Side Effects Software is proud to announce the immediate release of Houdini 12 which offers a wealth of new features and performance enhancements making it easier for CG artists to accomplish more and iterate faster. Built on a powerful new geometry engine, Houdini 12 includes targeted optimizations to dynamics and rendering and a reworked OpenGL 3 viewport. Houdini 12 also includes Bullet solver integration, Pyro FX 2, faster, more accurate FLIP fluids, production-ready cloth, an Alembic exporter and much more. Houdini’s Mantra renderer now brings physically-based rendering to volumes such as smoke and fire. 

This week Luxology LLC today announced the immediate availability of modo® 601. modo 601 includes character animation, built-in dynamics, volumetric rendering, and enhanced retopology modeling tools along with a host of other new capabilities. modo is now a full pipeline solution for professionals working in media and entertainment, advertising, engineering and architectural design visualization. modo 601 is available immediately for both Mac OS X and Windows at $1,195 with an upgrade price of $495. Existing modo owners can upgrade for $395 for the next two weeks.

Pixologic announces the release of ZBrush 4R3 for both Windows & Mac. ZBrush 4R3 not only implements various enhancements and polish to existing features, it also introduces major new features to dramatically expand your artistic possibilities. This update includes new features and expands the features introduced in previous versions. This includes enhancements to FiberMesh, BPR, and the interface, as well as the addition of the NoiseMaker plugin and Vector Displacement Maps. ZBrush 4R3 is a free update for all registered ZBrush users from Pixologic Download Center.

Adobe has made its Photoshop Touch application for Apple’s iPad available. The app is richly featured and includes much of what you’d expect from Photoshop: it comes with full layer support, editing features, over 20 filters, and many of the standard selection tools and brushes that make Photoshop so powerful to use. Photoshop Touch also comes with some interesting features such as a built-in Google image search feature, which makes finding images to edit,social network functionality to sharing your artwork and others. Photoshop Touch for iPad 2is available only for 9,99$.