Create a Stunning Bane Character in Blender 4.33D Core shares powerful techniques for creating advanced game assets in Blender 4.3.https://adapt.one/editorial/link/261/Create+a+Stunning+Bane+Character+in+Blender+4.3/

https://adapt.one/editorial/link/260/Concord+%7C+Secret+Level/First teaser for 'CONCORD' Episode The first teaser trailer has been released for the 'CONCORD' episode of the 'SECRET LEVEL' video game anthology series, set to premiere on Amazon Prime on December 10th.

Scientists created a spear using tar they produced from a makeshift hearth to test whether Neanderthals might have used similar methods to obtain tar. Ochandoet al., Quaternary Science Reviews, 2024When fire was invented, it changed the course of human evolution. It provided warmth, enabled cooking and facilitated the creation of more advanced tools. For instance, one pivotal tool, the stone-tipped spear, might have been assembled using tar and other adhesives. While early tar production remains largely a mystery, scientists have now uncovered a 65,000-year-old hearth that appears to have functioned as a small-scale tar factory.In a new study published in Quaternary Science Reviews in November, scientists describe a 65,000-year-old hearth found in Gibraltar on the Iberian Peninsula. The fire pit was theoretically used to make tarand if that conclusion is proven true, it also represents the first evidence of the use of the plant rockrose, Cistus ladanifer, for obtaining tar.For this reason, it can be said that it was unexpected, says Juan Ochando, lead author of the study and a biologist at the University of Murcia in Spain, to Discover magazines Paul Smaglik.Scientists already knew that Neanderthals made adhesives using other materials like ocher and naturally sticky substances to haft stone tips onto wooden shafts to create weapons. The newly described hearth in Gibraltar represents a specialized burning structure for tar production, the researchers write in the study.Stone Age adhesives are an important and still much understudied aspect of early humans, says Patrick Schmidt, an archaeologist at the University of Tbingen in Germany who was not involved with the study, to Sciences Taylor Mitchell Brown.Still, Schmidt says that although the study points to wood burning in the hearth, more evidence is needed to conclude for certain that Neanderthals used the hearth to make tar. The Gorham's Cave Complex in Gibraltar has revealed several findings about Neanderthal history. Visit Gibraltar via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0The ancient hearth was uncovered in the Vanguard Cave, part of the Gorhams Cave Complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gibraltar. This area is renowned for its rich history of Neanderthal findings, including tools and cave art. Research in the Vanguard Cave began in 2012, and since then, scientists have revealed several new findings in its passageways and chambers.One such discovery was a cave chamber full of ancient hearths and stone tools dating to the time of Neanderthals, uncovered in 2021 by Clive Finlayson, an evolutionary biologist and director of the Gibraltar National Museum. He told the Guardians Sam Jones at the time that the caves have been giving us a great deal of information about the behavior of these people.That remains true today with the discovery of the prehistoric hearth, where researchers found charcoal and remnants of the rockrose plant. Chemical analysis of the hearths contents revealed burning residues and traces of wax from leaves, suggesting the controlled use of fireand possibly the production of tar. The team also found guano, or bat and bird poop, in the hearth. They suggest Neanderthals used guano with a mix of sand to cover the plant materials, allowing them to heat up and melt without fully catching fire. The researchers used the same materials and methods that would have been available to Neanderthals at the time to recreate the prehistoric hearth and produce tar. Ochandoet al., Quaternary Science Reviews, 2024To prove it is possible to produce a significant amount of tar from rockrose resin, Ochando and his team set out to make a similar hearth. They intended to do so with materials and techniques that wouldve been available to Neanderthals in the area at the time.First, they filled their replica hearth with rockrose leaves, then covered them with sand and soil. They built a small fire with grass and rockrose wood and let it burn for two hours. Afterward, the result was a mixture of rockrose leaves dripping with labdanum, a sticky resin, that the scientists used to haft arrowheads to wood in a type of makeshift spear.For Neanderthals, this effort might have been a cooperative process, as study co-authorFrancisco Jimnez-Espejo,a scientist at the Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute in Spain, tells Live Sciences Kiona Smith. On either side of the hearth, the researchers found a pair of straight furrows cut in the ground, where he suggests two Neanderthals might have dug into the hearth to remove the hot leaves from opposite sides. Separating the tar from the leaves is much harder when the leaves have cooled, so they had to work quickly, he adds.Although this production of tar will require further study, Ochando says the work aligns with the current suppositions about tar production. As he tells Science, Ochando hopes the findings may serve as a starting point for other researchers when identifying these structures in other archaeological sites.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Archaeology, Caves, Fire, Hominids, Innovations, Neanderthal, New Research, Technology, Tools, Weapons

