3D Monthly News: AI Controversy, Roblox Ban, James Cameron Hit With a Lawsuit
0Article by Yuri Ilyin
December is almost through, along with the year 2025. We're looking back on what has been memorable this waning month.
No Roblox In Russia
Early in December, Russia squarely banned Roblox, the immensely popular game among kids there. It resulted in a somewhat minor backlash, but not nearly enough to force the Russian omnipotent watchdog 'Roskomnadzor' to backpedal.
The reason was quite typical for Russia these days: Roblox had been banned on the grounds of spreading 'propaganda' of LGBT+ and 'extremism', which is the buzzword for anything that the Russian state frowns upon.
Truth be told, several US states, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia, have previously sued the platform for the alleged failures in protecting minors from predators and sexually explicit content. No verdicts have been issued so far, and no wholesale bans have been enacted in the US.
The countries where Roblox is now banned, aside from Russia, include Iraq, Algeria, China, Oman, Qatar, Turkey, North Korea, and Palestine.
AI Art Gets Toxic
December brought a flurry of news regarding the use of AI in game development, which quite uniformly made people angry.
Early in December, the game Postal: Bullet Paradise was cancelled within a day following its reveal. The reason for the cancellation was a barrage of fan accusations that the game art was AI-generated.
RWS (Running With Scissors), the owner of Postal brand, denied the accusations initially, but eventually caved in and 'unannounced' the title citing it's been 'overwhelmed with negative responses' from the concerned POSTAL Community.
"The strong feedback from them is that elements of the game are very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation", the company said.
The game in question had been outsourced to indie studio Goonswarm Games, becoming the third installment of the series not developed by RWS alone. Goonswarm Games announced the studio shutdown as a result, while acknowledging that 'the promo art does appear to include or be influenced by AI-generated material' and apologizing for denying the earlier claims.
Another controversy was ignited when players of Battlefield 6 accused EA of using generative AI for one of the cosmetics in the new Windchill bundle.
In fact all the rage is about a single sticker which indeed looks like a mishandled AI slop - an M4A1 rifle suspiciously sporting two barrels.
Interestingly, as Gamerant.com reports, EA has mandated AI usage despite the developers' concerns and frustrations.
But the players aren't quite happy with AI 'art' shoved down their eyes.
Appropriately, Larian Studios, developer of Divinity and Baldur's Gate 3, found itself on fire in the middle of the month after dropping the reveal trailer for Divinity and acknowledging that the company does use generative AI 'in early development'. Larian CEO Swen Vincke clarified later that the divisive technology is used to 'explore references' which are then replaced with original concept art, and not to create any kind of final product. Other than that, Vincke promised that the company will remain 'a human-focused operation'.
Still, AI 'art' is an extremely controversial matter thus far, and will probably remain so for at least some time.
As the year's final power chord, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won two awards at The Indie Game Awards, only to have them revoked shortly after. The IGA has rules prohibiting the use of generative AI during the development process. While developers initially stated there was none, it turned out they did use AI at the prototyping stage, with the ostensible placeholders surfacing on social media. And while there's presumably no AI-generated assets in the final product, the 2025 Indie Game Awards has withdrawn two major awards citing a direct breach of eligibility rules.
AI Claims All The Memory
Another divisive factor pertaining to AI is the drastic shortage of user-grade RAM on the market worldwide, which has already driven prices through the roof.
The chipmaker Micron has claimed that the RAM crisis could last beyond 2026 due to an overwhelming demand from the AI developers.
Earlier this year, OpenAI struck a deal with the world's two largest RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix. OpenAI eyes expansion of its Stargate data center, and its gluttony for RAM appears insatiable: the $500 billion deal with the chipmakers reserves roughly 40% of global RAM stock over the next four years.
Whatever kind of Skynet-grade AI is going to be run in the Stargate, there is a more immediate result, however: DDR5 RAM kit prices have already tripled. As Micron, one of the worlds backbone RAM manufacturers, joins the AI camp, a very bleak future for gaming hardware is clearly on the horizon. It will probably also lead to a significant shake-up in the approach to software development worldwide.
Meanwhile OpenAI's Napoleonic plans appear to be running headlong into the piling issues as the investors start questioning the sustainability of the AI vendors current development and money-grab pace. Besides, an increasing number of analysts say that the AI boom is eerily reminiscent of the DotCom boom period, which resulted in the very spectacular catastrophe of 2000. Is history going to repeat itself?
V-Ray 7.2 for Blender, Now on Macs Too
Chaos has released V-Ray 7 for Blender Update 2, finally making it available on macOS. It also adds support for V-Rays new distributed rendering system DR2 and the V-Ray Fur system, along with Blender's own hair system.
