CD Projekt RED has announced that it will be capping off 10 years of post-launch support for critically-acclaimed RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with one final update. Announced through a post on social media platform X, the studio has said that the update will be coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and will bring with it cross-platform mod support. While mod support has been available in the PC version of The Witcher 3 for a while now, with this update, CD Projekt RED will allow players to create and share mods across the different platforms on which it is available. It is worth noting that this update will not be coming to the Nintendo Switch version of the game. CD Projekt RED hasn’t yet confirmed when this update will be released, saying simply that it will be coming out “later this year”. In an FAQ on its official website, the studio has also confirmed that players can upload and download mods to the platform being used – mod.io – at no cost. Players will, however, need to create a mod.io account that is connected to their CD Projekt RED account to access cross-platform mods. The use of mod.io will also not prevent PC players from sticking to Nexus Mods or other modding platforms. “As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, we’re excited to share some good news for our players and modders,” wrote the studio on its official website. “Later this year, we will release one more patch for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This update will introduce cross-platform mod support across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S via mod.io.” “Creating, sharing, and enjoying mods will be easier and more accessible, as players on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S will be able to share a modding ecosystem.” Since its release back in 2015, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has proven to be an incredibly successful game for CD Projekt RED. The studio had announced during its recent earnings report that more than 50 million copies of The Witcher 3 had been sold so far. This include copies across launch platforms PC, PS4 and Xbox One, as well as platforms that got the game later – PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. The current-gen version of the game, dubbed the Complete Edition, brought with it a host of new features to take advantage of modern hardware, including ray-traced global illumination and ambient occlusion, 4K textures, and even new content. These enhancements were also released for the PC version of The Witcher 3 as a free update. The studio had also released a video to celebrate a decade of killing monsters since The Witcher 3’s original release. The video focused mostly on the epic journey that players took alongside Geralt through the game’s main storyline as well as some of its more notable side quests. In the meantime, CD Projekt RED is working on The Witcher 4 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game doesn’t yet have a solid release date. #10YearsofTheWitcher3 and one more patch! 🎉We will introduce cross-platform mod support for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S later this year. For the first time, creating, sharing, and enjoying mods for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be easier and more accessible than… pic.twitter.com/qiSh9nqd8i— The Witcher (@thewitcher) May 30, 2025

Codemasters’ next iteration in its flagship Formula One racing series arrives this week with F1 25. Alongside My Team 2.0 and the next chapter of Braking Point, it also offers some new events and modes. But how does it push the series’ boundaries for fidelity, especially on PS5 Pro? We spoke to creative director Lee Mathew, who confirmed three modes on the console – Quality, Performance and Resolution. Quality Mode targets 4K/60 Hz with on-track ray tracing and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution enabled. Performance Mode delivers 4K for 120 Hz screens and offers “a crisp, smooth experience and extra clarity from the increased resolution.” Finally, there’s Resolution Mode, which debuted last year when F1 24 received PS5 Pro support. It runs at 8K/60 Hz, and supports ray traced dynamic diffuse global illumination (RT DDGI) on tracks. Ambient occlusion, reflections, shadow effects and RT DDGI are also viewable in cutscenes, Photo Mode, and replays in 8K/30 Hz. If that wasn’t enough, couch co-op in split-screen runs at 60 Hz “without compromise.” F1 25 launches on May 30th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, but Iconic Edition owners can start playing on May 27th. Check out our feature for everything you should know.

