CG Press

10 stories

CG PressVFXV-Ray 7 update 5 brings AI assistant, MCP server New features in the latest version of Chaos V-Ray renderer include: AI assistant that speeds up scene setup, reduces manual work, allows to find or generate 3D assets from a single reference image…

11.05

CG PressVFXUcupaint 3.0 is out New features in the open source add-on for layered texture painting in Blender include: cleaner UI, dedicated height/displacement channel, unified preview mode, adjustment layers and new decals.

11.03

CG PressVFXLight Wrangler 5 released New features in the interactive lighting add-on for Blender include: A new engine models a real softbox shining through diffusion fabric, and new Scrim lights use it by default Adaptive Size: The…

11.02

CG PressVFXModeling Toolkit for Blender Modeling Toolkit is an add-on that offers tools inspired by 3ds Max and Substance Modeler in Blender: splines with real parameters, clay-like SDF modeling, cutters, FFD and more.

11.02

CG PressVFXTenPix Cloth for 3ds Max is out TenPix Cloth is a GPU-accelerated cloth simulation system for 3ds Max. It works as a set of modifiers: you add them to a mesh the way you would add Bend or Skin, play the timeline, and the cloth is…

10.28

CG PressVFXSketchUp 2027 adds procedural modeling New features in Trimble’s modeling software for Archviz, product design and manufacturing include: SketchUp Procedures – iterate faster with native, non-destructive modeling in tools you already…

10.27

CG PressVFXProcedural Canvas for Houdini Procedural Canvas is a new Houdini plugin for those who are tired of keeping notes in different apps. Now references, sketches and VEX can all live inside the projects, saved right in your .hip file.

10.27

CG PressVFXArcBrush 1.7 brings materials lit in 3D, depth of field and Pixel Art editor New features in the node-based image editor for Windows, MacOS and Linux include: Build a complete material (color, roughness, normal and height images a 3D model needs) and see it lit on a 3D model…

10.27

CG PressVFX3ds Max doppelgänger built on top of Blender AI is bringing unexpected developments. UK artist and veteran Max user Jake Denham has made available a video in which he claims to have used vibe-coding with AI to rebuild Max’s workflow on top of…

10.23

CG PressVFXAnimatica Marionette offers directable character animation inside Blender Marionette is a Blender add-on for posing and editing character motion by hand – letting animators direct motion instead of fixing it bone by bone.

10.21

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo