Maxon Cinebench 2026 Assesses New NVIDIA, AMD and Apple Hardware
Maxon's new release of Cinebench is updated to the most recent Redshift Rendering engine and adds support for the new NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, and M4/M5 Apple Silicon processors.
Chaos Vantage's real-time feedback is now accessible in the viewport, speeding up layout, previs and lookdev for VFX and animation teams, alongside a new set of updates for V-Ray 7 for Houdini and Maya.
GenAI Generalist Sami Ling at Dimension Studio shares interesting ideas on the role of AI in filmmaking, particularly in virtual production, reflecting her experience gained at the studio.
Mari 7.5 has a new Multi-Paint feature developed as a collaboration between Foundry and Wētā FX, a Texture Transfer system, an expanded asset library and an Image Manager.
The December Maxon One release delivers improvements to Cinema 4D, Redshift, ZBrush and Red Giant, upgrading workflows for sculpting, rendering and motion graphics design.
The new Boris FX Sapphire 2026 release introduces an authentic film burn effect and transition, an AI-driven whiplash cutout transition, new lens flares, and grunge stamps.
Digital Domain has appointed Sudhir Reddy as President of its Global VFX Business, with 27 years of industry experience in India, New Zealand and the US.
Das Element, asset library software built for VFX and animation studios, now has stronger support for 3D workflows, new permission controls and improved tools for customization.
The Academy Software Foundation held its annual Open Source Days event in August, helping to further open source software development for VFX, animation and digital content creation.
Christopher Jaques and Theo Facey, formerly of DNEG, launched The TWIN Group, a collective of visual experts specialising in the development and creation of high-end digital characters.
Chaos V-Ray 7 for 3ds Max now features AI-driven tools for materials creation and automated scene enhancement, shifting scenes from day to night and exchanging feedback via the cloud.
Ingenuity Studios announced the appointment of Armen Kevorkian as president. A visual effects industry leader, Armen brings high-profile production expertise to a new role.
Chaos Group V-Ray for Blender now makes the V-Ray renderer available to Blender users, working in animation, VFX, archviz and game cinematics, from inside the application.
Video production, post and applications are evolving and expanding rapidly around the world. Three committed companies talk about their ambitions and expectations for 2022.
Foundry has made significant changes to Nuke in this release, updating its Node Graph UX, improving the timeline, extending Machine Learning and introducing an Unreal Reader in beta.
Foundry Mari 5.0 improves the brush engine to include colour jitter, has a new export workflow for USD material networks and helps users to take better advantage of proceduralism in Mari.
3D software developer Unity will soon acquire Weta Digital’s tools, pipeline and engineering talent, in effect making Weta’s VFX tools available for integration onto the Unity platform.
Chaos Group’s V-Ray renderer has won an Engineering EmmyAward for making new levels of photorealistic visual effects possible in episodic productions. The award honours technical developments that are “so innovative in nature that they materially affect the production, recording, transmission, or reception of television”. The award will be presented by the Television Academy Engineering Committee live at their annual event on 21 October 2021.
Used on hundreds of television programming since 2003, including Game of Thrones, Stranger Things and Star Trek: Discovery, V-Ray creates a blend of real and virtual elements on screen through the use of physically based rendering and adaptive ray tracing. Optimised to handle large production scenes, V-Ray is used to render digital environments, digidoubles, creatures and vehicles in a highly efficient way, leading to its use at studios like Digital Domain, Zoic Studios, Scanline VFX, FuseFX, Mackevision and others.
Game of Thrones, Scanline VFX
“We are very honored by this award, and are happy to have played even a small part in helping artists achieve their visions. It feels like every year we see something new and exciting happening in episodics, which gives our team the inspiration we need to push the software even more,” said Vlado Koylazov, CTO and co-founder of Chaos. “I am thankful for all the studios that have made V-Ray a part of their pipeline, and all the developers who work hard behind the scenes to make it even better. There’s more to come.”
“We use V-Ray every day to achieve the highest quality render output and iterate quickly on a very compressed delivery schedule,” said Matt Smith, digital effects supervisor at Digital Domain. “As we continue to bring film-quality VFX to episodics, V-Ray has become especially important to shows like WandaVision, where it helped us create over 300 shots for the season finale’s Witch and Vision battle scenes. Congratulations to Chaos.”
WandaVision, Digital Domain
“V-Ray has been at the core of Zoic's CG render pipeline for the past 14 years, producing close to 75 million rendered frames for 1,893 episodes, for the major studios including Disney, Netflix and Amazon,” said Saker Klippsten, CTO at Zoic Studios. “The support from Chaos is also first class. They’re always there to help implement new features and fixes, allowing us to focus on the creative and solve other pipeline issues.” www.chaosgroup.com