It is 30 October. Christmas Day is exactly eight weeks away. If your company has just decided it needs the best Christmas video ever, congratulations on getting an excellent head start on 2027.

Fumaris brings interactive GPU smoke and fire to Blender, with OpenVDB bakes and safer cache handling. Seasonal greetings can get complicated.

TenPix Cloth adds GPU cloth modifiers to 3ds Max, with triangle collisions, painted controls, deformation preservation and Alembic caching.

Nuke 18 beta connects Griptape workflows, refines splat editing and adds cut detection, clearer errors, HEVC decoding and more useful node inputs.

ValTerra brings city context, sun planning and drone-photo camera matching into 3ds Max, with a full trial, free Lite tier and perpetual licences.

Digital Anarchy’s free Ugly Box puts skin retouching to sinister use. Here’s how it works, where Beauty Box differs and what Flicker Freak adds.

IlluGen 2.0 adds GPU particles, fracture, pivot animation textures and Niagara exports. Here is the technical detail, including the 2.0.1 follow-up.

Painter 12.2 adds local cage painting, quad-loop fills and controllable transparency sorting, with important limits for baking and selection.

HSHL seeks an acting professor for media production. Bring your practical experience into teaching and help shape the next generation. Apply by 30 November.

Sekondo helps with Adobe production, from repetitive edits to translations, layer cleanup and document repair. We examine its tools and limits.

Ditherfactory brings 27 dithering algorithms to After Effects with CPU rendering and an offline license. It offers animation-ready controls.

Plasticity 2026.2 adds reusable assets, live constraints, Project Align and finer surface controls. Some relationships remain strictly session-based. Plasticity 2026.2 gives the repeatedly rebuilt ...