushes are now stored in separate asset libraries, making it easier to reuse sets of brushes between projects, or share them within teams. And rather than the toolbar, brushes can now be selected from a brush asset shelf, which appears across the foot of the 3D Viewport and Image Editor when working in Sculpt Mode. Instead of being grouped by tool, brushes are now organized into ‘asset catalogs’, with users able to configure the shelf to show only the subset of catalogs needed for a particular project. There are also some quite significant improvements to sculpting performance: brush evaluation is now “about 8 times faster” when sculpting a 6-million-face mesh. The user interface gets a number of workflow improvements in Blender 4.3, including previews of images, movies and fonts in the tooltips that appear when hovering over assets. The UI can also now be rendered using the experimental new Vulkan backend for the viewport. It’s supported on Windows and Linux, on AMD, Intel and NVIDIA GPUs, but still has a number of limitations, and may currently be slower than the existing OpenGL backend. New 3D modeling and UV editing features include a new Minimum Stretch mode for UV unwrapping, based on the SLIM algorithm: you can read about it in detail in this story. For procedural modeling and scene layout, the Geometry Nodes toolset gets a number of new features, including a For Each Element zone to simplify complex workflows. It is also now possible to add gizmos to node groups, making it possible to edit their inputs directly in the 3D Viewport, rather than having to switch to the Node Editor or modifier stack. The character rigging and animation tools get smaller workflow improvements, including updates to motion paths, keyframing, and a new ‘bone eyedropper‘ system. Cycles finally now supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing on AMD GPUs via HIP RT on Linux: something Windows users have been able to choose since Blender 3.6. The Compositor gets support for multi-pass compositing when using Eevee. The Video Sequencer gets performance and workflow improvements, including the option to connect and disconnect strips, and support for snapping in the preview area. Pipeline integration changes include the option to export point clouds in USD format. Blender 4.3 is currently in beta. It is due for a stable release on 12 November 2024. Blender is compatible with Windows 8.1+, macOS 11.2+ and glibc 2.28+ Linux. https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.3/ https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/ Enscape 4.2 Enscape 4.2 is a smaller update than other recent releases – Chaos says that it is shifting to a ‘more dynamic’ release schedule – but it does build on two of the key changes in Enscape 4.1. First, Enscape Impact, its accompanying building performance analysis plugin, is now officially out of beta. Second – and more relevant to CG artists – the new Artistic Visual Modes system, which applies readymade visual styles to images, has been extended. Changes include adjustable texture controls in Watercolor mode, and proper handling of transparent materials in Watercolor and Colored Pencil mode. The update also improves the visual quality of software ray tracing, adding support for multi-bounce global illumination and ray traced sun shadows. There are still some limitations, particularly for sun shadows. Application-specific changes include support for up to six clipping planes in Rhino, and for Clip Cubes in Vectorworks, both for rendering cutaway images of models. Rhino users also get support for World Coordinate System (WCS) mapping for materials Revit users get a new Graphics Override feature, for creating material and color overrides defined by Revit Filters in rendered output. Enscape is compatible with Windows 10+ and macOS 12.6+. It integrates with Archicad 26+, Rhino 7+, SketchUp 2022+ and Vectorworks 2023+ on Windows and macOS, and with Revit 2022+ on Windows. The software is available rental-only. Node-locked licences cost $84.90/month or $562.80/year; floating licences cost $958.80/year. https://blog.enscape3d.com/enscape-version-4-2 Continuum 2025 Boris FX began to add AI features to Continuum in its 2024 releases, beginning with machine learning-based filters for denoising, upresing and retiming video. In Continuum 2025.0, they are joined by BCC+ Motion Blur ML, a new motion blur filter that combines a new hardware-accelerated optical flow algorithm with machine learning. It provides controls for both the intensity and direction of the blur, and also makes it possible to apply motion blur data from another clip, helping to connect elements in a composite. The other new AI filter, BCC+ License Plate ML, automatically anonymizes car license plates, isolating the plates in a shot and applying blur, mosaic or brightness/contrast effects. Continuum 2025.0 also features four other new filters, BCC+ Grain, BCC+ Linear Color Key, BCC+ Two Way Key and BCC+ Pixel Chooser, all faster and more controllable