Digital Production is taking a short end-of-year break. Back up your data, sort out the chaos folder, enjoy the holidays, and we will be back next year.

Tired of calm coding sessions? Ridiculous Coding turns Godot scripting into an action scene with screenshake, fireworks, and XP bars.

New Vulkan-based retopology add-ons make Blender’s mesh work feel like Maya’s Quad Draw, fast, intuitive, and production-ready.

FMX 2026 confirms early talks including VFX for Woodwalkers 2 and AI debate, and reminds industry to submit to Animation Production Days by February 4.

Blackmagic Camera 10.0 adds pre-record, smarter cooling, and new API tools for PYXIS and URSA cameras.

Plasticity 2025.3 drops a full toolset refresh: live instancing, SVG export, real-time curvature and continuity feedback, new materials and precision tools.

SMPTE’s revised AI report defines where AI stands in media: open source, agentic systems, security, ethics, and data. Read before you automate.

Kiri Engine releases Mesh Wrap, a free Blender add-on that makes projecting and scattering 3D-scanned terrain pieces onto base geometry fast, precise, and non-destructive.

Boris FX unwraps a holiday gift: SynthEyes Essentials, a free, three-hour matchmove training course for VFX artists, free until 31 December.

New Blender add-on ShapeScape Studio lets artists grow painterly trees procedurally with NPR shaders, custom meshes, and built-in animation.

KeenTools 2025.3 expands host support with Blender 5, Character Creator 5 export from FaceBuilder and Alembic output from GeoTracker for After Effects.

Chaos ships V-Ray for Blender Update 2: macOS support, AI tools, faster distributed rendering, and a long list of bug fixes and GPU tweaks.

Cleaner graphs, smarter noise, and a friendlier graph creation UI: Substance 3D Designer 15.1 focuses on making material authoring less fiddly.

Leopoly’s hybrid sculpting tool grows up: Shapelab Max 2026 adds a smarter gizmo, Pixar-inspired Elastic Move, and faster voxel remeshing.

Chaos Vantage enters the DCC viewport. With V-Ray 7 updates, real-time feedback, volumetrics and AI materials now reach Maya and Houdini.

The release of INSYDIUM Fused 2025.4 introduces a rebuilt NeXus core that accelerates GPU simulation performance while reducing VRAM usage. The system handles particle and fluid data more responsively, and the update brings expanded mapping controls such as looping data channels and layered GPU falloffs that increase procedural flexibility. The changes shift NeXus closer to a general purpose GPU simulation framework inside the host DCC.

AI-assisted mattes, cleaner camera solves, and the return of the curve editor: Mocha Pro 2026 refines your roto and tracking life without reinventing the wheel.

Epic opens its once invite-only rigging workshop for all: five days of Control Rig deep-dive, free and production-focused.

CityEngine 2025.1 arrives with a broadened toolset for procedural modeling, architecture, and urban layout work. The update focuses on CGA geometry manipulation, a more capable Visual CGA workflow, improved street modeling, and a first look at the new Python 3 API. CGA: Direct geometry modifications CGA rules have always been powerful, although historically confined to operator-driven construction. CityEngine 2025.1 breaks that convention with direct geometry modification.

Mavis Camera 7.4 introduces Film Kit: a $9.99 add-on with LUT workflows, Open Gate capture, MLUTs, and ATOMOSphere C2C upload.

The VES Handbook enters edition four with 95 contributors, new chapters on AI, NeRFs, real time engines and more. Pre orders open now, release Dec 18.

Beeble Studio puts 4K AI-powered relighting and full PBR pass generation on your own machine, no cloud uploads, no credits, just local GPU power.

ABViewer 16 brings practical upgrades for anyone forced to open CAD files. Better 3D views, cleaner DWG export, and new G-code tools.

Pixar refines RenderMan 27.1: better Lama layering, smarter checkpointing, memory savings, and fixes across Blender and Houdini bridges.

World VFX Day 2025 kicks off today at 11 AM CET. A 15-hour livestream unites 65+ speakers from across global VFX, animation and CGI.