Originally announced last November, LightWave 11 was originally due to ship at the end of 2011, but has been stuck in final bugfixing for a month or so. LightWave 11 is a complete out-of-the-box pipeline that puts award-winning modeling, rigging, effects, dynamics, animation, and final rendering at the fingertips of 3D artists. Lightwave offers many unique technologies such as the Virtual Preview renderer (VPR) for onscreen real-time rendering, Anaglyph Stereoscopic Preview for real-time interocular, 'red-blue' anaglyphic separations, and more.

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.62. Most of features were updated and some new were added, including render layers and passes, multi GPU rendering and selection of GPU device, improved sampling for complex environment maps, border rendering,  BVH caching for faster rendering of camera fly-throughs, and new shading nodes for color correction and a checkerboard texture node. UV tools have now an advanced interactive stitch tool, to align and join together UV islands. Version 2.62 updates Blender’s Boolean operations, implementing the faster, more stable Carve library, and adds a new Remesh modifier for converting a mesh to uniform quads. This update also fixes more than 200 bugs.

Digital Art Zone (DAZ) announced the immediate availability of a free 3D software download at DAZ3D.com. DAZ is offering full retail versions of the following 3D software for free. The offer includes figure-posing app DAZ Studio Pro, veteran landscape-generation tool Bryce and modelling package Hexagon. The 3D Photoshop Bridge plugin for DAZ Studio – part of the Pro edition of the software – is also being made available free for users of other editions. DAZ Studio Pro is the perfect tool to design unique digital art and 3D animations using virtual people, animals, props, vehicles, accessories, environments and more. 

E-on software has released a new version of LumenRT Review, its real-time visualisation tool for SketchUp. LumenRT is the only solution that combines real-time rendering with a full, physical simulation of light, letting architects and their clients accurately experience the true volume and lighting of their designs. LumenRT 2 Review has a number of new features and enhancements, including complete physical simulation of light, physically accurate rendering of reflections and dynamically adjustable time of day with realistic lighting or a low-quality rendering mode for slower computers.