versions of existing filters. The BCC+ Light filter, for adding new lights to shots, gets 33 new gobos. There are also four new transitions, BCC+ Atmospheric Glow Dissolve, BCC+ Orbs Dissolve, BCC+ Smoke Wipe and BCC+ Smoke and Fog Dissolve, shown in the video above. Particle Illusion, Continuum’s particle effects system, gets new options to copy and paste data between particle type nodes, including color and alpha gradients, and particle sprites. Other workflow improvements include a new Repeat option for creating looping effects, available for any animated parameter, and updates to the UI for the emitter library. Continuum 2025 is compatible with a range of compositing and editing software, including After Effects, DaVinci Resolve and Nuke, on Windows 10+ or macOS 10.15+. It is priced according to host application, with new perpetual licences costing from $295 to $1,995. Subscriptions cost from $195/year to $695/year. https://blog.borisfx.com/boris-fx-brings-greater-ml-power-to-continuums-vfx-toolkit Gigapixel 8 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 images”, with Topaz Labs claiming that it can enlarge images up to 16x 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 noise from renders by upscaling them, then reducing them to their original size. Topaz Labs describes Gigapixel 8.0 as the “first upscaler using generative AI models to create high-quality photorealistic results”. The software’s new Redefine model uses generative AI to fill in missing detail when upscaling images to very high resolutions, or repairing damaged images. It is also “surprisingly good at denoising and sharpening in some scenarios”. The model comes with a Creativity setting, which determines to what extent the image is stylized: low values result in realistic sharpening, while higher values produce progressively more and more stylized results. For high Creativity settings, users can also enter text prompts to guide the content of the AI details generated, in a similar way to a conventional generative AI tool. The Redefine model currently runs on the GPU, and there are some known issues with AMD GPUs and on macOS Gigapixel’s existing Face Recovery model has been updated, with the Gen 2 model improving performance when upscaling faces seen in profile. Gen 2 also results in “cleaner teeth and eyeglasses”, and performs better when recovering “obscure faces with little-to-no facial attributes”. The other major change in Gigapixel 8 is the option to process images in the cloud as well as on your local machine. Cloud rendering is available when using the generative AI models: both Redefine and Recover, which was introduced in Gigapixel 7.1 for upscaling very low-res images. The service is priced on a credit basis, with cost depending on image size – outputting larger images costs more – and the AI model used. Gigapixel 8.0 is available as a standalone application for Windows 10+ and macOS 11.0+; and as a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. The software is OpenGL-based, and supports AMD, Apple Silicon, Intel and NVIDIA GPUs. New licences of the standard edition cost $99. The new Gigapixel Pro edition for studios is subscription only and costs $499/year. Cloud render credits cost $5 for 20 credits. Credit subscriptions start at $9.99/month for 80 credits per month. https://community.topazlabs.com/t/gigapixel-v8-0-0/79692 Howler 2025.1 Originally released two decades ago, Howler – originally Project Dogwaffle – is an idiosyncratic sub-$100 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. New features in Howler 2025 include LiquidFX, a new tool for brush-based freeform deformation of images, along the lines of Photoshop’s Liquify filter. There is also a new halftone gradient fill. The existing Text tool is now supplemented by a new Text Object tool, which provides a greater range of options for formatting text, including outles, drop shadows and perspective warping. For greenscreen removal, it is now possible to sample multiple color values from the screen when using Select by Color to help refine the matte and reduce color spill. For object removal, a new Advanced Feature Removal window makes it possible to mirror or rotate a source area of an image before blending it over another part of the image. The update adds WatercolorFX, a Rebelle-style watercolor painting toolset that mimics the way in which real paint flows and blends, shown in the initial proof-of-concept video above. The Text tool gets a further update, adding the option to flow text along Bézier curves. Howler 2025.1 is available for Windows only. It has an MSRP of $56.99, although the software is usually available at a significantly lower price. Watercolor FX is available as a standalone tool with a MSRP of $17.99. http://www.pdhowler.com/WhatsNew.htm O3DE 24.09 The Open 3D Foundation has released Open 3D Engine 24.09 (O3DE 24.09), the latest version of the open-source game engine. The update introduces a new dedicated mobile rendering pipeline, improves