Pilgway has begun shipping 3D-Coat 4.0, a sizeable – and long-awaited – update to its voxel sculpting and retopology tool. New features include Live Clay, a dynamic mesh density system similar to ZBrush’s DynaMesh; the power to paint directly onto a sculpted mesh; and new Voxel Extrude, spline drawing and Magic Wand tools.

Sitni Sati released a version of its FumeFX also for Maya™ modeling and animation software.FumeFX is a fluid dynamics engine designed for simulation and rendering of realistic fire, smoke, explosion and other gaseous phenomena.

It's versatility, robustness and intuitive workflow makes it a perfect solution for the most demanding tasks in the computer graphics industry. The core engine allows user to interfere with simulation computation at the lowest level.

Next Limit Technologies announced the immediately availability of the most popular available fluid simulation software, RealFlow 2013. With RealFlow you can simulate large-scale Hybrido fluids, highly detailed particles fluids (Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics), rigid and soft bodies (Caronte Body Dynamics Solver) and wave surfaces. RealFlow has gone through lots of major and minor changes. The main features will doubtless attract your attention, but there are also many improvements affecting the stability, memory efficiency, user-friendliness and speed. Between the most attractive changes belongs RealFlow's cutting-edge hybrid grid/particle solver, Hybrido 2 which was rewritten from scratch. Hybrido 2 provides a very high level of detail and is much faster than it’s before. Next Limit also added sophisticated support for GPU-based simulations and a new mesh engine which is able to catch all the fine structures from the core fluid simulation. By performing large-scale simulations the conditions for splash, foam and mist formation, are automatically created. Even these secondary particles can even be simulated as a post process in a network using RealFlow Nodes. Like this you can create and generate millions of particles representing the fluid.

Pixologic updated ZBrush4 to version R5 simplifying the process of modifying and controlling basic topology. ZBrush is a digital painting and sculpting tool widely used in the 3D industry fully loaded with powerful features and intuitive workflows. Built within an elegant interface, ZBrush offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. Designed around a principle of circularity, the menus in ZBrush work together in a non-linear and mode-free method. The latest upgrade to ZBrush is focused on enhancing brushes, masking capabilities, Polygrouping functions and workflow efficiently. With the addition of features like Quick Save, Mouse Wheel Support and a new See-Through mode, artists will have more time for exploring their creativity without leaving ZBrush. Between the new changes belongs „Panel Loops“. Using this function you can convert your model’s PolyGroups into panels of polygons with or without thickness, or even as extruded surfaces. Created panels have their edges defined by an editable curve with a custom bevel.