V-Ray 7 for Blender makes it possible to render scenes without exporting them to standalone V-Ray.
Users can create, edit and manage V-Ray materials, textures and geometries via the V-Ray Node Editor, which provides a workflow similar to Blender's native node editors. There is even 'initial' support for Cycles nodes.
The update adds support for Chaoss new AI tools: AI Material Generator, which enables the creation of PBR materials from photographic source images, as well as AI Enhancer and AI Upscaler.
V-Ray for Blender is available via named-user or standard subscriptions. Details can be found here.
Adobe: Substance 3D Designer 15.1 And Photoshop 25.2
Adobe updated two of its ultra-popular suites, Substance 3D Designer and Photoshop.
Substance Designer sees its graph creation window redesigned 'to enhance the initial user experience', i.e. to streamline the template selection process. Thumbnails 'offer instant visual references for the intended material types' with detailed tooltips.
Besides, the templates are now classified into specific categories such as materials, filters, and scan processing.
A number of sample materials have been added too: fabrics, wood, metal, plastic, ceramic and more.
Reference: Substance 3D Designer
Advanced samples to demonstrate how to use FX-map and Pixel Processor features more effectively have been added as well.
Other than that, there are a few new noises, bit depth is no longer hard-locked to 16-bit, and support for no tiling, among other new additions.
Check the release notes for more detailed info.
The Photoshop update is relatively minor, focused on new third-party AI models from Google and Black Forest Labs to use in Generative Fill: Gemini 3 (Nano Banana Pro) and FLUX.2 Pro.
Other than that, the update is mostly a bug-fixing one.
Keyshot Studio 2025.3
KeyShot (ex-Luxion) has updated KeyShot Studio, their core flagship visualization software.
The latest update introduces features such as support for OpenPBR materials, Cryptomatte, and a Custom Pivot tool.
Support for OpenPBR enables transferring files from Rhino through the importer or plugin, from Blender through the plugin, and from GLTF/GLB files through the importer into Studio while maintaining the original material parameters.
Pivot points can now be created inside KeyShot without relying on the original CAD software or the model author.
There are several modes available: Corner, Cylinder, and Sphere, which are essentially ways to place pivots on edges, axes, or centers of the objects in question.
Besides, KeyShot Studio 2025.3 can now transfer metadata from a CAD application to KeyShot Studio by means of a plugin for PTC Creo and importers for PTC Creo, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, CATIA, and Siemens NX.
Cryptomatte support has been added as a render pass for easier part selection in compositing, as well as for exporting EXR files that can be read by compatible post-production tools.
Other than that, displacement performance has been improved, and on AMD-based systems the suite now works up to 50% faster.
For the full list of improvements and new features, refer to the developer's release notes.
Avatar: The Way of Class Action
Disney and famous director James Cameron have been hit with a lawsuit in California federal court by a 3D animator, Eric Ryder, who alleges that Cameron copied his work in the blockbuster 2022 film Avatar: The Way of Water.
Ryder claims that he collaborated with Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment to develop a movie based on his science fiction story 'KRZ' in the late 1990s, which never made it to production.
The complaint alleges that Cameron knowingly copied elements of the story for the Avatar series.
The lawsuit came mere days before the third film of the series, 'Avatar: Fire and Ash', premiered in the US. Ryder demands at least $500 million in damages and a court order blocking the new film's release. The latter request was not granted.
It is, in fact, not the first time Ryder has attempted to get his alleged due: a similar lawsuit was filed in 2011. However, a California state court threw it out after finding that Cameron created 'Avatar' well before Ryder submitted his story to Lightstorm.
Ryder still firmly believes that Cameron has misappropriated the central plot point of KRZ: the extraction of an animal-based substance that can extend human life. This point was not present in the original Avatar, but does exist in 'The Way of Water'. Indeed, the antagonist Resources Development Administration (RDA) actively pursues extraction of the life-extending Amrita substance. However, in the film it is produced in, and extracted from, the brains of whale-like creatures called Tulkun, who are sentient and have a rich culture, and thus are not exactly animals.
Reference: Tulkun from Avatar
Still, Ryder and his legal team claim that this plot point is just one of many elements Cameron has ostensibly misappropriated without proper compensation.
Ryder is represented by the law firm Kasowitz LLP.
According to Reuters, the case will be heard in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
As 2025 winds down, December highlighted how games, AI, and creative technologies are increasingly colliding with regulation, ethics, and production realities across the industry. Subscribe to the RenderHub Blog to keep track of how these shifts continue to unfold.