Moviemation Facial Motion Capture Software 2.0

With Moviemation Facial Motion Capture Software 2.0 you can transfer movements of a real person face to a 3D model. To achieve this markers are glued on the face of the real person. These are recorded by a helmet camera. The software can track the movements of these markers and transfer them to a 3D face.

With new features and redesigned interface:

• 2D images can be converted into 3D movements. 
• With animated textures and facial expressions are more realistic. 
• The video and the 3D face can be zoomed and rotated.

(The free version is limited to 15 points, 250 frames and 640 x 640 resolution)

More infos and download on www.moviemation.de

Two HDR files from Dutch Skies 360 free until 31 December 2011

On the website of www.3dworldmag.com you can get two HDR files from Dutch Skies 360 for free until 31 December 2011 from Bob Groothuis, the photographer behind the popular Dutch Skies 360° series. Each set includes an 8K spherical background, a 4K spherical HDR for reflections, a spherical lightmap and a reference document to link everything together using the popular sIBL system. You also get a sequence of 11K exposures for post-production work.

These sets work with any 3D package capable of reading HDR files, including 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, LightWave 3D and modo. To celebrate the release of his newest DVD, Dutch Skies 360° Volume 4, Bob is offering a prize selection including all four Dutch Skies 360° DVDs in his annual rendering competition. For your chance to win, all you need to do is create a render with the free HDR set created specially for the competition. The closing date is 31 January 2012.

More infos and download on www.3dworldmag.com

130 free Xfrog plants

Xfrog inc.,  the 3d Plantmaker, is giving away 130 plants for free
XfrogPlants are realistic, highly detailed, fully textured 3D trees, shrubs, and flowers, carefully modeled with Xfrog procedural software. They have 600 species available in libraries or as individual species!

The plants are available in the following formats: Maya, Max, obj, lwo, c4d, 3ds

They have free samples from 31 plant libraries available at www.xfrog.com

xNormal 3.17.7 released

An update of xNormal was released:

New in Version 3.17.7:

• Added support to import/export WebP images ( which is aimed to replace JPG/JPG2K/GIF/PNG images ). 
• Now it's possible to write image importers/exporters using Java. 
• The FBX mesh importer has been completely rewritten. Now it can load the tangent basis from the files which is specially good if you use the Unity engine. 
• Fixed several bugs ( CS5 filters, problem closing the SBM exporter in 3dsmax, use shortest diagonal, dilation in the OS2TS tool, Optix error message with some GPUs, etc... ).
• Added a new experimental renderer based on the Caustic Graphics / Imagination Technologies's OpenRL ray tracing API. 
• Added a new map type: the derivative normal maps ( which are aimed to replace old-school problematic tangent-space normal maps ). 

More information and download on www.xnormal.net 

Voodoo Camera Tracker 1.1.0

The Voodoo Camera Tracker is freeware and it estimates camera parameters and reconstructs a 3D scene from image sequences. The estimation algorithm offers a full automatic and robust solution to estimate camera parameters for video sequences. The results are useful for many applications like film production, 3D reconstruction, or video coding.

The estimated parameters can be exported to the following 3d formats:

• 3D MAX Script 
• Blender Python Script 
• Lightwave 3D 
• Maya Script 
• Softimage 3.9 | XSI 
• Textfile 
• CAHV 
• Cameras Feature Points 
• User Primitives

More Information about Voodoo Camera Tracker 1.1.0 can be found at www.digilab.uni-hannover.de

Digital Cut Out

Digital Cut Out is a free cut out site for architectural, landscape architectural, and planning graphics.  The entire site is free to student and professional designers. 

It offers cut out images in the following categories:

Home, people, plants, animals, furnishings, sky, perspective, vehicles.

More info at www.digitalcutout.com

MakeHuman 1.0 alpha6

MakeHuman(TM) is an open source, innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters. Features that make this software unique include a new, highly intuitive GUI and a high quality mesh, optimized to work in subdivision surface mode (for example, Zbrush). Using MakeHuman, a photorealistic character can be modeled in less than 2 minutes.

MakeHuman is released under an Open Source Licence (GPL3.0) , and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

 More info & download at www.makehuman.org