Bringing to life the era of 1930s Spain, Madrid-based studio Twin Pines masterfully presents La Virgen Roja, its excellent invisible VFX work. From crowded streets to detailed interiors, every frame is a testament to this studios work in perfecting the feeling of living through another time.Digital craftsmanship was seamless in changing the films visuals, spanning from period-accurate architecture to subtle environmental enhancements. In Twin Piness meticulous layering of details, it had plunged audiences into the rich tapestry of the historical period, making all that VFX practically unnoticed and altogether organic to the tale.La Virgen Roja is a film by Twin Pines that proves sometimes the most striking visual effects are also the ones that go unnoticed, merging artistry with technology in order to take the viewer elsewhere in another different time. Their work is a testament to the invisible role of VFX in enhancing storytelling without overpowering it.The post La Virgen Roja: VFX Breakdown by Twin Pines appeared first on Vfxexpress.

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are reunited for the highly awaited 28 Years Later. The first trailer of this film promises a thrilling return to the terrifying world of infection and chaos. Decades after the original outbreak, the film delivers an intense and pulse-pounding narrative that will leave fans on the edge of their seats.Visual effects for the film were developed by Union VFX with VFX Producer Paul OHara at the helm of affairs. Production VFX was supervised by Adam Gascoyne and Production VFX Producer Clare Norman. So far, they have wonderfully combined the apocalyptic horror of infection with breathtaking cinematic visual effect.Directed by Danny Boyle, 28 Years Later promises to redefine the genre of infection films with its visceral storytelling and haunting realism. Watch this trailer if you want an unforgettable cinematic experience, dare yourself!The post 28 Years Later Official Trailer: A Haunting Return to Infection and Chaos appeared first on Vfxexpress.

Few tech-industry traditions are as time-honored as vaporware: stuff that gets publicly demoed well before its ready to ship. In some cases, the companies in question are just slower to finish their work than theyd expected. Other times, theyre strategically drumming up enthusiasm for something new and shiny to distract customers from competitive offerings. Either way, any gratification involved is delayed, assuming the product ever ships at allwhich is not a given.The high-stakes intensity of the current battle of the tech giants for AI supremacy has led to countless launches that remain vaporous for at least a while, a dynamic I wrote about back in May. So its no shock that two new Google creations, Project Astra and Project Mariner, arent shipping products. For now, Google DeepMind, the companys AI research arm, is only making them available to a small pool of hand-selected trusted testers. In fact, the Project in their names indicates that theyre showcases for work in progress rather than actual products.And yet, dismissing them as mere vaporware feels unfair. Google is being quite clear about its goals for Astra and Marinerwhich is to get a better feel for how people might use new forms of AI before springing them on millions or billions of unprepared humans. Particularly given some of the travails the company has had with AI features that were seemingly undertested before release, its the responsible thing to do.Both projects fall into general AI categories also being ardently pursued by other companies. Astra, which Google first demoed at its I/O developer conference in May, is the companys vision of a next-generation AI assistantnot an inflexible and limited piece of software like Google Assistant, or a text-centric chatbot like the Gemini app, but a helper that listens, speaks, and sees your world. Its roughly akin to the version of ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode that OpenAI unveiled in Maythough that products camera-enabled features are still vaporware as I write this. (Maybe that will change before OpenAIs current 12-day advent calendar of Shipmas announcements is over.)Project Mariner, meanwhile, is a Chrome extension that can use websites for you, typing and clicking on its own to accomplish tasks youd otherwise perform yourself. Its in the same conceptual zip code as Anthropics Computer Use feature, which debuted as part of its Claude large language model in October and lets that chatbot control apps. Both are steps toward one of the tech industrys biggest current obsessions: agentic AI that can work more independently on your behalf.What Google learns from Astra and Mariner could matter as much to the quality of the experiences it builds as to the raw capabilities of its Gemini large language modelyet another sign that the AI rubber has hit the road. Academic benchmarks are important, but nowadays, when we say something is best in class, what we mean is, do the users find it best in class? says Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu. The models capability has to be merged with the way the application works and is useful. Thats a change for all the researchers.That basic reality was reflected in the demos I saw during a recent visit to Google. Running on an Android phone and utilizing its camera, Astra recognized images of paintings, such as Edvard Munchs The Scream, and answered questions such as, If I like this, what other artists might I like? It also scanned the spines and covers of books in a scientific library to help pick among them and read, and summarized two pages of information in a travel book. What it had to say seemed roughly comparable in intelligence to what you might coax out of the Gemini chatbot in a text-based conversation, and wasnt always dazzling when judged purely by the information it conveyed.For instance, when I pointed the phone at a shelf of books about hearing and asked Astra to recommend a good introduction to the psychology of hearing, it picked one titled . . . Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing. Shown six bottles of wine and asked which one went best with beef Bourguignon, it rhapsodized about a pinot noira superb pairing! Even I, a guy who knows nothing about wine, could have figured that out on my own.Still, Astras spoken interface and ability to see the world around it made for a far richer experience than typing prompts into a chatbot. (It might get even richer if Astra eventually runs on AR glasses as well as phones, a scenario Google is working on.) At one point, after the app misunderstood the question about beef Bourguignonit thought it involved coq au vinit not only apologized, but did so with an embarrassed half laugh. Maybe that falls well short of OpenAIs quest to turn the movie Her into everyday life, but its an example of simulated humanity we never got from Google Assistant or Siri.Among the goals of Astras controlled testing is to give Google DeepMinds safety team the opportunity to chime in on exactly how much personality the software should exhibit. We think a lot about anthropomorphismwhat is and isnt appropriatebecause we are not trying to build someone to replace the humans in someones life, says Google DeepMind senior director of responsibility Helen King. Along with that, the team is also assessing such obvious issues as the privacy concerns raised by an AI assistant that sees what you see and has a superhuman photographic memory. For now, Google DeepMind has decided that Astra should only remember the most recent 10 minutes of video its captured.Project Mariner is in an even earlier stage of exploration. In one of the demos I saw, it read a salmon teriyaki recipe in a Google Doc and then complied with the request of director of product management Jaclyn Konzelmann to go off to Safeways site, find the necessary vegetables, and place them in a shopping cart. It took several minutes to perform this task and painstakingly explained what it was doing in a pane next to the browser window. For now, Mariner cant see the shopping process through to actually placing an order, whichconsidering scenarios like AI getting confused and accidentally buying 10,000 onions, or maybe even doing so on purposeis probably just as well.The point of Mariners cautious approach, Konzelmann told me, is to err on the side of transparency and avoid potential problems: We just think its really important at this stage of where this research prototype is to keep the human front and center and able to control whats happening.Of course, tech enthusiasts might think its kind of cool to have AI help with tasks such as veggie shopping even if it doesnt save any time. Indeed, King told me that Googles trusted testers skew more toward AI expertise than the general population, so the company can learn only so much from them. At the moment, theyve mostly been those who are familiar [with AI] because were in such early stages, she says. But as we expand, its really important for us to have that mix of civil society and academiathe experts in that as well, and the broader public. Because we want our tools to be able to be used by everyone, not just those who already have that AI literacy.Everyone I spoke with during my Google visit emphasized that Astra and Mariner will evolve further as the company learns how outsiders use them. The whole team is configured in such a way that we can do this kind of exploration quite fast, and thats the journey weve been on, says Kavukcuoglu. The proof of their value will be in the AI features Google eventually ships. But they do seem promising as a way to make some initial headway.READ/LISTEN/WATCH/TRYThe news, as picked by your friends. A decade ago, I wrote about Nuzzel, a wonderful app that curated new articles on the web using a strikingly simple yet effective algorithm: It showed you ones that had been shared by people you followed on Twitter. After being acquired by a company that was itself acquired by Twitter, Nuzzel shut down. But a new service called Sill feels like Nuzzel reborn, except that it uses the people you follow on Bluesky and/or Mastodon to find its news. It, too, is wonderful, and yet another good reason to use these social networks.Apple being born. Last week, I recommended The Verges list of the best tech books of all timebut said most of my favorites werent on it. So from time to time, at least, Ill share some of them here. There have been more