Audio is such an important component of any game and 3D audio in 3D games adds massively to immersion. Today we are going to look at two different Godot add-ons that add Audio Occlusion capabilities to the Godot game engine. The first solution is VASTLY easier to use; the aptly named Godot Audio Occlusion Plugin that’s part of the Audio Arsenal bundle by Ovani Sounds. The other is part of the free and open-source Giga Audio plugin, which also provides two different 3D area audio zones. The Ovani Godot Audio Occlusion Plugin is described as: The Audio Occlusion Plugin for Godot makes sounds in your game behave more realistically. When a sound is behind a wall, door, or obstacle, this plugin will automatically make it sound muffled or filtered—just like it would in real life. It works by attaching an AudioOccluder (a Node3D) to any AudioStreamPlayer3D in your scene. The plugin calculates how sound would travel through the environment and adjusts the audio in real time, depending on what’s between the source and the listener. To do this, it simplifies your world into a voxel grid—a 3D block-based map—and simulates how sound waves move through it. You can even preview how the plugin sees your world by enabling Voxel Preview in the Inspector (after activating the included plugin.gd). You can easily customize settings like: Range Voxel resolution Collision mask Detection margin The Giga Audio plugin is described as: Audio Occlusion, Audio Areas, and Audio Depth Areas for your project. …yeah, slightly less verbose description there. 😉 You will find that as a general trend, the Giga Audio plugin has less documentation and no samples to get you up and going. Don’t worry though, we have that process mostly covered in the video below. Key Links Audio Arsenal bundle by Ovani Sounds Ovani Godot Audio Plugin Giga Audio GitHub Repository Giga Audio YouTube Video Using the links on this page to purchase the bundle helps support GFS and thanks so much if you do! You can learn more about using both of the Godot 4.x audio occlusion add-ons in the video below.

CDPR releases 37 minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 Switch 2 video - so what have we learned? Previewing the latest port vs Xbox Series S and PlayStation 4. Image credit: CD Projekt RED Face-off by Thomas Morgan Senior Staff Writer, Digital Foundry Published on May 26, 2025 Developer CD Projekt RED has uploaded a generous batch of Switch 2 Cyberpunk 2077 footage week - 37 minutes of direct 4K capture to be exact - giving us an early glimpse at the state of its docked 30fps quality mode. Since it releases on 5th June as a Switch 2 launch title, we don't really have too long to wait to see the real thing in action, though given that this footage comes with no "early build" disclaimer or suchlike it appears CDPR is confident in what it's showing in this material - and for good reason. Poring over all the assets, we have plenty to work with for some preliminary comparisons and even frame-rate analysis. In short, the prospects for this Switch 2 rendition are encouraging overall. In terms of content, CDPR is showing all manner of gameplay: driving, combat, major mission set pieces - you name it, it's included. Some clips even reveal, quite openly, the challenges Switch 2 faces in running such a complex open world game - notably for high speed car action. To its credit, frame-rate delivery at 30 frames per second is strong based on this footage overall, with drops into the 20-30fps range mainly being a problem while speeding through Night City's streets. Especially at points where multiple AI cars clog up its roads, it appears drops and traversal hitches are possible, something we're keen to re-test on its release. It's a positive showing overall, though: on-foot exploration around its markets, the bustling parade sequence teeming with NPCs, and even combat during the Phantom Liberty DLC all run at a perfect 30fps here. In performance terms, this showing is perhaps best put in the context of what's currently possible on last-gen consoles, and also Series S. In re-testing the base PS4 version today for example, it's sobering to find that open world roaming there still plays out with hitching, geometry pop-in and drops to 20-30fps - certainly more than is evident in this Switch 2 footage. Going hands-on with the final build ourselves is a must for any final word on this, but early signs point to fewer glaring issues in traversal and battle. Sit back, relax and enjoy another massive episode of DF Direct Weekly.Watch on YouTube 0:00:00 Introduction 0:00:39 News 1: 37 minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 Switch 2 footage released! 