performance on mobile devices by “up to 400%”, and reduces start-up times for the O3DE editor by “up to 90%”. It is also now possible to create projects without the need to compile them, using only Script Canvas, O3DE’s visual programming system, and Lua scripting. First announced in 2021, O3DE is an open-source, cross-platform “AAA-capable” game engine” pitched as a successor to Lumberyard, AWS’s free engine. It features a modular, SDK-like design, open-source build system and new networking stack, and includes hardware-accelerated ray tracing renderer Atom. The engine is the first release of the Linux-Foundation-backed Open 3D Foundation: a games counterpart to VFX technology body the Academy Software Foundation. Although the latest sizzle reel (embedded above), is still heavy on AWS’s own projects, O3DE is starting to be used on commercial games, like Team Plutinite’s State of Matter. Open 3D Engine 24.09 – despite the version number, it was actually released in October – is the first update to the engine in for a year, and is being pitched as a “huge milestone”. Key changes include greatly improved mobile performance: the release notes cite performance improvements of “up to 400%” across iOS, Android, and AR and XR devices. Part of that will be due to a new mobile-specific rendering pipeline, described as an “extremely performant … pipeline built for tiled GPUs”. It includes materials and lighting features tailored to mobile hardware, including an “optimized BRDF” and support for analytical approximation of image-based lighting. Users can “easily … disable features as needed” according to the capabilities of the target device. It is also now possible to control visual quality on a per-device basis, with a default of three performance levels – low, medium and high – based on the device’s CPU, GPU and memory. New graphics features include a Silhouette material type that displays meshes it is applied to as filled-in silhouettes. O3DE also now supports lighting channels, for controlling which lights affect which in-game objects. There are three channels for “each kind of light and light-able objects”. In addition, simple spot lights now support gobos, and can cast shadows. For developers as opposed to artists, a key change in O3DE 24.09 is the introduction of ‘script only’ projects, making it possible to create games without the need for a C++ compiler, using only Script Canvas, O3DE’s visual programming system, and Lua scripting. Projects can also now be exported using a dedicated UI, rather than having to be done via the command line. It provides “full support” for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Other changes include a new framework for interfacing with AI Large Language Models (LLMs) within O3DE. In addition, PhysX 4 and 5 have been split into separate Gems, making it easier to switch between versions of the physics engine. There are also a number of new features targeted at industrial simulation rather than games work, including a new Georeference component, and the ability to parse Gazebo data. Performance improvements include a reduction of “up to 90%” in editor start-up times. There are also a lot of smaller feature improvements and bugfixes. Open 3D Engine 24.09 is available as compbiled binaries for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 Linux. The source code is available under an Apache 2.0 licence. https://o3debinaries.org/ Toolbag 5.0 The update, described as a “game-changer”, adds support for UDIM workflows, making it possible to create, bake and render materials that follow the UDIM UV layout format. Other changes include material layering, new vector texturing tools, a new hybrid render mode, the option to render imported hair grooms, and speed boosts of 2-10x in ray traced renders. A lightweight system for look dev, compositing and final rendering, Toolbag is widely used by games artists, but is also increasingly being used in other sectors of the industry. It enables users to visualise imported models quickly, setting up PBR materials and lighting, with 2021’s Toolbag 4.0 also adding a 3D texture painting system. Users can then either bake texture maps for export to other DCC software or game engines, or render stills or animation directly. Users can now author materials with multiple UV tile sets, including the UDIM UV layout format widely used in VFX pipelines. All of the software’s key texture-creation tools – including 3D painting, Fill and Procedural layers, and masks – “work seamlessly over [UDIM] tile borders”. It is also possible to bake and render UDIM materials. Conversely, Toolbag 5.0 makes it possible to use UV-less workflows, with support for Triplanar texture projection as an alternative to UV texture mapping. The software also now supports material layering, making it possible to create complex blended multi-material set-ups. Toolbag 5.0 also introduces support for vector-based texturing workflows, including a new vector layer type, and tools for drawing and editing vector