3D4 Oct 2026
Gears of War: E-Day ships UE5's MegaLights first
The Coalition went from roughly three shadow casters on screen to hundreds, holding 60fps on Series X. On PC only a 5090 clears native 4K60. The cost moved.
3D
Environment art, shading, rigging and the pipelines around them — Blender, Unreal, Substance, Marvelous Designer and Houdini, read from inside the job rather than from the release notes.
49 articles · latest 4 Oct 2026
3D2 Oct 2026
Cinema 4D 2026.4: an MCP server, off by default
Maxon built an MCP server into Cinema 4D so Claude or ChatGPT can drive it. Undo, scoped permissions and an audit log decide whether it is usable.
3D30 Sept 2026
Blender on Android: Vulkan only, and no denoiser
The upstream Android patch builds Blender with the NDK and runs it through SDL3. Vulkan is required, arm64 only, and the dependency set is short a denoiser.
3D29 Sept 2026
Houdini RBD: add fracture without re-simulating
Jae Jun Yi's multi-layered RBD workflow, presented at SIGGRAPH 2026, lets a second fracture inherit motion a director has already signed off on.
3D28 Sept 2026
Cyberpunk 2077 Chimera: two years, four rebuilds
CD PROJEKT RED rebuilt Phantom Liberty's spider tank four times across two years, and calls it one of the most expensive art assets the studio has made.
3D27 Sept 2026
GTA 2 path tracing needed a new D3D9 renderer
A modder path-traced GTA 2 by writing a Direct3D 9 renderer that rebuilds the game's tile world into geometry RTX Remix can actually light.
3D27 Sept 2026
MobyGames lets you claim credits you never got
MobyGames will let developers claim credits their studio left off, and verify them. It costs $14.99 a month, aimed at an industry shedding jobs.
3D26 Sept 2026
Mari 8 hex tiling: three taps kill the repeat
Foundry's texture painter now de-repeats tiled textures in a hexagonal grid. The technique is four years old and has been in renderers for months.
3D25 Sept 2026
Silent Hill: Townfall stutters at 60fps on a 5090
A 5090 clears 60fps at native 4K with ray tracing and still hitches. Konami has now confirmed a performance patch. Two separate faults are doing the damage.
3D23 Sept 2026
Studio Orange: 3D models bent to look hand-drawn
Dropped frames, warped models, faces redrawn by hand. Every trick that makes Orange's CG read as anime costs the asset reuse 3D is supposed to buy you.
3D20 Sept 2026
Cyberpunk 2077: twice Witcher 3's texel density
CD PROJEKT RED's art directors say every building, advert and piece of litter in Night City was placed by hand. First person is why it had to be.
3D17 Sept 2026
PS1 pre-rendered backgrounds, rebuilt in Blender
Static Between Stations renders its rooms in Blender and plays them as video — path-traced, scan-heavy, nothing the engine has to optimise.
3D15 Sept 2026
Blender's OVERGROWN teaser: painterly shadows
Blender Studio's first OVERGROWN footage landed on 14 September. The painterly shadows in it are solved in the geometry that casts them.
3D14 Sept 2026
Zerply closes 28 September: export by the 21st
Zerply shuts down on 28 September after sixteen years. Export requests close on the 21st, and no one site replaces what it did for VFX credits.
3D13 Sept 2026
Blender 5.3 dispersion: spectral vs RGB
Caustify carries a wavelength to CIE 1931 and converts once. Cycles samples one too, then hands it back to RGB. That gap is why dispersion renders slowly.
3D10 Sept 2026
Krokodove ships in Fusion 21.1: 20 years of nodes
Raf Schoenmaekers gave Krokodove away through Reactor for two decades. Blackmagic's 8 September release puts it in the box, and ends a render farm headache.
3D7 Sept 2026
Spider-Verse ink lines, rebuilt in Grease Pencil
Imageworks built Kismet inside Houdini so ink lines would follow a moving character. Grease Pencil in Geometry Nodes puts that within reach of one person.
3D6 Sept 2026
Blender's OVERGROWN: every log free this week
Blender Studio dropped the paywall on every OVERGROWN production log for a week, while the feature itself is still short of the subscribers it needs.
3D5 Sept 2026
Fusion to Blender: materials survive a re-sync
A free add-on pipes Fusion 360 into Blender over localhost and matches bodies by ID, so materials, creases and light links live through the second export.
3D4 Sept 2026
ArmorPaint 1.0: eight years, six build targets
ArmorPaint tagged 1.0 on 3 September, eight years into early access. Source still free under zlib, binaries still $19, and six build targets explain the wait.
3D4 Sept 2026
Insomniac's Wolverine: 189,589 photos of Japan
Six people, four regions, 5.6TB and 189,589 frames. What a location-scanning trip actually brings home, and which parts of Japan refuse to be scanned at all.
3D3 Sept 2026
tyFlow 2.100: PhysX vehicles land in 3ds Max
A proper car sim inside 3ds Max at last. Tyson Ibele's plugin now drives PhysX vehicles from the same flow graph as the particles and rigid bodies.
3D2 Sept 2026
Caddis 1.0: a node graph per layer, and Linux
Mike Gaynor's After Effects alternative left beta with more than 130 nodes and a $129 perpetual licence. The Linux build is what pipelines will notice.