You Can Actually Smell the Incense, Rainy Meadows and Musty Cloth in These Pre-Raphaelite PaintingsAt an exhibition in England, curators have placed artworks alongside diffusers that dispense carefully crafted fragrances, which visitors can trigger by pushing a buttonThe Blind Girl,John Everett Millais, 1856 Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsVisitors to a new exhibition in England will not only be able to look upon painted scenes and characters: Theyll be able to smell them, too.Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, which is on display at the University of Birminghams Barber Institute of Fine Arts, focuses on paintings made in the 19th and early-20th centuries. These works are part of theAesthetic andpre-Raphaelite movementswhich rejected conventions such asgenre painting and reverence for artists like the Italian Renaissance painterRaphael, opting instead to portray nature and beauty.According to the museum, fragrance was often visually suggested in paintings from these movements, in the form of, for instance, a person smelling flowers or burning incense. Artists included such details to enhance paintings sensory aura, portrayhedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) or evoke particular moods and emotions.Autumn Leaves, John Everett Millais, 1856 Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsWhile pre-Raphaelite painting (in its broadest definition) is beloved for its sensuous beauty, including exquisite colors, textures and allusions to music, the olfactory aspects of these works have long been overlooked, writes exhibition curator Christina Bradstreet, author ofScented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914, on the Barber Institutes website.One common motif in Victorian painting was a subject smelling flowers, Bradstreet adds. For example, an 1864 portrait by George Frederic Watts shows a young woman pressing a red bloom to her face, eyes closed, lost in reverie. Other paintings evoke less pleasant smells, like the burning foliage of John Everett MillaisAutumn Leaves (1856).In the exhibition,two artworks are flanked by diffusers, which visitors can trigger by pressing a button, according to theSpectators Melanie McDonagh. Simeon Solomons portrait of a haloed clergyman,A Saint of the Eastern Church (1868), is accompanied by the fragrance of incense and wood, replicating the scented smoke wafting from the subjects incense burner.Meanwhile, Millais The Blind Girl (1856) depicts a young woman and her younger sister sitting in a lush meadow, two rainbows curved across the sky behind them. Although she is unable to see the stunning environment in which she finds herself, she can still rely on her other senses, including smell, writes Artnets Tim Brinkhof. As such, the painting is accompanied by two diffusers, one evoking the girls clothing and the other their natural surroundings.The Blind Girl is a painting about sight, blindness and spiritual vision, Bradstreet tells theObservers Dalya Alberge. The girls quiet stillness suggests a heightened alertness to the scents and sounds that we imagine coming from the meadow.The Barber Institute collaborated with art curation companyArtphilia and Spanish perfumerPuig, which created the diffusers and scents on display in Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. For The Blind Girl, the shows lead work, Puig made two scents.The first captures the rain-soaked pasture, combining the aromas of freshly cut grass, bright spring flowers and other vegetation with those of damp earth and ditch water, as Artphilia founderAntje Kiewell tells the Observer. A second Puig scent aims to bring to life the experience of the younger sibling, with the lower half of her face half-buried in her sisters rain-dampened, musty, yet comforting, shawl.In recent years, other museums have staged similar scent-focused displays. In 2022, Madrids Prado Museum installed floral and vegetal fragrances besideThe Sense of Smell, a 1618 painting by Flemish artistsJan Brueghel the Elder andPeter Paul Rubens. The Prado discovered that while visitors usually spend around 32 seconds before a painting, they remained in front of The Sense of Smell for roughly 13 minutes.Its an experiment to see if scents can bring these paintings to life, enhancing peoples understanding of the painting, Bradstreet tells the Observer. Its not just seeing the visual details. We want people to take a long, slow look at the paintings, smell the scents and perhaps imagine themselves there in the scene.Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites is on view at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts through January 26, 2025.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Art, Art History, Artists, Arts, Exhibitions, Exhibits, Fine Arts, Museums, Nose, Painters, Painting, Raphael, Senses, Visual Arts