shapes. Marmoset describes it as a quick way to add geometric forms to materials, from large features like pipes, wires, panel lines and vents, to smaller details like nuts, bolts and stitches. There are also a number of new texturing features, including Sync Points. The interesting system makes it possible to edit a material’s normal or bump map, and have Toolbag automatically generate matching ambient occlusion, curvature and height maps. Another new feature, Carve Groups, makes it possible to blend multiple texture layers using a single “height-style blend” mask. The update also makes the Clone tool available for Paint Layers, and adds support for painting flow maps and anisotropic direction maps for materials like hair and brushed metal. Toolbag 5.0 introduces support for interactive baking, making it possible to preview the output of baking operations in real time. It is possible to adjust baking settings interactively during the preview, rather than having to wait until the baked texture maps have been written to disk before making changes. The update also adds a new Bevel Shader, for mimicking rounded edges and corners on a model at render time, with the option to bake the output to normal, AO and curvature maps. The update improves rendering performance, with speed boosts in ray traced renders ranging from 2x for typical scenes, to 10x for those with “high bounce counts”. A new Hybrid render mode, similar to those in game engines, balances “the raster renderer’s interactivity and the ray tracer’s image quality”, providing further render speed boosts without the need to sacrifice too much image quality. It is also now possible to render realistic hair and fur in Toolbag, importing hair grooms in Alembic (.abc) format, and use the new Hair Reflection model for rendering. Toolbag 5.0 also updates the software’s UI, which should now scale better on high DPI displays. Mac users finally get native Apple Silicon support, which should improve performance on current Macs: pretty much any macOS laptop or desktop less than four years old. Toolbag 5.0 is compatible with Windows 10 and macOS 13.5+. It supports AMD, Apple Silicon and NVIDIA GPUs. Perpetual licenses now cost $399 for individual artists, up $80 from the previous release, or $1,299 for studios, up $300 from the previous release. Subscriptions now cost $18.99/month for individuals, up $3/month, or $49.99/month for studios, up $6/month. https://marmoset.co/posts/marmoset-toolbag-5-official-release/ Inkscape 1.4 Inkscape is an open-source vector design app, with a good range of freehand and path-based drawing tools. It has a layer system; includes toolsets for grouping, transforming and simplifying paths; supports on-canvas text editing; and exports to a range of standard file formats, including PNG, SVG, EPS, PDF and DXF. Although the software was first released in 2003, the pace of development has increased in recent years, as has uptake among professional artists, leading to the milestone Inkscape 1.0 release in 2020. As well as graphic design, the software is used to create vector shapes for motion graphics or 3D modelling. Inkscape 1.4 improves workflow in a number of the software’s key toolsets. Key changes include a new Filter Gallery dialog (shown above) for quickly previewing and filters within the software. An experimental new unified font browser does a similar thing for fonts, providing a sortable, filterable list of font previews, replacing the Text and Font dialog. The Swatches dialog has also been reworked, again to make it easier to preview and filter color swatches. The Shape Builder tool introduced in Inkscape 1.3 has been updated. Initially a way to build up complex vector forms by performing Boolean operations on simpler shapes, it now supports raster as well as vector images, making it possible to clip selections from imported images, as shown above. The update also adds support for modular grids, making it possible to create more complex layout guides for vector designs. Changes to file import and export include support for Affinity Designer‘s native .afdesign file format, making it easier to import designs from the commercial vector design app. The update also makes it easier to import color palettes from other applications, with support for Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) and Adobe Color Book (.acb) files. Support for .acb files is primarily for the CIELAB color space: support for CMYK is “limited for now”. There is also a long list of smaller feature and performance updates: you can find a full list of changes via the links at the foot of the story. Inkscape 1.4 is available free for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, Linux and macOS. The source code is available under a GPL licence https://inkscape.org/news/2024/10/13/inkscape-launches-version-14-powerful-new-accessib/ https://inkscape.org/doc/release_notes/1.4/Inkscape_1.4.html https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.4 Maya 2025.3 Key changes in Maya