0:18:51 News 2: AMD introduces 9060 XT 0:31:43 News 3: AMD teases "FSR Redstone" 0:44:15 News 4: Doom has hidden performance metrics on Xbox 0:53:38 News 5: Mario Kart World originally planned for Switch 1 1:02:49 News 6: Hellblade 2 coming to PS5 1:11:29 Supporter Q1: What do you make of the Nvidia/Gamers Nexus controversy? 1:19:41 Supporter Q2: If Microsoft is working on an Xbox emulator for Windows, does that signal the end for traditional Xbox consoles? 1:28:56 Supporter Q3: Should Nintendo release a non-portable, home-only Switch 2? 1:35:32 Supporter Q4: Could Switch 2 become a dumping ground for last-gen games? 1:40:29 Supporter Q5: What are your hopes and concerns for Switch 2? On the other hand, Xbox Series S' performance level - in its own 30fps quality mode - is a more aspirational target for Switch 2. We described this version as 'what last-gen should have been' in our original review, thanks to it boasting a broadly rock-solid 30fps experience, and it even went on to receive a 60fps mode post-release. A question mark hovers over the viability of Switch 2's own 40fps performance mode though, where we have no recent assets. More to come on this when we get the game ourselves. In terms of comparisons, image quality is a plus point for Switch 2 when compared to the older PS4 release, and even Series S. Much of this boils down to Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology being available to Switch 2's Tegra 239 processor. CDPR has already confirmed the use of DLSS to hit a 1080p target in docked play in this case (and a 720p target in handheld mode). However, the actual native pixel counts are typically lower than 1080p - with dynamic scaling taking us to 1280x720 at its nadir during the most extreme 20fps drop on record here while driving. More typically though, numbers like 792p, 810p and 864p crop up at less taxing points in the footage, which is a high enough base pixel count for DLSS to (usually) work its magic and reconstruct a 1080p frame. For perspective, Series S' quality mode renders at a 1296p-1440p range using AMD's FSR 2 as its upscaler (as of a late 2022 patch 1.61, following an upgrade from TAA). Meanwhile, base PS4 continues to run at a 720p-900p range using CDPR's own in-house temporal AA solution. In both cases Switch 2 has an advantage in temporal stability, at least. Even though it runs at a lower pixel count than Series S, DLSS more adeptly cleans up the game's visual noise in certain scenarios compared to FSR 2. Shimmer is minimised across the dampened floors of the market area, while during static moments, fences and character detail up-close resolve with added sharpness via Switch 2's upscaler. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. On the downside, for all its benefits, DLSS does not always hide its lower base pixel input. Driving at speed reveals blocking artefacts on Switch 2, while a later Johnny Silverhand dialogue sequence shows similar break-up around two background NPCs playing basketball. There are some limits on show, then, but it's a respectably competitive result next to Series S all things considered. In fact, it's similar to what we found with Street Fighter 6 comparisons between these two consoles, where Switch 2 pushes a sharper, less visibly noisy frame via DLSS - and despite Capcom's fightert running at a lower native res in that case. Focusing on visual quality, it's a surprise to find Switch 2 is on par with both PS4 and Series S in a great many of its core settings. Paired side-by-side with each, there is scarce evidence of any differences in recreated shots: texture quality is a match, SSR is enabled across the floors, and motion blur is engaged too. There is a difference in ambient occlusion (resulting in thicker pockets of object shading on Switch 2) that needs further investigation - and it's clear that Switch 2 also loses the lens flare effect of the Series S release. That aside, the variance in time of day and NPC placement account for a majority of the differences in the open city - whereas in confined interiors that are perfectly matched, the main difference is again DLSS' impact on image quality. It's a positive peak at CDPR's optimisation efforts so far and it appears to be an improvement on the build I played at Nintendo's Switch 2 event in London last month. We're just ten days away from what's undeniably one of the most technically challenging third party games on Switch 2, and it's certainly a big one for coverage plans at Digital Foundry. In fact as I type this, there's an ongoing effort to bank as much Cyberpunk 2077 footage on other platforms for comparison. Roll on June 5th!

