Blender 5.0 Release

A major update that deepens Geometry Nodes (including volume grids), improves color management and compositor workflows, and delivers wide-ranging performance and usability tweaks for modern pipelines.

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Octane Studio 2026 Release

OTOY’s OctaneStudio+ 2026 bundles Octane 2026.1 with Greyscalegorilla Plus, and early access to the new OTOY Studio and canvas.otoy.ai portals, positioning Octane as a hub for GPU rendering and generative AI-driven workflows.

This release is especially exciting because it signals a deep transformation in the way AI workflows integrate with DCC tools going forward.

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Karma User Guide

SideFX’s official Karma User Guide for Solaris, covering everything from basic rendering setups to advanced AOVs, diagnostics, and production rendering workflows in Karma XPU/CPU.

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USD Basics

SideFX’s USD primer for Solaris that explains essentials of USD including stages, layers, variants, and packing assets.

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Joy of vex

Matt Estela’s “Joy of VEX” is a hands-on collection of daily exercises that gradually demystify VEX, focusing on practical patterns you can reuse in real Houdini shots. This a starting point for many artists who wants to start use VEX in their work. I have started my VEX journey with it.

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VEX Attribute Glossary

John Kunz’s VEX Attribute Glossary is a personally curated reference that catalogs common VEX attributes, their data types.

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VEX for Algorithmic Design Series

Junichiro Horikawa’s YouTube series that teaches VEX from an algorithmic/procedural design perspective, covering attributes, vectors, matrices, SDFs, and more through practical modeling examples. Can be complicated for beginners but give’s a lots of insights.

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Standard Surface - Arnold User Guide

The official Arnold documentation for the Standard Surface shader, breaking down every parameter of its physically-based BRDF so you can build consistent, renderer-agnostic materials. Also gives a solid understanding how PBR materials are layered.

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The PBR Guide - Part 1

The PBR Guide - Part 2

Series of Adobe’s PBR Guide explains the core theory behind PBR materials - energy conservation, albedo, metalness, roughness - and how these concepts translate into texture maps.

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What Is PBR (Physically Based Rendering)? A complete guide

This time it’s Chaos’ overview article that frames PBR from a production perspective with application to Vray.

A Solaris/USD walkthrough focused on solo artists and small teams, showing how to structure layout, lighting, and rendering inside LOPs without a big-studio pipeline and additional setups.

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Similar introduction from voxyde.

A long-form beginner course that introduces Solaris and USD in Houdini, focusing on practical scene-building and rendering rather than deep USD internals.

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A marathon tutorial that walks through Houdini’s new Copernicus (COPs) context node by node, showing how to build slap comps and texture workflows directly in Solaris pipelines. COP’s are constantly improving and some of the theory will be outdated in new Houdini’s versions.

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A live stream exploring procedural particle setups without the usage of simulations. This approach is great for creating art-directed shots.

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A FLIP-based tutorial focusing on usage of custom vector fields (volume advection) for controlling the particles/fluid behavior. Essential tutorial.

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A guided setup for building hexagonal particle simulations in Houdini, great for learning how to control stylized motion with procedural patterns.

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Creating Procedural Drift Ice in Houdini using SOPs and Solaris

A project-based breakdown that showcase the Solaris/Karma scene setup.

Today we share list of essential Houdini plugins.

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MOPS - Houdini Motion Operators

An open source Houdini toolkit for motion designers and visual effects artists. This is a most useful tool for motion designers and best alternative for someone get used to c4d mograph tools.

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OD Houdini Shelf Tools

Shelf Tools for Houdini to facilitate general workflow improvements and efficiency.  Its an ever growing collection of Houdini Tools.

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Axiom Solver

Axiom is a sparse GPU-accelerated volumetric fluid solver for computer graphics and visual effects. What sets it apart is the ability to run true sparse simulations fully on a GPU.

‍Free VDB Volumes Created With EmberGen

A curated library of free EmberGen-simulated VDBs (explosions, smoke, fire, etc.).

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Threedscans

An archive of high-quality, CC-licensed 3D scans of classical sculptures and objects, perfect for shading tests, lighting studies, and quick hero assets.

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Poly Haven

A good collection of free HDRI environments.