Free Textures from CGArena

On www.cgarena.com there are many high quality textures for free.

Categories include:
Animals, Buildings, Fire, Ground, Misc, Ornaments, Panoramic, Scenes & Skies, Transport, Trees-Flowers and Weapon.

More info and dowload at www.cgarena.com

xNormal 3.17.9 released

An update of xNormal has been released:

New in Version 3.17.9:

• Removed a warning message about OpenGL 3.1 loading the OpenRL renderer's plugin DLL. 
• Improved compatibility reading .OBJ vertex colors from 3D Coat. 
• The OpenGL graphics driver now lists all the anti-aliasing video modes. 
• Added an option to the mikktspace plug-in to compute the binormal on the fly in the shader. 
• Recompiled using the latest libraries ( Optix 2.5, JDK 1.7u3 ).

More information and download on www.xnormal.net

5 free HDRI from nordicFX

The website of nordicFX offers 5 free HDRI´s for non-commercial use only.
This HDRI environments include matching backplates.

Get them on www.nordicfx.net

OpenSCAD 2011.12

OpenSCAD is a software for creating solid 3D CAD objects.

Unlike most free software for creating 3D models (such as the famous application Blender) it does not focus on the artistic aspects of 3D modelling but instead on the CAD aspects. Thus it might be the application you are looking for when you are planning to create 3D models of machine parts but pretty sure is not what you are looking for when you are more interested in creating computer-animated movies.

It is free software and available for Linux/UNIX, MS Windows and Mac OS X.

More Info at www.openscad.org

Blender 2.62 released

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.62, the second update to Blender 2.6.

New in Version 2.62:

• Additions to the Cycles Render Engine
• Additions to Motion Tracking
• Additions to UV Tools
• Remesh modifier
• "Carve" Booleans
• Updates for the Game Engine
• and more

More info and download at www.blender.org

Unity 3.5 released

The version 3.5 of Unity has been released. 3.5 is one of the biggest releases to-date. It’s packed full of new features and improvements.
Major new features are:

• Shuriken Particle 
• System Built-in Pathfinding 
• Upgraded Occlusion Culling & new LOD 
• Google Chrome Native Client deployment 
• Linear Space Lighting and HDR

More Infos about Unity 3.5 at www.unity3d.com

Arbaro 1.9.8, a free 3D tree generator

Arbaro is a free tree generator. It's written in Java, so you can use it with any OS, wich is supported by Java.

Arbaro reads in an XML file with the tree parameters and writes out Povray, DXF or Wavefront OBJ files.
16 free 3D trees are included as XML-files ready for export.  

You can download the Arbaro software from the project site at SourceForge.