E-on Software today began shipping the latest version of its landscape creation and animation application. You can read a list of all the new features in their press release.

French artist Matt Guetta reviews NVidia’s GTX 690 card for 3DVF: “This card makes VRay RT really interesting.” (French|English online translation)

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of the world wide web’s technology to the public domain, the first web pages to ever exist are being brought back to the web.

CG Supervisor and VFX artist Andrew Roberts has updated his reel with impressive work. Check it out on Vimeo.

The footage that was shown at Wondercon of Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming summer blockbuster Pacific Rim has been posted online. It certainly looks like it will grab this year’s award for biggest VFX spectacle — meant in the most positive definition of the word. Check it out on Youtube.

Planetside has released a free, non-commercial edition of v2.5 of its landscape creation and rendering software. Also of note, a new 2.5.5.0 build is available for licensed users with some bug fixes and other enhancements. More on Planetside’s website.

(Updated) More information has been disclosed by E-on in recent posts: Create Plants With Unprecedented Detail – Sample 2, Easily Add Details to Your Plant Geometry.
(Updated) According to the latest information revealed by E-on, The Plant Factory will be available as a standalone application and is expected to be released in this quarter (Q2 2013). Its price has yet to be determined. Check out the latest posts at the software’s website for more: Procedural Vegetation Modeling, Modeling from Components, Grow Plants on Objects, Your Questions Answered! (FAQ). [more...]

Atomic Fiction recently spoke at FMX 2013 and provided 7 lessons they learned about cloud rendering while delivering vfx shots for the film Flight. It provides some great insight to anyone looking to utilize cloud-based rendering services. You can read the full article over at the CG Channel website.

FXGuide has put up a fairly in-depth article on how Weta Digital uses Spherical Harmonics to light a lot of their scenes. The article discusses its benefits and drawbacks as well as makes comparisons to more basic approaches like Ambient Occlusion. Read the article on FXGuide’s website.

At FMX in Stuttgart Next Limit announced that the new version of Realflow will be available in late May which is only a short few weeks away. Anyone who purchases Realflow 2012 now will get a free upgrade to Realflow 2013. More information about Realfow can be found on Next Limit’s Realflow website.

Joe Gunn has released a video demonstrating his recently released free Maxscript called CamShakeHelper. As the name suggests, the script helps you easily add camera shakes to your scene. Check out the video on Vimeo.

Developers from the NVidia PhysX team have published online a paper describing the method used for creating the real-time water simulation videos released recently. Check out the paper and illustrating videos on the blog of NVidia’s Miles Macklin.