Blender 2.63 released

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.63, the third update to Blender 2.6.

New in Version 2.63:

• New: BMesh
• Additions to Cycles
• Improvements to Motion Tracker
• New: Sculpt Hiding
• More Features
• Improvements to Addons
• Bug Fixes

Full release notes here

More info and download at www.blender.org

300+ Free Animal Reference Images on CGArena

www.cgarena.com added more than 300 high quality free reference images of animals.

Search in their database for "animal" or "bird" for example.

More info and dowload at www.cgarena.com

Mandelbulber 1.12 released

A new version of Mandelbulber was released.
New in version 1.12:

• added saving of all image layers in separate PNG 16-bit files
• improved fish eye perspective projection - now is compatible with full-dome projectors
• added "fish eye 180 degree cut" mode to limit rendering area to hemisphere

More info and download at www.mandelbulber.com

xNormal 3.17.12 released

An update of xNormal has been released:

New in Version 3.17.12:

• Fixed some crashes in the FBX mesh importer.
• Added 3dsmax/Maya 2013 support.
• Added preliminary support for Photoshop CS6.
• Fixed a problem that was avoiding the OpenCTM mesh importer plug-in to load properly.
• Fixed a memory leak releasing shaders in the OpenGL graphics driver.
• Solved a problem with Growl ( GNTP-send ) which was causing some crashes.
• Fixed a problem with color dialogs in the OpenGL graphics driver.
• Now you can use derivative maps in the 3D viewport ( with parallax effect based on Morten Mikkelsen's blog entry )
• Optimized the de-indexing phase for all the graphics drivers.
• Optimized the DX9 graphics driver and dropped support for ps1/2.
• Recompiled using the latest libraries ( Crosswalk 2012.5, FBXSDK 2012.2, Ogre3D 1.7.4 ).

More information and download on www.xnormal.net

Voodoo Camera Tracker 1.2 Beta released

digilab Hannover has released Voodoo Camera Tracker 1.2 Beta.

New in this version is improved support for Blender 2.5.x and higher. Export was tested for Blender 2.53 beta, 2.57, and 2.62.

More Infos and download at www.digilab.uni-hannover.de

Marc Lorenz: Free Time-lapse Skies

On the website of Marc Lorenz you can get 3 high quality time-lapse skies (each video in 1080p resolution and 4 different color grading flavors).
These time-lapse skies are great for usage as background in archviz projects.

All footage is creative commons licensed and free for personal or commercial use.

More info and download on www.marclorenz.com

Examplevideo:

Sky Cloudy002 Time-lapse preview from Marc Lorenz on Vimeo.

Get 4 free HDRI images at HDR Mill

On the website of HDR Mill you can get 4 free HDRI´s.
The free images are available in 3000x1500 resolution and include two nature, one city and one interior scene.

More info and download at www.hdrmill.com