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the latest game from BioWare after a few rough years. Is it enough to bring back the love from fans?Read More

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreThe team of AI researchers known as Nous Research is currently doing something unique in the fast-moving space of generative AI (at least to my knowledge): Nous is in the midst of pre-training a new 15-billion parameter large language model (LLM) using machines distributed around the internet and the world, avoiding the need to concentrate model development as it traditionally has been in expensive, power-hungry AI data centers and superclusters of graphics processing units (GPUs) such as the one recently completed by Elon Musks xAI in Memphis, Tennessee. Furthermore, Nous is livestreaming the pre-training process on a dedicated website distro.nousresearch.com showing how well it is performing on evaluation benchmarks as it goes along and also a simple map of the various locations of the training hardware behind the exercise, including several places in the U.S. and Europe. As of the time of this articles publication, there are roughly 57 hours (2.3 days) left in the pre-training run with more than 75% of the process completed.Pre-training is the first of two and arguably most foundational aspect of training an LLM, as it involves training the model on a vast corpus of text data to learn the statistical properties and structures of language. The model processes extensive text datasets, capturing patterns, grammar, and contextual relationships between words. This stage equips the model with a broad understanding of language, enabling it to generate coherent text and perform various language-related tasks.Following pre-training, the model undergoes fine-tuning on a more specific dataset tailored to particular tasks or domains. If successful, Nous will prove that it is possible to train frontier-class LLMs without the need for expensive superclusters or low latency transmission, using a novel, open source training method. It could usher in a new era of distributed AI training as a major, or potentially dominant, source of new AI models and shift the balance of power in gen AI away from well-moneyed big tech companies and towards smaller groups and non-corporate actors.Nous DisTrO: the tech behind the training exerciseNous, which made headlines earlier this year for the release of its permissive and existentially conflicted Meta Llama 3.1 variant Hermes 3 and its overall mission to make AI development personalized and unrestricted, is using its open-source distributed training technology called Nous DisTrO (Distributed Training Over-the-Internet), which Nous initially published in a research paper back in August 2024.According to Nous Researchs recent publication, DisTrO reduces inter-GPU communication bandwidth requirements by up to 10,000x during pre-training. This innovation allows models to be trained on slower and more affordable internet connectionspotentially as low as 100Mbps download and 10Mbps upload speedswhile maintaining competitive convergence rates and loss curves.DisTrOs core breakthrough lies in its ability to efficiently compress the data exchanged between GPUs without sacrificing model performance. As described in an August 2024 VentureBeat article, the method reduced communication requirements from 74.4 gigabytes to just 86.8 megabytes during a test using a Llama 2 architecture, an efficiency gain of nearly 857x. This dramatic improvement paves the way for a new era of decentralized, collaborative AI research.DisTrO builds upon earlier work on Decoupled Momentum Optimization (DeMo), an algorithm designed to reduce inter-GPU communication by several orders of magnitude while maintaining training performance comparable to traditional methods. Both the DeMo algorithm and the DisTrO stack are part of Nous Researchs ongoing mission to decentralize AI capabilities and bring advanced AI development to a broader audience.The team also made the DeMo algorithm available as open-source code on GitHub, inviting researchers and developers worldwide to experiment with and build upon their findings.Hardware partnersThe pre-training of Nous Researchs 15-billion-parameter language model involved contributions from several notable partners, including Oracle, Lambda Labs, Northern Data Group, Crusoe Cloud, and the Andromeda Cluster.Together, they provided the heterogeneous hardware necessary to test DisTrOs capabilities in a real-world distributed environment.Profound implications for future AI model developmentThe implications of DisTrO extend beyond technical innovation. By reducing the reliance on centralized data centers and specialized infrastructure, DisTrO offers a path to a more inclusive and collaborative AI research ecosystem. Smaller institutions, independent researchers, and even hobbyists with access to consumer-grade internet and GPUs can potentially train large modelsa feat previously reserved for companies with significant capital and expertise.Diederik P. Kingma, a co-author of the research paper and co-inventor of the Adam optimizer, joined Nous Research as a collaborator on the development of DeMo and DisTrO. Kingmas contributions, alongside those of Nous Research co-founders Bowen Peng and Jeffrey Quesnelle, lend credibility to the project and signal its potential impact on the broader AI community.Next stepsNous Research has opened the door to a future where AI development is no longer dominated by a handful of corporations. Their work on DisTrO demonstrates that with the right optimizations, large-scale AI models can be trained efficiently in a decentralized manner.While the current demonstration used cutting-edge GPUs like the Nvidia H100, the scalability of DisTrO to less specialized hardware remains an area for further exploration. As Nous Research continues to refine its methods, the potential applications of this technologyranging from decentralized federated learning to training diffusion models for image generationcould redefine the boundaries of AI innovation.VB DailyStay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox dailyBy subscribing, you agree to VentureBeat's Terms of Service.Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here.An error occured.