Botox injections used to be a secret for (largely) women in their 40s and 50s. But growing numbers of (largely) women in their 20s and 30s are turning to “baby Botox,” or smaller doses that are intended to prevent aging rather than combat it.Baby Botox is just one intervention that doctors say younger people now frequently seek, and some view the trend with concern. Dr. Michelle Hure, a physician specializing in dermatology and dermatopathology, says younger patients aren’t considering the cost of procedures that require lifetime maintenance, and are expressing dissatisfaction with their looks to a degree that borders on the absurd.Hure traces the demand for “baby Botox” and other procedures to the start of the pandemic.“Everyone was basically chronically online,” she told Vox. “They were on Zoom, they were looking at themselves, and there was the rise of of TikTok and the filters and people were really seeing these perceived flaws that either aren’t there or are so minimal and just normal anatomy. And they have really made it front and center where it affects them. It affects their daily life and I really feel that it has become more of a pathological thing.”Hure spoke to Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the rise of “baby Botox” and her concerns with the cosmetic dermatology industry. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You told us about a patient that you saw yesterday, and you said you probably wouldn’t keep her on because her mentality really worried you. Would you tell me about that young woman?I had this patient who was mid-20s, and really a beautiful girl. I [didn’t] see a lot of signs of aging on her face, but she was coming in for Botox. There wasn’t a lot for me to treat. And at the end of the session she was asking me, “So what do you think about my nasolabial folds?”Basically, it’s the fold that goes from the corner of your nose down to the corner of your mouth. It’s the barrier between the upper lip and your cheek, and when you smile it kind of folds. Of course, the more you age, the more of the line will be left behind when you’re not smiling. And she was pointing to her cheek as if there was something there, but there was nothing there. And so I had to tell her, “Well, I don’t see that, you’re perfect.” It’s a phantom nasolabial fold. It didn’t exist.That sort of mentality where someone is perceiving a flaw that is absolutely not there — providers need to say no. Unfortunately, they’re incentivized not to. Especially if you have a cosmetic office, if you’re a med spa, if you have a cosmetic derm or plastic surgery office, of course you’re incentivized to do what the patient wants. Well, I’m not going to do that. That’s not what I do.That means you may get paid for seeing her in that visit, but you’re not getting paid for putting filler in her face. I think what I hear you saying is other doctors would have done that.Absolutely. One hundred percent. I know this for a fact because many times those patients will come to my office to get that filler dissolved because they don’t like it. In the larger practices or practices that are private equity-owned, which is a huge problem in medicine, you are absolutely meant to sell as many products, as many procedures as possible. Oftentimes I was told to sell as much filler as possible, because every syringe is several hundred dollars. And then if they’re there, talk them into a laser. Talk them into this, talk them into that. Then you become a salesman. For my skin check patients, I’m looking for skin cancer. I’m counseling them on how to take care of their skin. I was told, “Don’t talk to them about using sunscreen, because we want them to get skin cancer and come back.”I was pulled out of the room by my boss and reprimanded for explaining why it’s so important to use sunscreen. And so this is why I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to start my own office and be on my own. I can’t do that. That goes against everything that I believe in, in my oath. Because there is potential harm on many different levels for cosmetic procedures.What are the risks to giving someone a cosmetic procedure that they don’t really need?This is a medical procedure. There is always risk for any type of intervention, right? What gets me is, like, Nordstrom is talking about having injections in their stores. This is ridiculous! This is a medical procedure. You can get infection, you can get vascular occlusion that can lead to death of the tissue overlying where you inject. It can lead to blindness. This is a big deal. It’s fairly safe if you know what you’re doing. But not everyone knows what they’re doing and knows how to handle the complications that can come about. Honestly, I feel like the psychological aspect of it is a big problem. At some point you become dependent, almost, on these procedures to either feel happy or feel good about yourself. And at what point is it not going to be enough? One of my colleagues actually coined this term. It’s called perception drift. At some point, you will do these little, little, incremental tweaks until you look like a different person. And you might look very abnormal. So even if someone comes to me for something that is legitimate, it’s still: Once you start, it’s going to be hard for you to stop. If you’re barely able to scrimp together enough to pay for that one thing, and you have it done, great. What about all the rest of your life that you’re going to want to do something? Are you going to be able to manage it?I wonder how all of this makes you think about your profession. Most people get into medicine, it has always been my assumption, to be helpful. And you’ve laid out a world in which procedures are being done that are not only not helpful, they could be dangerous. And you don’t seem to like it very much.This is why it is a smaller and smaller percentage of what I do in my office. I love cosmetics to an extent, right? I love to make people love how they look. But when you start using cosmetics as a tool to make them feel better about themselves in a major way, it’s a slippery slope. It should be more of a targeted thing, not making you look like an entirely different person because society has told you you can’t age. It’s really disturbing to me.See More:

