The appleseed version 1.8.0 - beta released.

The appleseed is an open source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine primarily designed for animation and visual effects and is developed by a small team from VFX industry.
The day of November 28, 2017 come with this news: We’re proud to announce the release of appleseed 1.8.0-beta, the eighth release of our beta program and the 31th release since the first alpha in July 2010.
This tool supports:

• fully programmable shading via Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Open Shading Language (OSL);
• RGB/spectral/mixed rendering;
• fast and robust transformation and deformation motion blur;
• state-of-the-art ray traced subsurface scattering;
• exhaustive Python and C++ APIs;
• ... and many other production-oriented features.

You can read more on official website.
The next video from official vimeo channel is an old basic tutorial of appleseed software.

Sketchware - scratch IDE for Android applications.

The term of Scratch IDE come like a free visual programming language with visual forms.
The Sketchware mobile application is a IDE for Android applications.
You can make easy and fast application , show the source code and test it with your android .
The application can be found on google play.
You can see that into the next video from official youtube channel.

The Hexels tool creative suite .

The development team tell us about this tool:

Hexels is a creative suite for grid-based painting, animation, and design. The Hexels canvas is a paintable grid of geometric shapes that lets artists create complex designs with the stroke of a brush. It is a new kind of vector workflow, a friendly playground for the beginning artist, and a versatile tool in the hands of a professional.
The price now is the $24.50 and you can read and download it from official website.

Maps with telnet .

The MapSCII use telnet to show you whole world into your console.
The project can be found here.
To test it just run this telnet command with your linux or use PuTTY on Windows:

telnet mapscii.me

Love2d - the most simple game engine with Lua programming language .

The development team tell us about this software:
Hi there! LÖVE is an *awesome* framework you can use to make 2D games in Lua. It's free, open-source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS.
Even if they say it is a framework, most of them who use it already consider it a game engine. You can download it and read about this game engine on the official website After download you need to create a project folder and put the lua scripts for love .
I named this folder test.
I add to this folder one transparent image from internet with the filename: oldpaper.png, see next image:

I create a file named main.lua and I add this lua script:

local imageFile

function love.load()

    imageFile = love.graphics.newImage("oldpaper.png")
end

function love.grid_text()
local gx = 0 
local gy = 0
local g = 0
 while g ~= 100 do
    love.graphics.line( gx, 0, gx, 10)
    love.graphics.setColor( 111, 255, 255 )
    love.graphics.line( 0, gy, 10, gy)
    love.graphics.setColor( 111, 255, 255)
    gx=gx+50 
    gy=gy+50 
    g=g+1
 end
    love.graphics.setColor( 16, 5, 255)
    love.graphics.print("Hello world ! Lua and Love 2D for games !", 290,400)
    love.graphics.setColor(0, 0, 0)
end

function love.draw()
    love.graphics.setBackgroundColor(0, 0, 0)
    love.grid_text()
 -- this displays the normally colored image
    love.graphics.setColor(255, 255, 255, 255)
    love.graphics.draw(imageFile,250,100)
end

Run it outside of test folder with:

 love.exe test

The result of this code is this screenshot.

Unity 3D and the Puppet2D tool .

This tool can help you to animate sprites with Unity 3D.
You can create 2D skeletons, skin your characters to the bones, and create really easy to use controls that make animating 2D characters.
The tool come with this price $30.00 from this link.
First you need to create a 2D project into Unity 3D.
After you download this tool into your Unity 3D  then you can deal with this tool.
The main goal is to assemble sprites into a character and then create the desired animation.
Then the animation will be embedded in your project just like any animation.
See the next tutorial from official youtube channel of  Puppet2D tool:

The Mischief 2.1.5 - another drawing tool.

This is tool come free and you can use a paid version.
The paid version come with one price $25 more features :  presets, a full color palette, layers, and export to PSD files.
This allows you unlimited freedom to sketch, create and save brushes, hot keys and shortcuts.
You can used with Windows 7/8 and Mac OS X. I tested with Windows 10 and works great.
The output of your project is filename with the extension named .art .
The result of your work can be export like .pdf , .jpeg or .pds files.
The free version I don't see the copy paste option, but you can use export to save your drawing image.
This application come with few feature in the free version.

The MediBang Paint - free drawing and animation software tool.

Today I show you another free drawing tool named: MediBang Paint .
The MediBang Paint is a FREE lightweight digital painting and comic creation software.
This tool comes loaded with brushes, fonts, pre-made backgrounds, and other resources,like :

• Cloud features
• tool for comics 
• materials
• Fonts
• Group Project 
• and Paint Gallery

You can used with your device: PCWin/Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android.
The official youtube channel can be found here.