books about Apple than any other tech company, yet the very first oneMichael Moritzs The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computerremains one of the best. Its a fun, funny, intimate look at the company and founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, which was published in 1984, before the Apple story got so sprawling that it tended to overwhelm many of the authors who tried to tell it. Moritz, then a Time reporter, went on to become a famed venture capitalist but revisited his book in 2009 in a new edition called Return to the Little Kingdom. Sadly, it seems to have fallen out of print again, even as an e-book, but both the original and updated versions are available at the Internet Archive.Youve been reading Plugged In,Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre reading it on FastCompany.comyou cancheck out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me athmccracken@fastcompany.comwith your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also happy to hear from you on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads.More top tech stories from Fast CompanyIn defense of being extremely online. The creator economy by the numbersRichard Florida maintains that in a time filled with loneliness, isolation, and alienation, the digital creator economy provides hundreds of millions of people with a source of meaning, purpose, community, and much-needed income.Read MoreWhy olive oil girl is TikToks main characterTikTok user Megan Chacalos recalled a high school mishap involving an olive oil hair mask. What happened from there, you couldnt make this up.Read MoreHow Big Tech labor organizers aim to unite for Trump 2.0Supercharged during the first Trump administration, tech-worker activism faces new challenges and motivations as the 47th president heads to Washington.Read MoreReddit rolls out its own AI-powered search tool after cracking down on AI companiesReddits RDDT stock jumped 4% by mid-afternoon on Monday in response to the new AI search tool.Read MoreAmtraks sleek new high-speed electric trains are coming next springTaking the train from D.C. to Boston is about to get nicerand a little faster.Read More4browser-boostingChatGPT Chrome extensionsSave time and work more efficiently with these AI-powered extensions for web searching, writing, summarizing, and beyond.Read More

American higher education is in crisis. This year, some two dozen colleges shut their doors and more are forecast to close in 2025, CNBC reports. According to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, as many as 80 colleges and universities are expected to close in the next five years.That working paper from the Fedbased its analysison a massive dataset of college and university information from 2002 to 2023, which predicted future closures through a model using machine learning. It found that of the 100 institutions it assessed, 84 closed within a three-year period. Researchers then predicted the likelihood of future closures, factoring in a 15% decline in enrollment between 2025 and 2029.Many colleges are struggling financially as enrollment falls, the result of skyrocketing tuition costs and students questioning if the degree is even worth the hefty price tag.Bucking the trend are more elite institutions, such as the so-called Ivy-Plus schools (i.e. Ivy equivalents, Stanford, MIT, Duke, University of Chicago, and others), as well as the Ivy Leagues themselves, all of which are experiencing record-breakingincreases in applications. (As of November 1, overall applications rose 10%for the 2024-25 application season, compared to a year earlier, according to the latest data from the Common Application.)We cant blame it all on COVIDA report from Best Colleges found that 40 colleges have closed since 2020, the year the pandemic began. (It also found another 32 public or private nonprofit schools merged or announced mergers with other universities.)The report said that the COVID-19 pandemic forced campuses to temporarily shut down to help contain the virus, and then some were unable to reopen due to financial strains.However, the findings showed that many of the biggest issues now facing higher education (dwindling enrollment,rising tuition, doubts about thevalue of a degree) started long before the pandemic, and American colleges have been closing for the past decade. Its possible that the pandemic simply accelerated the issue.As the tuition cost to attend some colleges and universities nears six figures per year, students, particularly those from low- and moderate-income families, are increasingly choosing to attend less-expensive public universities orfour-year trade schools, according to CNBC.But now, several elite and Ivy League schools are stepping up their financial aid programs, even providing full tuition to many of the most promising students, which is working to encourage students to apply to the high-sticker-priced schools. Eight schools, including New York University, Tufts, Brown, Yale, and Washington University in St. Louis, each cost more than $90,000 for the 2024-25 academic year, according to the Princeton Reviews Best Colleges list, as reported by CNBC.A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.

