Torgeir Holm reviews PDPlayer for VRay.info: “… speeds up the process of reviewing rendered sequences and preliminary compositing in a big way …”

New features in Exlevel’s plugin for creating and animating trees, plants, flowers and various types of vegetation include: spline direction modifier, additional parameters for instanced geometry such as current time for animated objects, deform along path and generate multi-material, as well as improvements to the UI. More at Exlevel.com.

The Open Camera Controller uses at Nintendo DS to control a camera in order to overcome the limitations imposed by camera manufacturers. OCC allows for extended HDR shooting, timelapse photography, controlling an affordable telescope mount, sound triggering, and more. The project is open source, more info at Christian Bloch’s HDRLabs.com.

A tutorial by Israeli artist Yuval Kolton on how to render particles’ color driven by vorticity or velocity, useful for creating effects such as water foam.

CGSociety has an interesting article on the making of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Film continues to be replaced by digital projectors. Read the PR at Barco.com.

Italian artist Gianpaolo Fragale has written a great scripted surfing machine that creates “surfing rides” for animators to test their characters and skills. A very creative idea.

New features in the latest version Spiral Graphics’ seamless texture, animated texture, and HDRI environment map editor include: texture synthesis to create seamless textures from photos with a broad range of creative options for controlling the texture generation process, ability to remove unwanted perspective and distortion from photos, a multi-core rendering engine that brings significant speed improvements, ability to isolate individual objects from photographs and randomly bomb them throughout a texture, etc. Genetica also comes with a library of over a thousand royalty-free texture photos. A free trial can be downloaded from Spiralgraphics.biz. Watch a demo video and find out more info at Spiralgraphics.biz.

New great images at 3D Artists gallery.

COLIMO is a GPU-accelerated postproduction tool designed for modifying scenes’ lights, colors and textures after rendering. These changes to the scene influence reflections, refractions and GI. The software does not handle real 3D data, it takes pre-rendered images and some passes from a Mental Ray shader developed by Motiva. Visit MotivaCG.com for more.