March 23 - 3:00pm EDT   Developer Luxology has announced a upcoming COLLADA plug-in for its imminent 3D rendering suite, modo 401. COLLADA is an XML scheme, used to ensure that art output created with one program can be edited by another, where normally filetypes would be incompatible. The plug-in will support layered transform stacks, and text profiles of modo items, channels and animation envelopes. [full story]

November 7 - 9:20pm EST   A new Wenatchee build of Rhino has upped the system requirements to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and introduced several new features, while the new Electric Image Sonica 1.0 plug-in provides audio-visual synchronization for Maya users. Architosh reports that Rhino can now accommodate European ISO keyboards for some menu shortcuts, as well as two new mouse gestures, four trackpad gestures, and many new commands for tool palettes. [full story]

October 21 - 8:05pm EDT   Craft Animations has released its Craft Director Tools animation plug-in suite for users of Autodesk Maya on the Mac platform. Three primary sets of plug-ins are offered, including Craft Camera Tools, Craft Vehicles, and Craft Accessories. A variety of camera functions are available, including controls for automatic zoom, camera movements, simulated human interaction, and real time camera perspective and angle adjustments. Other tools include a stabilizer for cameras attached to animated objects, spherical path utility, spline speed controller, and a zero gravity environment replicator. [full story]

August 12 - 11:10am EDT   Following its announcement of Maya 2009, Autodesk has revealed two more apps in development for October, Stitcher Unlimited and ImageModeler. Each is based on software formerly developed by REALVIZ; the former lets users generate panoramas and wide-angle shots by merging photos, and has been upgraded with a "fully" automatic engine, as well as high dynamic range (HDR) compositing, support for Photoshop, and croppable rendering areas. [full story]

August 12 - 10:30am EDT   Autodesk has announced Maya 2009, the next version of its 3D modeling, animation and effects suite. Features in the new version are expected to include a "Maya Assets" toolset, which will let people bundle a particulate set of nodes into a single container, and view that data in a means suited to an artist's assignment. Users will also have access to a new "Render Proxy" feature in mental ray, and should see faster performance thanks to improvements in algorithms and multi-threading. [full story]

March 26 - 12:15am EDT   Demicron recently announced support for the Mac platform by unveiling WireFusion 5 for Mac, its architectural and industrial design software for small and medium sized design firms. According to Architosh,WireFusion allows designers to create realtime 3D visualizations using content imported from Maya, Lightwave 3D or any other application that can export to VRML or X3D file formats. WireFusion 5 is available for $1500 for a standard professional license. [full story]

March 19 - 10:25am EDT   EI Technology has released the public beta version of Sonica, a plug-in for the Maya rendering suite. The software is used to synchronize animation in Maya to sound; it does this by extracting spectrum and waveform animation from a track, and generating dependency nodes that can be connected to others for different effects. Multi-tracking is supported, and pre-made scripts are included for common representations of sound such as vertical bars. [full story]