Investment firm Yntegra Group has unveiled a floating padel court in Miami Harbor that was partially constructed using recycled steel from shipyards. Afloat offshore of Miami's Fisher Island, the padel ball court is partially made of recycled steel and operates engine and battery-free as part of Yntegra Group's "commitment to innovation".Yntegra Group has unveiled a floating padel court in the Miami Harbor"As demand for ultra-luxury experiences soars, this sustainable, design-forward installation exemplifies Yntegra's commitment to innovation," said the team."The first-of-its-kind court features recycled steel from old shipyard materials, giving new life to maritime components. Its tranquil setting offers a serene escape for both physical activity and mental rejuvenation."The court is made with recycled steelThe padel court is comprised of a court, protective fencing, light posts and a thin strip that serves as a platform for observers. It measures 16 by 38 by 71 feet (5 x 11 x 21) and weighs 84 tonnes.As it is free of an engine or battery, it is moved into location by boat, and then anchored.Read: ACT! Studio and Borhaven Arkitekter add "joyous" floating sauna to Oslo harbour"Engine- and battery-free, the court reflects Yntegra's commitment to sustainability," said the team.The court will float in the Miami Harbor until next year, then it will be transported to the Rosewood Exuma hotel in the Bahamas, which is set to open in 2028.It will float in Miami Harbor until next yearFloating amenities have become more popular in recent years. In Manhattan, a team of designers and planners are testing on a floating swimming pool that will also filter water in the East River.Padel comes from Mexico and resembles tennis and pickleball, but has its own rules, techniques and international associations. Recently, Italian architect Fabio Novembre designed for playing the sport at Milan's CityLife development.The floating court debuted following Miami art week, a citywide event in early December that included Alcova Miami's second showing and a 3D-printed star installation by Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre.The photography is courtesy Yntegra GroupThe post Yntegra Group creates "first-of-its-kind" floating padel court in Miami Harbor appeared first on Dezeen.

French designer Philippe Starck has used Brazilian materials for the interiors of the penthouse at the Rosewood So Paulo, inside a tower by architect Jean Nouvel.The multi-level suite occupies the top floors of Nouvel's Mata Atlantica "vertical garden tower" and is one of several serviced Rosewood Residences within the building.The penthouse has a huge double-height living area with floor-to-ceiling glazingMeasuring 12,000 square feet and comfortably sleeping eight, the penthouse sits at one of the highest points in So Paulo and is afforded uninterrupted, panoramic views across the city.Starck's team was responsible for the interiors and terraces throughout the Rosewood So Paulo hotel and residences, and took the same approach to using local materials throughout the project.Materials like warm-toned ipe wood create a modern take on Brazilian modernismInside the penthouse, marbles sourced from Paran and warm-toned ipe wood create a dramatic and contemporary take on Brazilian modernism."While the layout allows for separation from the hustle and bustle below, all design touches still work to make guests feel connected to the spirit of the city," said the Rosewood team.The kitchen features sculptural stone islands with curved cornersThe penthouse is filled with furniture and artworks by Brazilian artists and designers, including Tarsila do Amaral, Jean-Baptiste Debret, Jerome Sainte Rose, Julio Bittencourt, Trcio Teixeira, Lcio Consul, Renato Marcelo Rei and Oscar Niemeyer."The artists' works tell different stories of life in Brazil across various mediums including sculpture, paintings, tile work, drawings, textiles, and rugs, providing a visual and meaningful touchpoint back to the destination's rich culture," the team said.The swooping staircase with floating marble treads is based on an Oscar Niemeyer designThe huge double-height living area is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass, making the most of the skyline vista, while a high-gloss ceiling reflects the windows to allow the space to feel even taller.An ensuite bedroom, a kitchen with sculptural stone islands, a patterned wallpaper-lined powder room and back-of-house quarters are also located on the lower level.The majority of the furniture and artworks in the penthouse are by Brazilian artists and designersAt the end of the living room is a focal staircase with floating marble treads based on a Niemeyer design in Brasilia, which swoops up to a mezzanine walkway.This provides access to a study and TV room, the primary bedroom suite and additional sleeping quarters.Windows look onto the terraces planted with tropical floraThe primary suite encompasses a marble-clad bathroom with a matching freestanding egg-shaped tub, which has a view of the cityscape through a glass panel onto the mezzanine.A long corridor with closet storage on both sides leads through to the bedroom, which can be wrapped in electronically controlled blackout curtains at the push of a button.The penthouse comfortably sleeps eight guestsMost of the windows are surrounded on the exterior by tropical foliage that grows on the tower's expansive terraces, some of which are accessible."The lush landscaping is filled with a captivating array of vibrant plants native to the surrounding rainforest, an extension of the awe-inspiring biophilic design of the hotel's entire Mata Atlantica tower," said the team.In the primary bathroom, an egg-shaped marble tub is afforded a skyline viewOn the roof, accessed via a black spiral staircase, is a jungle-like garden of tropical plants through which flagstone pathways lead to hidden seating areas and a hot tub.The end of the path emerges at an infinity pool overlooking Avenida Paulista, lined with dramatic blue, green and orange stone and flanked by plants on either side.Read: Jean Nouvel designs "vertical garden tower" for Rosewood hotelA pitched weathering-steel frame rises over the water, mimicking the rooflines of the historic buildings that comprise the Cidade Matarazzo a former hospital turned mixed-use complex below.The penthouse and the other residences within the tower have access to all of the hotel's restaurants and pool areas, as well as amenities including the spa and fitness centre.As one of the highest points in So Paulo, the roof terrace enjoys panoramic views across the cityPrivately owned, the residences are available for guests to book depending on availability.The Rosewood group is rapidly expanding its global portfolio of permanent residences, with recent announcements including Los Cabos and Beverly Hills.Pathways lead through the jungle-like foliage to seating areas and the swimming pool"People are no longer just looking for a home, but a fully serviced lifestyle," Brad Berry, Rosewood's vice president of global residential development, told Dezeen."Owners gain access to a carefully curated lifestyle where every detail has been designed to meet the highest standard of comfort and sophistication."Covered by a weathering-steel frame, the infinity pool overlooks Avenida Paulista and the city beyondStarck is one of the world's best-known contemporary designers and is behind many iconic hospitality projects.His other recent work in South America includes a skyscraper in Ecuador that was unveiled last year.The photography is courtesy of Rosewood.The post Philippe Starck reinterprets Brazilian modernism in So Paulo penthouse appeared first on Dezeen.

