Developers of Real IES, a standalone tool for generating photometric lights, recently released their new software - Real HDR, that allows creating 32-bit HDR files to use in various rendering software for custom lighting scenarios.

It's already June, so it's time for an overview of the new 3ds Max: 3ds Max 2019 released in Marchand 3ds Max 2019.1 Update released last week. Let's see what Autodesk has prepared for us this year.

Luxion has released KeyShot Viewer a free, stand-alone, touch-enabled, desktop application for Mac and Windows for sharing, interactive viewing and presentation of KeyShot scenes. KeyShot Viewer uses the same CPU-powered ray-tracing render engine as KeyShot to produce amazing photo-realistic visuals in real-time.

Autodesk digital drawing software, Sketchbook, became free for Windows, Mac and Tablet from May 1st. This free individual version of Sketchbook will function cross-platform with Autodesk ID after a week's trial period, while Sketchbook Pro version will be, as previously, available for enterprises with multiple user licenses.

We are happy to be a partner of animago Awards also this year and to announce that the project submissions for this prestigious CGI competition are now open.

Chaos Group has opened the beta for new V-Ray for Unreal Engine that allows to bring V-Ray scenes from 3ds Max, Maya and SketchUp directly into the Unreal Editor and connects the best of real-time and ray tracing.

Unreal Studio - a complex real-time visualization solution created specifically to meet the needs of architects and product designers - is in free open beta until November 2018.

Technical artists from Unity Labs created a highly detailed photogrammetry guide for professional artists to produce high-quality, reusable digital assets from photos and video.

Exlevel released Service pack 6 for GrowFX 1.9.9, a plant modeling and animation system for 3ds Max and offers 25% discount till the end of April.

Chaos Group presented the end of February V-Ray Cloud beta - new cloud rendering integrated directly in V-Ray that seamlessly unlocks the speed and virtually unlimited power of the cloud.

The full editions of ProBuilder and Polybrush, tools for seamless level design and texturing, recently became part of Unity and are now available to all subscription plans with no extra costs.

End of February Chaos Group presented V-Ray Next, Beta 2 for 3ds Max with GPU volume rendering, Nvidia denoising and many other cool new features.