News: C# IN GODOT game engine.

The development team come with this news:
In order to bring C# programming to Godot, we are embedding the Mono runtime into the engine. As of alpha2, Godot is using Mono 5.2 and C# 7.0 is supported.
I will write more posts about the internals and how things work in the future but, for this one, I would like to focus on introducing the language and how to write Godot scripts with it.
One example of script it's that script class show by the development team :

// Coin.cs
using Godot; // Namespace that contains all Godot types

// Class Coin has same name as its file. Godot will detect it
public class Coin : Node
{
    public override void _Ready()
    {
        GD.Print("Hello, Godot!");
    }
}

Read more about this at official website .

News: The new released Krita version 3.3.1 .

The Krita development team tell us:

Published    10/11/2017

Today we are releasing Krita 3.3.1, a bugfix release for Krita 3.3.0. This release fixes two important regressions:

Krita would crash if you would restart Krita after closing Krita with the reference images docker set to floating
Krita 3.3.0 could not read .kra backup files or .kra files that were unzipped, then zipped up manually.
Additionally, there are the following fixes and improvements:

Fix a crash when creating a swap file on OSX (Bernhard Liebl).
Merge down does not remove locked layers anymore (Nikita Smirnov)
Various performance improvements, especially for macOS (Bernhard Liebl)
Improve the look and feel of dragging and dropping layers (Bernhard Liebl)
Improve the tooltips in the brush preset selector (Bernhard Liebl)
Fix a memory leak in the color selectors (Boudewijn Rempt)
Fix rotation and tilt when using the Windows Ink api (Alvin Wong)
Don’t allow the fill tool to be used on group layers (Boudewijn Rempt)
Add brightness and contrast sliders for textured brushes (Rad)
Add paste-at-cursor (Dmitry Kazakov)
Improve performance of the cpu canvas (Alvin Wong)
Fix a crash on closing Krita when there is something on the clipboard (Dmitry Kazakov)
Add a button to open a file layer’s image in Krita (Wolthera van Hövell tot Westerflier)

You can read more about this new version of Krita software and download it from here.

Blender 3D - simple gold material .

This tutorial show you how to make a simple gold material with Blender 3D - version 2.79 .
The base of this tutorial come from this link.
Open a new scene and add your object. Select the render from Blender Render to Cycles Render from top of the Blender 3D software.
Create a new material click on Use Nodes button from Material tab.
The next step is to chose screen layout to Compositing.
You will see a Node Editor and set this to Shader to edit your material.
In this window you can change the material object from default Diffuse BSDF to new gold material. 
Use Shift A keys to search and add all you need to make the gold material.
This is the result of nodes for this material:

Big prizes in objects .

Here's a contest for lovers around the world with awards prize graphics.
The website team tell us about this contest:

  Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there was a tiny kingdom hidden away in the mountains. And while its people were happy and led good lives, in the back of their minds there was always the worry about what might be at the other side of the mountains… 

Welcome to our new community contest! We’ll be going back to medieval times to explore castles, medieval towns, knights, and perhaps… dragons? Anything is possible in this Medieval Fantasy!

See this link.

Blender 3D - Open Shading Language tutorial - part 001 .

Using this tutorial about Open Shading Language, you can try a glass shader. The source code show a simple use for Fresnel equations. The backfacing() and raytype() are two functions that provide the shader some information about the state of the renderer and the scene at the time of evaluation. I used just backfacing(), because is a raw example of this Fresnel equations. As you can see the I, N, eta inputs from Fresnel_Dielectric() is used to get a result variable fr. The all result of this shader is bsdf like a equation. See the next code:

#define IOR_THRESHOLD 1.000000001

float Fresnel_Dielectric(vector i, normal n, float eta)
{
//see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations
    float c = fabs(dot(i, n));
    float g = eta * eta - 1 + c * c;
    float result = 1.0;
    
    if (g > 0) {
        g = sqrt(g);
        float a = (g - c) / (g + c);
        float b = (c * (g + c) - 1) / (c * (g + c) + 1);
        result = 0.5 * a * a * (1 + b * b);
    }
    
    return result;
}

shader glass(
    color diffuse_col = 1.8, 
    float ior = 1.45, 
    output closure color bsdf = 0)
{
    float real_ior = max(ior, IOR_THRESHOLD);
    float eta = backfacing()? 1.0 / real_ior : real_ior;
    float fr = Fresnel_Dielectric(I, N, eta);
    
    bsdf = diffuse_col * (fr * reflection(N) + (1.0 - fr) * refraction(N, eta));
}