How do you create wealth? One answer is by enabling trade. British company Ox Delivers observed that the Global South is hamstrung in this regard; entrepreneurial individuals are hampered by unreliable transportation networks, and without an efficient way to ship goods, prosperity through trade is impossible.The company thus designed their eponymous vehicle, the Ox. This is a truck that they ship to Africa flatpacked, and assemble near their deployment areas to save on costs. The Ox is electric, has a range of 150 km (90 miles), and a payload capacity of 2,000 kg (4,400 lbs). The company reckons they are nearly ten times less expensive to operate than existing delivery methods. Rather than selling the trucks outrightwhich would be prohibitively expensive for their target marketOx Delivers has rolled them out as trucks-as-a-service. Using an app, merchants book space on trucks to ship their goods at an affordable rate, the way you can split a shipping container. They can pay through the app and also, importantly, see where the trucks are with their goods, gaining an accurate sense of delivery times. The positive impact on those using Ox Delivers cannot be understated. Here are some customer stories, where they discuss the night-and-day difference of their before-Ox and after-Ox experiences:Ox Delivers launched in Rwanda in 2021 (initially with a diesel-powered version of the truck; they switched to an electric powertrain in 2022). Today they have over 5,000 customers in Rwanda, and this year signed a $163 million multi-year franchise agreement to expand into East Africa. Ox Delivers will soon be operating in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Burundi.

Tasked with having to clear ice off of a rubber roof, Redditor amish_novelty reached for a leafblower:Reddit being Reddit, one of the commenters channeled his inner Christopher Nolan and ran the video backwards:We think amish_novelty needs to join forces with the last Redditor we saw hacking a leafblower.

No, we dont need Text To 3D yet but there definitely are AI features that could upgrade your 3D modeling and rendering workflow.I hate to phrase it this way, but it does seem like AI has somewhat upended photography. If you remember, last years Sony World Photography Award witnessed a unique scandal the winning image was generated using AI. While that event shook the photography world to the core, everyone and their grandfather knew the 3D industry was the next to face an AI wave. GenAI tools have been very good at disrupting the 2D image world the internet is overwhelmingly 2D, and is filled with hundreds of trillions of images that serve as a nifty database for these AI tools for 3D, not so much. Sure, companies are working on developing 3D-specific AI tools, but weve got years before an AI tool can accurately create stunning 3D models from scratch.However, fearing the potential of AI disruption in the future unfairly undercuts its usefulness in the present. For 3D modelers and renderers, AI holds a LOT of potential in upgrading your workflow. The only problem not a single major rendering software has embraced any AI feature yet (barring just a tiny handful). However, here are a handful of powerful AI features that rendering software like Blender, Octane, V-ray, SketchUp, and KeyShot should absolutely add to their arsenal. Until then, Ive also made the liberty of providing alternatives.AI Environment Generation (Alternative SkyBox.ai)What most first-time designers dont realize with product rendering, is that the product itself is just a small part of the picture. You still need to design or compose a background or scenario in which to place your product. A car needs a nice empty road or lighting studio, a vase needs a mantelpiece, a chair needs a living room, etc. You could spend hours and quite a bit of money finding 3D assets for your scene but what if you could just ask AI to create a nice HDRI environment for you instead? Need an empty studio, ask the AI. What about a cyberpunk neighborhood? Simply ask the AI! GenAI could make rapid environment generation incredibly easy, allowing you to compose and render in minutes instead of hours or days. Although rendering software havent implemented such an idea, a website called SkyBox by Blockade Labs lets you create and even edit 360 environments using AI, and then download and apply them in your rendering scene.AI Background/Backplate Generation (Alternative Midjourney)A 360 environment is one thing what if you need something less complicated? Like a nice gradient for your