Beta 6 brings a lot of improvements which have improving the workflow, usability, and discoverability. Many of them were created as answer of request from forum feedback. You will not need to uninstall previous versions of 123D to install Beta 6, the installer would do that automatically. Some of the features you can also watch in the What's new in Autodesk 123D Beta 6 videos here.
At Saturday was officially announced Blender 2.59 release. This is the third stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign, development and stabilizing work. This release contains the 1000s of fixes and feature updates since the 2.5 beta versions were published. So the Blender Foundation can be proud of it.
Alembic is the computer graphics interchange format developed by the two entertainment giants last year and focused on efficiently storing and sharing animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. It was designed to handle massive animation data sets often required in high-end visual effects and animation.
Portal Blenderguru brings again helpful tip for blender users. There is a video tutorial, where is explained how to create realistic ice. In this 45 minutes tutorial you will discover how to quickly add imperfections using displacements, an easy way to add air bubbles and how to create realistic ice material. Due to the complexity of refractions and and relections of ice, it generally renders better using unbiased rendering engines (like LuxRender or Cycles).
Shotgun Software unveils Version 3.0 of the Shotgun production management and collaboration system, with new features that make it faster and easier for visual effects, animation and video game studios to manage productions and collaborate. Shotgun v3.0 features completely re-written, polished navigation that simplifies the way data is organized and explored. A new visual filter tool panel makes it much faster for users to understand the big picture and find the answers they need.
