Blips Blog

DroneCam - A new Blender add-on for drone-like camera control

DroneCam is a new Blender add-on developed by 3D artist and add-on creator globglob. It allows users to control a camera like a drone using a gamepad, eliminating the need for manual animation when creating aerial shots. Users can add a drone to the scene, click record, fly around, and render the final footage, which closely mimics real-life drone videos.

Published: 30. Dec. 2024

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GitHub Copilot now available for free

GitHub Copilot, the AI-powered code assistant, is now available for free in Visual Studio Code, as announced in a recent post on the Visual Studio Code blog. To access the new free plan, users only need a GitHub account — no subscription or credit card is required. As it would be expected, the free plan comes with some limitations, offering up to 2.000 code completions and 50 chat requests per month. It also includes access to two AI models: GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Published: 23. Dec. 2024

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Camera Composition Overlays - A Toolkit to Enhance Unreal Engine's Cinematics

Camera Composition Overlays is a free pack of landscape camera composition overlays for Unreal Engine 5, created by Akintayo Adewole. It is designed to enhance in-game cinematics and other virtual productions by helping to create visually striking and engaging imagery.

Published: 16. Dec. 2024

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Nevercenter releases Silo & Milo 2025

Nevercenter has unveiled the 2025 versions of Silo and Milo, two versatile tools designed to streamline 3D workflows. Silo is a lightweight 3D modeler and UV mapper, featuring a robust toolset and an intuitive workflow that is easy to master. Milo, on the other hand, is an advanced real-time renderer and VR viewer powered by Unreal Engine. It is ideal for tasks like product shots, game asset visualization, architectural walkthroughs, portfolio rendering, and VR previews. Silo and Milo are both standalone tools, but they are designed to work seamlessly together.

Published: 9. Dec. 2024

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Abstraction Generator - A new tool for real-time abstract VFX in Unreal Engine

Abstraction Generator is a recently released tool for Unreal Engine that creates abstract visual effects in real time. Developed by Adam Drzazga, it is part of the author's Niagara Fluids series, using Unreal Engine 5's advanced Niagara VFX system to simulate fluid dynamics. The tool includes 21 Niagara Fluids systems: 8 that use a mesh renderer for spawning and 13 that use a sprite renderer. It offers around 50 user parameters to customize effects quickly, including settings for textures, shaders, and particle spawns in Niagara Fluids.

Published: 2. Dec. 2024

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Blender updated to version 4.3

Blender, the popular, free, and versatile 3D software package, has been updated to version 4.3. This release offers an array of improvements, including upgrades to Geometry Nodes, a Grease Pencil overhaul, a new brush workflow, and more.

Published: 25. Nov. 2024

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Unreal Engine 5.5 now available

Unreal Engine 5.5 has been released, just a month after its preview version and roughly six months after the 5.4 update. The latest version brings numerous improvements, with a focus on rendering performance, in-editor animation tools, mobile game development, visual production, and faster developer iteration. Let's briefly go over the highlight features in this release:

Published: 18. Nov. 2024

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Nanite Grass V3 - A visually impressive grass asset for Unreal Engine

Nanite Grass is a realistic grass asset for Unreal Engine, created by 3D environment artist Cloviren. It provides fully geometric grass for games and real-time rendering, without relying on alpha masks and it's optimized for Nanite (Unreal's virtualized geometry system). The asset includes an array of features and allows seamless interaction with characters and other objects.

Published: 11. Nov. 2024

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Hengo - A new visual scripting solution for Godot

Hengo is a new visual scripting plugin created to simplify the process of building gameplay logic in the Godot game engine. It enables users to create game logic visually, which then compiles into GDScript, the primary scripting language in Godot, providing a smooth and native-like experience. The project is developed by Henrique Henrique, a web developer and Godot enthusiast who is also working on another tool called Godot Playground. This web-based platform allows users to edit scripts and run Godot projects directly in a browser without requiring local installations.

Published: 4. Nov. 2024

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JetBrains releases a free version of Rider

JetBrains Rider, a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE), now offers a new free licensing plan. For those unfamiliar, Rider is part of a family of programming IDEs from JetBrains, initially designed for .NET development with a focus on languages such as C#, F#, and VB.NET. Like many JetBrains IDEs, it is well-regarded and designed to enhance the experience of developers working with these languages.

Published: 28. Oct. 2024

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Unity 6 has been released

Unity 6 is finally here, a release that has been highly anticipated due to the significant changes it promised. One of these changes is the return to the previous version numbering system, which was discontinued after Unity 5 in 2017. Another notable change was the introduction of a controversial runtime fee, which sparked widespread debate. We provided an explanation of this fee in our previous article Unity 6 launched in preview under the pricing section. However, due to significant community backlash, the fee has since been canceled.

Published: 21. Oct. 2024

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The O3DE game engine has received a major update (24.09)

O3DE (Open 3D Engine) recently received a major update, described as "game-changing," marking a significant milestone for this free and open-source game engine. For those unfamiliar, O3DE is the direct successor to Amazon Lumberyard, which was originally built upon CryEngine. While it retains some features from its predecessors, O3DE is largely a new, modular engine designed for creating high-fidelity games, robotic simulations, and immersive 3D worlds.

Published: 14. Oct. 2024