itself include an update to Boolean modeling. The software’s Boolean algorithm has now been updated to match the one in 3ds Max, also improving the predictability and reliability of Boolean operations. According to Autodesk, the improvement is quite significant: in its internal tests, the old Boolean system would fail in 6% of cases, reduced to 0% with the new algorithm. The change should be most noticeable on problem geometry, such as meshes with coincident vertices or coplanar faces, and on complex Booleans with multiple source meshes. Animators get workflow updates to the Graph Editor. Change include a new Auto-resize keys on zoom option, which resizes keys when zooming out, and new settings to control the appearance of tangent handles in the Graph view. Outside the core application, there are updates to the key plugins included with Maya, including LookdevX, the new look dev toolset introduced in Maya 2024. The big change in LookdevX for Maya 1.6.0 is support for OpenPBR, the new open material standard developed by Autodesk and Adobe. A unified successor to the Autodesk Standard Surface and Adobe Standard Material, it is intended to increase interoperability between of material between CG applications. Other changes include the option to save compounds – groups of nodes within the shading graph – for reuse in future projects, or to share with collaborators. There are also three new gradient types, Radial, Circular and Box, in the Ramp node. OpenPBR is also now supported in Maya’s integration for the Arnold renderer. Arnold for Maya 5.4.5 introduces a new OpenPBR Surface shader, and tools to convert Arnold’s aiStandardSurface shaders to OpenPBR Surface. The release also updates Arnold’s own Ramp shaders, which get new 3D ramp modes, and the option to add procedural noise to the ramps generated. The Tonemap imager gets a self-descriptive heatmap mode, which generates heatmap-style effects in renders. Volume rendering workflow has also been improved, with volumes now displayed in the viewport, and two new parameters for controlling light scattering. For denoising renders, the OIDN (OpenImageDenoise) denoiser is now supported on AMD as well NVIDIA GPUs on Windows, and on Apple Silicon processors on macOS. Under the hood, GPU rendering performance has been improved, particularly on scenes containing large numbers of lights or instances. There are also a lot of smaller feature and workflow improvements, so check out the release notes for a detailed list. Bifrost for Maya, Maya’s multiphysics plugin, gets an interesting update, with Bifrost for Maya 2.11 introducing an experimental modular rigging framework. Users also get the option to ‘wedge’ simulations, generating variant simulations with a range of parameter values, in the cloud. We wrote about Bifrost for Maya 2.11 when it was released, so check out our original story for the full details. Maya’s USD integration gets a more workflow-focused update, with USD for Maya 0.30 making it possible to use Maya’s native camera controls to manipulate USD cameras. It is also now possible to reload references, payloads and nested references for prims in the Outliner, and to set custom text colors for prims. Autodesk has also released Maya Creative 2025.3, the new version of the cut-down edition of Maya aimed at smaller studios, and available on a pay-as-you-go basis. It has the same key new features as Maya 2025.3 itself, although Maya Creative is not able to author new Bifrost graphs, only to run existing ones. Maya is available for Windows 10+, RHEL and Rocky Linux 8.7/9/3, and macOS 12.0+. The software is rental-only. Subscriptions cost $235/month or $1,875/year. In many countries, artists earning under $100,000/year and working on projects valued at under $100,000/year, qualify for Maya Indie subscriptions, priced at $305/year. https://www.autodesk.com/customer-value/me/maya https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2025/ENU/?guid=GUID-E30563A9-74A3-4E4B-A955-CDDD25A562FD Marvelous Designer 2024.2 Marvelous Designer 2024.2 improves the accuracy of the software’s simulation system, used to simulate how clothing drapes over a 3D avatar under gravity. Simulations running on the GPU now have the same collision handling accuracy as those running on the CPU: in particular, they properly take account of multiple layers of clothing. In addition, Trims – detailing not part of the main body of a garment, like buttons and patches – now support collision during simulations. When used during a simulation, Marvelous Designer’s Pinching function now supports soft selection, making it possible to control how a garment fits the avatar more intuitively. It is also now possible to set the direction of extrusion when exporting a mesh with Thickness. The software’s GoZ plugin, for exchanging data with digital sculpting package ZBrush, has also been updated to support the latest versions of its host applications. Marvelous Designer 2024.2 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=2024.2