Ton Roosendaal , a chairman of the Blender Foundation, announced the availability of a Blender 2.61 beta test build, and invites the community to test it. New features in Blender 2.61 include integrated motion tracking for video footage, the new Cycles renderer, dynamic paint (turn objects into paintbrushes), Ocean Sim and export to Adobe After Effects and many more. While many new features have been added, 117 bugs have also been fixed. You now can download testbuilds with the 2.61 features included. You can download it, if you follow the link at the end of this article.

Autodesk released a new application especially for Apple iPad ForceEffect™, an Autodesk Simulation mobile engineering is for analysing design concepts in the field or in the office. Unlike the tradition approach where you had to use a calculator to develop equations for design options, Autodesk ForceEffect does all the simulation and engineering calculations for you, enabling you to quickly and easily simulate design options during the concept phase to determine the viability of a design.

Autodesk revealed a short overview about the new node editor for Maya 2012 included inside Autodesk 2012 Subscription Advantage Pack. Basically all scene elements are node-based, each node have its own attributes and customization. As a result, the visual representation of a scene is based entirely on a network of interconnecting nodes, depending on each other’s information. For the convenience of viewing these networks, there is a dependency and a directed acyclic graph.

E-on software announced the full release of all Vue 10 line products. Together with Vue 10 Complete, Studio and Esprit e-on software released also Vue 10 Frontier and Vue Theme-Pack. The difference between the different versions of Vue 10 is in the content and tools available in. Vue 10 Complete is the most advanced solution compared to the Esprit and Studio version for Digital Nature artists. It combines into a single package a multitude of cutting-edge features that let 3D artists easily create and control rich EcoSystems™ of wind-swept trees and plants, hyper-realistic spectral atmospheres and detailed terrains in fully animated scenes.