What we are reading, testing and arguing about. Notes on VFX, 3D animation, live visuals, interactive installations and drone work, written by the people doing it rather than a marketing department.
When Victoria Beckham and OTB Group launched AI try-on tools in 2026, it became clear that rendered shopping is no longer a gimmick.
Real-time graphics that respond to language input are moving from research demos to touring shows, collapsing the gap between live control and cinematic polish.
Meshy AI's print-ready pipeline turns prompts into physical objects, and the tooling finally matches the speed of digital design.
3D-Agent shipped a standalone app in September that rewrites its own scripts for quad topology. Agentic workflows just stopped being a side project.
Head-mounted cameras for facial performance capture are now part of a full-body mocap pipeline. Here is what that changes.
Meshy 7.1 launched this September with geometry that holds up at 4K resolution. What changes when the hardest part of 3D work becomes instant.
It depends on the shot, the timeline, the software cost, and whether you can afford to go back and redo it.
Forward compatibility for spline IK and better pose workflows mean less time wrestling rigs and more time shipping.
Conversational image generation for industrial marketing moved from science fiction to October 1st, and the workflow math changed.
Blender's rebuilt ray-traced engine shipped with unlimited lights and screen-space reflections. For studios balancing speed and fidelity, the rules just changed.
AI is automating the hardest part of building for curved façades. Here is what changed for large-scale mapping.
Epic and Move AI shipped better video-based motion capture this summer. The tools are fast enough that a phone camera in a room becomes the whole rig.
Architects can now move from real-time preview to production render inside the same app. Here is what changes when the file doesn't leave the house.
One license covers 30 countries. Insurance is mandatory for work. Here is how to check.
A 50-meter curved wall in China marks the scale where virtual production stops being niche. For smaller studios, that means the rental market is about to shift.
A new custom node turns ComfyUI into a layered paint program. It cuts the friction between generation and refinement.
Major fashion houses are abandoning photoshoots entirely for controlled, perfect 3D renders. Here's what that means for everyone making product visuals.
When the most-used 3D library for web work lets you swap renderers in one line, adoption stops being theoretical. Here's what changed for people building in the browser.
Drive a node graph from your code editor. No more hand-wiring the procedural workflow.
The gap between open source and commercial software is not a talking point anymore. It is just the landscape.
Boutique houses with multiple disciplines cost more than specialists but keep files and clients in one place. Here's what to look for and who actually does this work.
The latest neural reconstruction work solves motion blur and sparse input. That changes what you actually shoot on set.
When text-to-3D becomes a native capability of AI agents, the abstraction between describing something and building it dissolves.
Armature automates the repetitive part of character rigging and ships free, which changes the economics of projects where rigs matter but budgets don't.
Native-class 3D performance in the browser is no longer a future idea. The platform just changed.
An AI model generator that shapes output to real manufacturing constraints changes who can turn a render into an actual object.
A handful of studios do handle previz through delivery, but 2026's trend is smarter handoffs with specialists.
SideFX wired MCP code generation into KineFX, letting riggers scaffold procedural setups faster without losing control.
360-degree eight-kilohertz video means pilots can now shoot the whole moment and choose the angle in post.
A new standard published in May defines how to encode and store HDR photographs with colour you can trust across devices.
Facial and body performance capture have always come from different vendors. That just changed.
Clients increasingly demand ownership of their pipelines. That changes how studios pitch and what they budget for.
A minute of product animation costs 5k to 25k USD. The gap is real, and it matters where you land.
Finding the right studio to build hands-on installations that listen to visitors and react.
Five major VFX platforms shipped native splat support in five days, signalling production is no longer an experiment.