Motorsport Games sunsets NASCAR games following IP license transferA new NASCAR console title from iRacing is expected to release in 2025 News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on Dec. 2, 2024 Following the transfer of its license to iRacing, Motorsport Games has confirmed it is pulling all sales of its NASCAR games at the end of the year.This means all NASCAR games and their associated DLC will not be available to buy after December 31, 2024.In a statement posted to X/Twitter, Motorsport confirmed the change, but said the games will remain playable for those who already own them."To the NASCAR game community! From 31st December, 2024, all NASCAR game titles and their DLC content will no longer be available for purchase on all digital storefronts but will remain available to play after this time," Motorsport Games said (thanks, TSA)."We sincerely thank our community for the enthusiasm and support you've shown for these games over the years and hope you have enjoyed racing with us," the developer wrote.It was announced that iRacing acquired the NASCAR simulation-style console racing games license back in October 2023.704 Games, a subsidiary of Motorsport Games, will continue development. A new NASCAR console title is projected to be released in 2025.

My.Games sells hyper-casual game publisher MambooCompany says decision to sell aligns with "primary business focus on mid-core gaming" News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on Dec. 2, 2024 My.Games is selling its hyper-casual game publisher, Mamboo.The company said the decision to sell aligned with its "primary business focus on mid-core gaming, reinforcing the company's commitment to innovation and growth in this area".Working with Mamboo has been a valuable journey for My.Games. However, considering the different focuses of our businesses, we made a strategic decision to part our ways," the company said in a statement."We believe that Mamboo has strong prospects in their niche and wish the team success in their future endeavours. We trust that this transition will allow Mamboo to continue growing toward their goals and enable their teams to unlock their full potential.My.Games CEO Elena Grigorian said the company "remains committed to developing mid-core games that captivate millions, lead their genres, and foster long-term engagement with players."Mamboo Entertainment was established in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in 2020, and acquired by My.Games in 2021.Back in July, My.Games confirmed it was selling off its non-game development and publishing businesses, including DonationAlerts and Boosty.

The conglomerate now holds a 51.4 percent controlling stake in the Wuthering Waves developer.

Visions of Mana director Ryosuke Yoshida has left developer Ouka Studios and parent company NetEase.In a post on X, Yoshida explained he's joined Final Fantasy maker Square Enix.The news comes with the future of Ouka Studios in the balance. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that NetEase was cutting jobs at the studio ahead of a potential closure.Ouka opened its doors in 2020 and hired veterans from Capcom and Bandai Namco. It released Visions of Mana on August 29, 2024, but NetEase is reportedly looking to scale down its Japanese investments after struggling to deliver what it considers hit titles.In August, Bloomberg claimed NetEase had laid off "all but a handful" of Ouka employees.Discussing his departure, Yoshida expressed gratitude towards his colleagues and NetEase for enabling Ouka to bring Visions of Mana to market."I quit NetEase Ouka Studios on October 31. We were a new studio, but we were able to release Visions of Mana. I am grateful to the development team and NetEase for their support. It was a very good experience. Thank you all," he wrote."I am happy to announce that I joined Square Enix in December. I will do my best to make a game that many people can enjoy."