Fernando Caire reviews the new Intuos5 multi touch pen tablets and discusses the pros and cons of the new features. Read the article on CGChannel.

This tutorial posted by CG Cookie explains how to easily solve creating an ink in water effect which is commonly thought to be a difficult effect to achieve. Watch the full 30 minute tutorial on CG Cookie.

Adobe announced the upcoming release of 14 Creative Suite 6 applications, including new versions of Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere. Digital Arts has published a number of reviews, discussing the new software and features. Adobe has also provided detailed information on its Creative Cloud offering, which follows a recent change in upgrade policy and seems aimed at moving its customer base from a purchase to a rental model. [more...]

A brief tutorial on enabling and using Iray matte objects in Max 2013. More at the Iray Dev blog.

ICube are offering a collection of 50 types of pine trees, each with 3-5 variations (a total of 220 models). Requires Max 2009 or later. More at ICube.

A short film with a CG recreation of the video game classic, re-contextualized in a sauce of frequent modern tropes. Watch it on YouTube.

French artist Guillaume Favre shares his process for recreating the Narrabeen House by Choi Ropiha Fighera. Read it on Ronen Bekerman’s blog.

A script by Alexander Kramer for rendering thumbnails and searching/collecting textures from files of models, materials and files with photometric IES data. Batch Render&Relink is included in the Project Manager and FilePathFinder PRO scripts, and is now available as a separate tool. More at Kstudio.

3DVF interviews Tobias Dunz, lead artist at InnoGames, on the development of the browser-based strategy game Forge of Empires. (French|English online translation)

Imagination Technologies announced the launch of the PowerVR Brazil SDK v1.0 ray traced rendering toolkit, which allows 3D graphics software developers to add ray tracing functionality to their applications. Read the whole PR at Imagination Technologies. Also of note, an implementation for Rhino can be found on Rhino’s site with an accompanying video.

Bassam Kurdali, director of Elephants Dream, is working on the production of another CG open movie project, this time based on the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. The project is being crowd-funded through Kickstarter.

The Los Angeles Times has published an article claiming long hours, a lack of of health insurance and pensions are driving an effort for VFX artists to unionize. Read the full story at Los Angeles Times.