products background, or some wacky splashes of water to make your rendering of a juice box look fresh, or perhaps just a nice model hand that you can then edit to make it look like its holding the product. This is perhaps the easiest application of GenAI in 3D product visualization. I find myself gravitating to Midjourney for its sheer realism, but there are a WHOLE bunch of free alternatives like Stable Diffusion, Leonardo.ai, even DALL-E inside Microsoft Bing. If youve got some money to spare, Midjourney is a good option, but Canvas AI tools are pretty neat too.AI Render Upscaler (Alternative Magnific.ai)This one is an absolute no-brainer. Imagine this youve got just half an hour before a meeting or pitch, and the clients asked for a new round of renders. Each render at maximum resolution takes a good 5-10 minutes, leaving you with hardly any time on hand. What if there was a way to just quickly upscale low-res renders? AI could absolutely help, and could do a phenomenal job too. Take your low-res 800px-wide render and feed it into an AI upscaler; just one minute later, youre presented with a render thats 2400px wide, enough to present to a client on a large screen, or even have printed! There are a few upscalers out there Topaz Gigapixel (for Windows and Mac) and Pixelmator (for Mac) come to mind, although if you have some extra cash to spare, Magnific.ai is the gold standard. Not only does it upscale your images, it lets you upscale them with text commands. You can turn a blurry render into a steampunk image, a realistic visualization, or even a watercolor painting. Pretty cool, eh?AI Material Generation (Alternative WithPoly)Most rendering software come with a preset material bank and most designers make the mistake of only working within the parameters of those presets. To truly unlock great rendering and visualization, you HAVE to step out of your comfort zone and build your own materials from scratch. Whether its making realistic wood-grain, fabric, or even woven carbon fiber never use the default materials that come free with your rendering software. You could go to websites that offer material assets (PolyHaven and Quixel Megascans are great for free stuff), but youll end up stuck if you cant find the exact material you need. So, what if AI could make materials FOR you? Imagine asking the AI to make pink carbon fiber, or glowing hot metal, and having all the image and texture assets ready for you. Sure, it would be nice to have rendering software with this built-in feature but until then, WithPoly is a great alternative. With a freemium tier, you should be able to generate pretty decent 2K-quality textures and materials simply through text. The AI creates diffuse, bump, displacement, specular, AO, and a host of other perfectly matching and seamless texture files, all for free. If you want to upscale your textures or download them in different formats, youll have to buy credits, but for beginners, the free version is more than capable.AI Render Style-Matching (Alternative PhotoShop AI Suite)Picture this youre scrolling through Behance or Pinterest (or even Instagram) and you see a wonderful product photo or render. The lighting is perfect, the background seamless, and you love the composition. You wish you could create such an image too, but it isnt so easy. What if you could render a basic image and have the AI match it to the photo you liked? Well, such a tool doesnt exist yet, butPhotoshops AI features allow you to achieve similar results. The softwares new AI tools include a generative fill feature, which lets you fill in selections with AI-generated objects. You could load a photo of a face, select your eyes, and have the AI generate sunglasses. Or change your clothes to a tuxedo but more importantly, you can now even add reference images to tell the AI what to generate, or use Photoshops newly introduced Neural Filters to directly perform style-transfers. Imagine seeing a gorgeous photo of a perfume bottle and wanting to recreate the scene with your own 3D model all you do is render your 3D model with flashy lighting, and add the background to your image using the reference feature. Its a lot like using Midjourney to generate backplates, but what Photoshop does so well is integrate subject and background seamlessly. Photoshop will match your products shadows on the floor, create the right glare or caustics, and make a fairly believable-looking render in probably a minute or two!The post Top 5 A.I. Features Every 3D Rendering Software Needs ASAP first appeared on Yanko Design.