cebas announces the release of its thinkingParticles 5 Trial Version – offering thinkingParticles users the opportunity to experience the great new features added to this state-of-the-art particles too.

A novelty by description – Release 5 introduces, for the first time ever, a dedicated true soft body rope and vehicle dynamics system that is purely procedural. Special effects like tearing ropes or cables, cars driving in a city or a forensic crash simulation - all this can now be done with one affordable and powerful special effects tool.

New issue of 3D World magazine is coming out. With this new issue you can discover the secrets of Method Studio’s epic Halo 4 trailer. Specifically Benjamin Walsh reveals how Method Studios collaborated with agency TwoFifteen and production company MJZ to create a teaser worthy of the big screen for upcoming videogame Halo 4.

You can also find there how Antony Ward details the techniques and tricks he used to make his game-ready model of a ninja and how Jordan Walker reveals how to create a model in ZBrush and 3ds Max, and render it using mental ray.

Allegorithmic releases the latest version of its popular non-linear texture and material processing software. With the addition of 2D painting utilities, and new batch processing tools that can automate away the most tedious of tasks, Substance Designer has become an even more potent ally to developers working on every type of game project, from mobile and web, to the next generation of AAA games.

Imagination Technologies has unveiled Caustic Visualizer: a new interactive viewport rendering plugin for Maya, developed using the PowerVR Brazil SDK. Imagination will be demonstrating Caustic Visualizer’s highly interactive full-frame performance on the new PowerVR low-power ray tracing hardware reference platform.

Imagination’s Caustic Visualizer family revolutionizes the performance and functionality of the interactive visual look development process by making ray-traced photorealistic rendering, from the start, an integral part of the content creation work flow.