OctaneRender is an unbiased rendering application featuring real-time processing based only on the GPU (graphics processing unit). OctaneRender was originally developed by a New Zealand company called Refractive Software and the development of the renderer was later taken over by OTOY. OctaneRender is the first GPU based unbiased renderer released to the public. It uses the graphics card to calculate all measures of light, reflection and refraction. It runs only on NVidia’s GPUs and takes advantage of the CUDA technology and it’s incompatible with other video cards by other vendors. Is a true GPU based engine, not a hybrid CPU/GPU, nor a CPU based engine that was modified with GPU acceleration. Since a CPU adds a negligible speedup to the total rendering speed, having your CPU free for other tasks while rendering with OctaneRender allows you to use your system for other tasks while rendering.

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.65. Headline feature this time out is fire simulation, along with other improvements to the smoke simulation system, including a new flow force field, mixing options and support for interactions with collision objects.

The Cycles render engine also gets an update, with support for the Sony Pictures Imageworks-developed Open Shading Language, and there are a few updates to the mesh modelling and editing toolsets.

In addition to the new features, over 200 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

Bitmap2Material, which is compatible with 3ds Max, Maya, Flame and Unity, generates seamlessly tiling textures from source photographs, automatically extracts common texture map types, and generates random texture variations.

Bitmap2Material 2.0 offers more control over the diffuse map, including built-in controls for adjusting hue, contrast and saturation without the need to export the texture to Photoshop.

The AO map extraction, normal map extraction and light-cancelling algorithms have been improved, and 15 grunge maps, previously a separate toolkit, are now included by default.

The Foundry released a new update for their popular 3D digital paint tool Mari 1.5v2. Mari was designed from the ground up so artists can spend more time being creative and less with time handling technical issues. Mari is capable to fulfil the most challenging VFX painting projects and handling high-resolution textures and millions of polygons without slowing artists down. MARI offers a ‘paint & bake’ approach designed and proven by artists, powerful image processing tools, customisable menu system and interoperability with Photoshop® and other VFX tools. The new update includes a number of important fixes and enhancements. One of the new features included inside Mari 1.5v2 is a new option in the Hue filter and the Diffuse HSV shader module which allows you to specify whether to calculate desaturation based on Original [HSV] or Photoshop [HSL] values.