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GLB3D Monthly News: Previs Pro Free Edition, Autodesk’s AI Push, Ton Roosendaal Steps Down
0Article by Yuri Ilyin
September has come to an end, which means it is time for another round of industry updates. This month's digest covers a range of important news, from fresh software releases and AI-driven tools to leadership changes that will shape the future of the 3D and creative community.
Previs Pro: Good News for Students and Indies
Previs Pro, the intuitive storyboarding app that has seen use on well-known shows including Our Flag Means Death and Riverdale, has been updated to version 3 and now includes a free edition for students and indie projects.
Some limitations apply compared to the paid tiers, but it remains a useful tool. The latest version introduces a new toolset for creating animatics, along with an AI-assisted scene lighting system.
The app also comes with customizable readymade characters offering a range of full-body poses and facial expressions. In addition, the software can automatically pose characters to match a real-world reference image.
There is a sizable props library built in, while the paid tiers unlock a generative AI Prop Gen feature to create custom props when needed. Users can add lights, choose camera types and positions, and even make use of an augmented reality mode for location scouting.
The resulting images can be exported as JPG, PNG, or PDF files, or sent directly to production-planning tools like StudioBinder and Celtx.
The free edition does watermark exported images, but this is more of a nuisance than a setback.
Animatic sequences are unlimited in the paid versions, as is AI prop-making. With the free version, users are limited to one animatic sequence and five AI-generated props per project.
Check Previs Pro site for more details.
Ton Roosendaal Steps Down
Chairman and CEO of Blender Foundation Ton Roosendaal announced that he would leave his watch on January 1, 2026, naming his current COO Francesco Siddi as his successor. He will remain with the Foundation as a member of the newly created supervisory board.
Ton Roosendaal is the original creator of Blender, as well as Traces, an Amiga ray tracing software that served as the forerunner of Blender.
Blender itself began as an in-house tool for the animation studio NeoGeo. After it was taken over by another company in the late 1990s, Roosendaal founded a company called Not a Number (NaN) to further market and develop Blender. However, by 2002 NaN had essentially flopped. Roosendaal managed to convince NaN investors to open-source Blender in exchange for 100,000 EUR as a one-time fee and launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money, already as the head of the non-profit Blender Foundation.
The campaign's goal was achieved in just seven weeks, and on Sunday 13 October 2002, Blender was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Roosendaal continued coordinating development efforts, turning Blender into a Swiss Army Knife of software and a serious contender among the older and more expensive CG suites.
According to his farewell keynote, his retirement had been planned and prepared since 2019. He will move to the newly established supervisory board within the Blender Foundation, which will also see Sergey Sharybin as the new head of development, Dalai Felinto as the head of product, and Fiona Cohen as the head of operations.
Francesco Siddi, who will take over the CEO position, has been part of the Blender organization since 2012, serving in many roles including animator, web developer, pipeline developer, producer, and manager of Blender's industry relations.
AI Race Still Rages On
As the AI race continues, various companies are trying to ride the wave while it's high. Autodesk is among them, promoting its 'AI mission' for the future of media and entertainment.
On the practical level, the company promises to 'remove the drudgery' with the introduction of the AI Assistant tool that 'can be used to automate traditionally manual tasks - such as adjusting scene lighting to match the time of day'. Another upcoming feature is FaceAnimator, a tool that uses previously animated sequences of a project to generate facial and lip-sync animation directly from an audio file.
In addition, Autodesk has launched a free tier of Autodesk Flow Studio, software that "uses AI to automate complex VFX tasks like motion capture, camera tracking, and character animation, so more creators can bring their stories to life."
Certain VFX houses, Boxel Studio among them, are already using Flow Studio to enhance their character work on shows like CW's Superman & Lois.
Another adopter of AI is Aviz Studio, which has released AImagine, an AI-driven image generator for Autodesk's 3ds Max.
It allows users to generate images via text prompts directly within the 3ds Max interface, with most processing handled in the cloud. Developers also state that it is compatible with locally configured AI models.
AImagine will be made available in 3ds Max as part of its AI Studio Tools package..
Anym has launched a new physics-based animation engine designed to generate full character motion in 3D suites from very sparse keyframes. At present, plugins are available for Blender, Maya, and Cinema 4D, with a plugin for Unreal Engine also in development.
The software essentially replaces the in-betweeners with AI, creating smooth, physics-based transitions between keyframes. This allows animators to focus on more complex and advanced tasks while retaining full control over the results.
A demo of the suite in action within Maya can be seen below:
There is, however, no unified pricing listed on the official site, only the vague statement "We work with you to create pricing that fits your workflow, team size, and project needs."
