3D Models
3D Print Models
3D Scans
Animation & MoCap
Textures
Materials
Skin Textures
2D Game Assets
Sound Effects
Brushes & Tools
Reference Photos
Stock Images
HDR Images
3ds Max
Maya
Blender
Unreal Engine
Unity
ZBrush
Cinema 4D
LightWave
Marmoset
SketchUp
FBX
DAE
DXF
GLB3D Monthly News: Chaos Updates, Unreal 5.7 Preview, CryEngine Revival and More
0Article by Yuri Ilyin
October's end draws near, and it's high time to look at the latest CG industry news. Grab a coffee and enjoy the read!
Chaos' New Toys
Throughout October, Chaos delivered a barrage of updates to its lineup of products, including the Vantage renderer, Anima animation software, and V-Ray for SketchUp. Each received significant improvements.
Anima 6.2, originally known as a crowd animation tool, now comes with an expanded street traffic simulation system. Every vehicle now includes a driver and passengers by default.
Traffic simulation, first introduced in April this year, allows users to simply draw paths, place objects like traffic lights, and define areas that animated units should avoid. The rest is handled automatically by the software. The latest release adds animated brake and indicator lights to the vehicles.
Designed primarily for architectural visualization, Anima 6.2 offers integration plugins for 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and Unreal Engine. Animated scenes can also be exported in FBX, OpenCollada, and V-Ray formats.
The software is now available exclusively through a rental model, priced at $121.80 per month or $717.60 per year. The free tier has been completely removed.
V-Ray 7.2 for SketchUp is another update that arrived in October. Described as a "wide-ranging" release by CG Channel, it introduces a new procedural night sky system, along with updates to features such as Chaos Scatter, 3D Gaussian Splats, and V-Ray GPU. In addition, there are two new AI-based tools: AI Enhancer and AI Upscaler.
AI Enhancer adds extra detail to renders by automatically identifying people, vegetation, and other focal areas, subtly improving them. AI Upscaler does exactly what its name suggests: it increases image resolution up to 16K. These tools join the AI Material Generator, introduced in September, which allows users to generate full PBR materials from photographs.
It's worth noting that Adobe Substance 3D Designer has offered a similar feature for years.
All AI tools are currently marked as beta, which means there's still room for improvement.
Last but not least, Chaos has finalized Vantage 3.0, the latest version of its real-time ray tracing renderer. Just like V-Ray, Vantage is now compatible with the Corona Renderer and its materials, and it supports USD and MaterialX standards, paving the way for use in nonV-Ray-based pipelines.
The latest release adds support for Gaussian splats, volumetrics, and a new camera tracking feature. Vantage 3.0 also introduces its own materials editor.
According to the developers, Vantage can handle large and complex 3D scenes while maintaining real-time performance - an encouraging advancement.
The System Requirements specify that Vantage requires an NVIDIA RTX series GPU or AMD RX 6000 series (or newer).
Further details can be found here.
As a footnote, Envision, Chaos' standalone rendering software, has also been updated to version 1.3. It includes over 5,000 new assets, a revamped Cosmos library, and AI material generation, among other features.
EbSynth
Secret Weapons - Sarka Sochorova and Ondej Jamrika - have released a new version of their software EbSynth, which allows artists to transform the look of any video using a single hand-edited frame.
Described as a VFX tool for creative video transformations, retouching, and rotoscopy, it might seem like just another generative AI application, except it isn't. EbSynth uses a different approach: it propagates the changes made to one still image across all remaining frames.
The results look convincing enough:
At present, it is a browser-based service with prices starting at $20 per month, along with a limited-capability free tier.
Details can be found here.
Foundry Flix 8.0
Foundry has released Flix 8.0, a story development software designed for animation and visual effects production.
This update focuses on smoother collaboration between pre-production and production departments - including directors, producers, and artists. It introduces a new Storyboard Pro extension, allowing users to send individual storyboard panels back and forth between Flix and Toon Boom's Storyboard Pro.
Additionally, it significantly improves the shot-related workflow (thanks to the new Shots UI) and streamlines panel drag-and-drop functionality.
Check for the details at the Foundry's website.
Unreal Engine 5.7 (Preview)
Epic Games has released the preview version of Unreal Engine 5.7, featuring a wealth of new capabilities.
Highlights include the Procedural Vegetation Editor, an experimental plugin that lets artists create and modify procedural 3D vegetation directly within Unreal Engine using its Procedural Content Generation framework. It's primarily intended for customizing existing assets rather than generating new ones.
The system is compatible with Quixel Megaplants, allowing users to adjust overall tree shapes and tweak parameters such as branch and leaf distribution. The results can then be exported as either static or skeletal meshes.