3D1 Sept 2026
Colour charts: why CG doesn't sit in the plate
Your render's lighting can be right and the shot still looks pasted. Usually the plate and the render are sitting in two different colour worlds.
3D1 Sept 2026
Krita paints Blender textures over a WebSocket
PaintBridge sends Blender's viewport passes straight into Krita and projects the paint back — normals, depth, AO and colour ID included.
3D31 Aug 2026
Stylized hair normals: shade it as one mass
Stylized hair fails in lighting more often than in shape. Point the normals off a scalp proxy and the clumps finally shade as one volume.
3D30 Aug 2026
DLSS 5 leak: a generative pass over finished art
DLSS 5 leaked out of an NBA 2K27 build before release. Modders put it in Control and Skyrim, where it repaints finished art and halves frame rates.
3D26 Aug 2026
Nvidia retired Nanite's shadow stand-in mesh
RTX Mega Geometry lets Unreal Engine 5 ray-trace Nanite's real cluster geometry instead of a decimated stand-in. Gears of War E-Day ships on it first.
3D25 Aug 2026
Building a house generator instead of a house
A breakdown of Ezequiel Grand's commercial VFX career, published on 80.lv, traces how a Paul McCartney tour deadline pushed him into procedural Houdini work.
3D24 Aug 2026
Marvelous Designer 2026.1 rips fabric on purpose
CLO Virtual Fashion's cloth sim tool picks up a Seamline Ripping Tool and two new pinching modes today.
3D24 Aug 2026
A hand-painted dormitory that paints its own light
Morgane Muller's Spellbound Dormitory, covered by 80.lv this week, gets its stained-glass windows to glow without a single translucent shader.
3D23 Aug 2026
Scanned garments beat cloth sim on hero clothing
Render Ready builds hero garments from physical scans on poseable mannequins instead of cloth sim, and now feeds the same data to AI motion models.
3D21 Aug 2026
Nuke 17.1 can relight Gaussian splats
Foundry's Nuke 17.1 beta drops lights onto a Gaussian splat in comp, and what it deliberately skips to manage that sets the honest expectation.
3D21 Aug 2026
How Tiny Flock handles scale when the player is a giant
No Brakes Games' new sheep-herding puzzler puts the player at doll's-house scale over 21 fully interactive dioramas.
3D20 Aug 2026
A Blender addon now picks your retopology algorithm for you
Quadify Ultra ships an ML router for Blender 5.0 that reads a mesh's geometry and decides which of five retopology algorithms to run on it.
3D19 Aug 2026
Phone-based 3D scanning just dropped the cloud entirely
Scantic trains Gaussian splats on-device: no account, no upload, no wifi. It is not the first, which is why offline capture is now the baseline.
3D19 Aug 2026
A ZBrush sculpt that reads as a flat drawing
David Papunashvili's Punk Knight reads as flat concept art until you rotate it. The 2D concept is projected onto the sculpt and PolyPainted over.
3D18 Aug 2026
Ikkis built tanks that drive, and VFX still had work
CGChannel ran ReDefine's breakdown for the tank battle in Ikkis, a film about the 1971 Battle of Basantar.
3D18 Aug 2026
One sci-fi hand prop, four texture sets
Dragoslav Vugdelija's Tears in Rain project is a small sci-fi prop with metal, glass and plastic sculpted into believable wear.
3D17 Aug 2026
007 First Light titles: built from the game's own mocap
Territory Studio built the Bond title sequence out of 007 First Light's own animation data. Here is what reusing in-engine mocap actually costs.
3D17 Aug 2026
True Depth V3 turns one photo into a Blender scene
True Depth V3 adds proper camera-projection scenes and one-click HDRI studios on top of its depth-map displacement, all running locally off a single 2D image.
3D16 Aug 2026
Low-Budget Repairs made squalor readable
A House Flipper parody where you renovate as badly as possible and still get paid. Convincing bad craftsmanship is a stranger art problem than good.
3D15 Aug 2026
Downtown Generator builds a city from sliders
Downtown Generator, a new Geometry Nodes add-on for Blender 5.x, builds full procedural American downtowns from your own asset library.
3D14 Aug 2026
Half-Life 2's Headcrab, remade in UE5 Substrate
Emanuel Pessel rebuilt Valve's Headcrab in Unreal Engine 5 Substrate and published the whole process, since nobody writes Substrate guides for creatures.
3D14 Aug 2026
Procedural feathers in Blender from your hair groom
A free Geometry Nodes tool by 3D artist Sherzod Kadirov turns ordinary hair groom curves into fully controllable feathers. No plugin, no custom particle hack.
3D13 Aug 2026
Spline Architect: from 100,000 objects to a million
Spline Architect's new update adds GPU instancing along splines at a scale that used to mean switching to Houdini.
3D12 Aug 2026
KitBash bought ArtStation and Sketchfab. What to watch
Epic sold both platforms to the KitBash3D people. Nothing changes today, and the promises are the reassuring kind.
3D7 Aug 2026
Blender 5.2 LTS: what changed, and what did not
Two years of support, ACES colour management built in, and a compositor that finally got rebuilt.
3D6 Aug 2026
Why I record everything at 1x
Timelapses look impressive and teach almost nothing. Here is why the slow version is the one worth keeping.