Meanwhile, Chaos has added the AI Material Generator to V-Ray 7.1.2 for SketchUp, courtesy of the Chaos Cosmos platform. It was previously introduced in V-Ray for 3ds Max.
The generator can also automatically fix prepared source images by applying perspective correction, de-lighting, and making them seamlessly tileable.
While the AI Material Generator is still in beta, its functionality is currently free of charge. According to CGChannel.com some advanced features will eventually be available only with premium tiers.
Finally, KIRI Engine, the well-known photogrammetry-to-3D scanning platform, has introduced new AI features in version 4.0, including PBR material generation using diffusion models for more realistic textures. This feature is limited to paid users.
Version 4.0 also brings significant performance improvements - up to 5x faster - for both paid and free tiers, along with full-resolution rendering on mobile devices. Upload limits have been raised as well: up to 150 photos per scan for Basic users and up to 500 for Pro accounts.
Check out the details at the vendor's site.
RenderMan 27.0 Incoming
Pixar has released the beta notes for RenderMan 27.0, touted as the most significant update in over a decade.
The upcoming public release will see RenderMan XPU, its hybrid CPU/GPU render engine, ready for both final-frame rendering and interactive previews. First introduced in RenderMan 24 four years ago, XPU offered a faster alternative to RIS, RenderMan's CPU-only architecture, for look development and interactive rendering. However, until now, it lacked support for several key features.
These features - such as new deep compositing, full support for Open Shading Language (OSL) display filters, mesh lights, and interior volume aggregates - are now being added, making XPU a viable alternative to RIS.
There are still limits, however. RIS remains the better choice for scenes with very large numbers of lights (several thousand), and XPU does not support light transport algorithms like bidirectional path tracing or photon mapping.
Sadly, baking is not supported either, and NURBS and quadrics remain unsupported.
In terms of pricing, RenderMan continues to offer a free tier. New perpetual and node-locked floating licenses now cost $845, an increase of $250 compared to RenderMan 26.3.
RenderMan 27 is compatible with Windows 10+, macOS 12.0+, and glibc 2.34+ Linux (equivalent to RHEL 9+). Integration plugins are available for Blender, Houdini, Katana, and Maya.
RenderMan XPU is supported on Windows and Linux and requires an NVIDIA Pascal GPU (GeForce 10 family) or newer.
RenderMan 27 is currently in beta, with no word yet on its final release date.
Check out the changelog.
Photoshop 26.11
Adobe has released Photoshop version 26.11, also referred to as Photoshop 2025.9.
The latest update introduces a new feature called Projects for creating and managing projects shared via the cloud. It also allows users to view images generated with Adobe's Firefly AI tools directly from the home screen and import them into active projects.
The software is rental-only and is offered through several subscription plans. Counterintuitively, the Single App plan ($22.99 per month) costs more than the Creative Cloud Photography plan ($19.99 per month), which also includes Lightroom and additional apps. Both plans provide 25 monthly generative credits for use with Firefly.
The most expensive option, Creative Cloud Pro, provides access to 20+ apps including Photoshop, unlimited use of standard AI image features, and 4,000 generative credits monthly.
Check Adobe's site for more details.
World Creator 2025.1: Meet The Biome
BiteTheBytes has released World Creator 2025.1, a major update to its terrain generation software. The new version introduces the Biome system, enabling the creation of entire ecosystems - forests, deserts, and more - and painting them directly into the generated terrain.
The update supports the use of custom 3D assets (including Megascans) as well as manual placement, though its primary strength lies in procedural scattering.
World Creator has been used by studios such as Blizzard Entertainment, Crytek, and Cinesite. Developers have also included support for the Grand Theft Auto V modding community, allowing the World Creator apps to be integrated into the game, including custom servers.
World Creator 2025.1 is available for current versions of Windows (post-Windows 7), with integration plugins for Blender, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Unity, and Unreal Engine.
Interestingly, BiteTheBytes has significantly changed its license tiers for the second time in a year. The $149 Indie license, previously available to artists earning under $100k/year, is now restricted to those earning under $50k/year and no longer includes the new object scattering features. To offset this, the maximum resolution for exported terrain has been increased from 4K to 8K.
The $249 Professional license has been limited to individual artists, though the previous $250k/year earnings cap has been removed.
Licenses for studios now start at $499. Subscription tiers have been discontinued for Indie and Professional users and are now only available for Studio and Enterprise.
For more details visit the developers' site.
The 3D industry never stands still, and each month brings new tools, ideas, and shifts that redefine the creative landscape. Subscribe to the RenderHub blog to stay informed and never miss the next wave of developments.