Another major addition is the Rig Mapper, which enables animation transfers between UE MetaHumans and ARKit, Apple's augmented reality API. Since ARKit is used in various iPhone and iPad motion capture apps, its upcoming support in Unreal Engine could further democratize mocap workflows for developers.
Interestingly, the compatibility works both ways - Rig Mapper also allows facial animations generated with MetaHuman Animator to be applied to ARKit characters.
In terms of animation retargeting, Unreal Engine 5.7 adds Spatially Aware Retargeting, which adapts collisions when transferring animations between characters with different body proportions. The IK Retargeter tool has also received updates to enhance this process.
More details about Unreal Engine's upcoming version 5.7 is available at the vendor's site.
CryEngine Community Edition
In a rather surprising turn of events, indie developer Pterosoft Studio has released an unofficial patch for CryEngine 5.7, titled CryEngine Community Edition.
The last official release from Crytek dates back to 2022, and according to CGChannel.com, the engine's development appears to have stalled. The company reportedly laid off a significant portion of its staff earlier this year.
The unofficial Community Edition addresses a number of bugs, including issues with rendering shadows under DirectX 12. In addition, it adds support for custom full-screen shaders..
The team behind it has also shared its own roadmap, which includes plans for DXR ray tracing, a shader graph, voxel fluid simulation, and more.
Some of these planned features were originally promised by Crytek itself, but the latest (and possibly final) official version of the engine didn't deliver on all of them.
CryEngine Community Edition is open source and distributed on GitHub as a patch for CryEngine 5.7 LTS, which must be downloaded and built beforehand.
Crytek charges a 5% revenue share on any project using the engine after the first $5,000 per year. Otherwise, it remains free to use.
You can find more details here.
Blender addons
As Blender developers continue upgrading version 5 Beta toward production release, several new and noteworthy add-ons have emerged this month.
One of the more notable is Fluid Flow, a multiphysics real-time simulation tool for water, sand, and lava.
The description emphasizes its artist-friendly design - simulations are controlled with simple sliders, and users can literally paint the simulated medium across the scene. It's also lightweight, being built entirely with Geometry Nodes
Judging by the demo video, the system performs better with lava and sand than with water. On the other hand, the add-on is quite affordable, priced at $14 by default and currently available for under $7 during the sale season.
That's significantly cheaper than the more physically accurate FLIP Fluids add-on, which normally costs $76, though it's also discounted at the moment.
Another important add-on worth mentioning is Style Thief, a framework for matching the colors of one or several images to the style and palette of a target image.
The color matching is said to be handled intelligently, though Style Thief does not rely on AI.
In simplified terms, users select one or more source images, choose a target image, and the add-on generates color-matched variations of the originals.
It includes several modes of operation, allowing for diverse output results.
Prices start at $14 for an individual license, with even the top-tier Large Studio license competitively priced at just $34.
Grab it here.
Last but not least comes Orange Turbine's Retopoflow 4.0, the newest version of the acclaimed retopology add-on for Blender.
Retopoflow enables users to retopologize any mesh simply by drawing guides on the model's surface. The process is dramatically faster and far less tedious. Version 4.0 integrates the retopology tools directly into Blender's Edit Mode.
What's particularly noteworthy is that Retopoflow tools can now be used on non-mesh objects - including curves, NURBS, metaballs, and even text.
The add-on is relatively expensive, starting at $85.99 for an individual license on Superhive for professional users, but it's also on sale at the moment.
For teachers and students, both the source code and compiled binaries of Retopoflow are available for free on GitHub.
Photoshop 27.0
Adobe has released the latest version of its renowned image-editing software, packed with a wealth of AI-powered features.
Among them are the new Harmonize compositing system, an image upscaler based on models by Topaz Labs, and the Generative Fill and Generative Expand tools, which utilize AI models from Google and Black Forest Lab.
Adobe also offers its own AI models, trained on content from its Adobe Stock library, a dataset that is presumably safe for commercial use.
Third-party generative models, however, consume 10 Adobe generative credits per use, while the standard Adobe model requires only one.
The Harmonize tool automatically separates foreground objects from their backgrounds and blends them into new scenes, adjusting lighting, color, and shadows for natural compositing.
Non-AI improvements include a new Color & Vibrance adjustment layer for non-destructive color palette editing.
As CGChannel points out, 'What's new' page on Adobe's website also lists several features that were actually introduced in Photoshop 26.11.
Well, they're still new, aren't they?
3D never stands still, and neither should you. Subscribe to the RenderHub Blog and stay plugged into the pulse of the CG industry.
