Basefount’s Animcraft 6.0 introduces advanced AI rigging and text-driven animation modules, enhancing efficiency in character preparation for production, while other updates in rendering and real-time engines push the boundaries of 3D visualisation.
Basefount’s Animcraft 6.0 is the most notable addition in this week’s round-up, chiefly because it extends the software beyond library management into automated character setup and motion generation. The company says the new AI rigging and skinning module can analyse a character’s structure and calculate weights with far less manual intervention, while a second module built on NVIDIA’s Kimodo model adds text-driven animation creation. According to coverage from Digital Production and Toolfarm Japan, the new tools are intended to speed up the traditionally time-consuming work of preparing characters for production, and Basefount says the AI system runs locally rather than as a generic LLM wrapper.
Otoy has also shipped OctaneRender 2026.5, the latest stable release of its GPU production renderer. The key change is native support for NVIDIA’s RTX Spark, the upcoming superchip aimed at laptops and mobile workstations. The update also adds OpenColorIO 2.5 configuration support, which should matter to studios that need consistent colour management across render pipelines. Otoy’s own documentation describes OctaneRender as a GPU-only, physically based path tracer, so hardware support remains central to how the product is positioned.
AMD’s Radeon ProRender for Blender 3.7 is a smaller update, but an important one for users staying on newer Blender builds. It now supports Blender 5.2 and is based on Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1.7. The software remains free to download as Windows binaries, while the source code is published under the Apache 2.0 licence. That said, the update appears to be mostly a compatibility release; the last substantial feature work was in version 3.6 in 2023, suggesting AMD is maintaining the Blender edition without pushing it forward aggressively.
Unigine 2.22 is the most significant release for real-time 3D teams interested in cinematics and interactive presentation. The engine adds Sequencer, a timeline-based tool for building cut-scenes directly in the Editor, while the Animation Graph gains inverse kinematics, Look At controls, joint constraints and procedural pose control. According to Unigine, the release also includes an experimental overhaul of navigation and pathfinding, Cesium integration for large-scale geospatial streaming, and improved Gaussian Splatting support. Taken together, the update closes one of the engine’s weaker areas for entertainment work, even if it remains rooted in simulation as well as content creation.
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