NPR Project May 23rd, 2025 Code Design, General Development Clément Foucault html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Wing it! Early NPR project by Blender Studio. In July 2024 the NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering) project officially started, with a workshop with Dillo Goo Studio and Blender developers. While the use-cases were clear, the architecture and overall design were not. To help with this, the team started working in a prototype containing many shading features essential to the NPR workflow (such as filter support, custom shading, and AOV access). This prototype received a lot of attention, with users contributing a lot of nice examples of what is possible with such system. The feedback showed that there is a big interest from the community for a wide range of effects. However the amount of flexibity made possible with the prototype came with a cost: it locked NPR features within EEVEE, alienating Cycles from part of the NPR pipeline. It also deviated from the EEVEE architecture, which could limit future feature development. After much consideration, the design was modified to address these core issues. The outcome can be summarized as: Move filters and color modification to a multi-stage compositing workflow. Keep shading features inside the renderer’s material system. Multi-stage compositing One of the core feature needed for NPR is the ability to access and modify the shaded pixels. Doing it inside a render engine has been notoriously difficult. The current way of doing it inside EEVEE is to use the ShaderToRGB node, which comes with a lot of limitations. In Cycles, limited effects can be achieved using custom OSL nodes. As a result, in production pipeline, this is often done through very cumbersome and time consuming scene-wide compositing. The major downside is that all asset specific compositing needs to be manually merged and managed inside the scene compositor. Instead, the parts of the compositing pipeline that are specific to a certain asset should be defined at the asset level. The reasoning is that these compositing nodes define the appearance of this asset and should be shared between scene. Multi-stage compositing is just that! A part of the compositing pipeline is linked to a specific object or material. This part receives the rendered color as well as its AOVs and render passes as input, and output the modified rendered color. The object level compositor at the bottom right define the final appearance of the object In this example the appearance of the Suzanne object is defined at the object level inside its asset file. When linked into a scene with other elements, it is automatically combined with other assets. From left to right: Smooth Toon shading with alpha over specular, Pixelate, Half-Tone with Outline This new multi-stage compositing will be reusing the compositor nodes, with a different subset of nodes available at the object and material levels. This is an opportunity to streamline the workflow between material nodes editing and compositor nodes. Grease Pencil Effects can eventually be replaced by this solution. Final render showing 3 objects with different stylizations seamlessly integrated. There are a lot more to be said about this feature. For more details see the associated development task. Anti-Aliased output A major issue with working with the a compositing workflow is Anti-Aliasing (AA). When compositing anti-aliased input, results often include hard to resolve fringes. Left: Render Pass, Middle: Object Matte, Right: Extracted Object Render Pass The common workaround to this issue is to render at higher resolution without AA and downscale after compositing. This method is very memory intensive and only allows for 4x or 9x AA with usually less than ideal filtering. Another option is to use post-process AA filters but that often results in flickering animations. Left: Anti-Aliased done before compositor based shadingRight: Anti-Aliasing is done after compositor. The solution to this problem is to run the compositor for each AA step and filter the composited pixels like a renderer would do. This will produce the best image quality with only the added memory usage of the final frame. Converged input One of the main issues with modern renderers is that their output is noisy. This doesn’t play well with NPR workflows as many effects require applying sharp transformations of the rendered image or light buffers. For instance, this is what happens when applying a constant interpolated color ramp over the ambient occlusion node. The averaging operation is run on a noisy output instead of running on a noisy input before the transformation. Left: Original AO, Middle: Constant Ramp in material, Right: Ramp applied in compositor (desired) Doing these effects at compositing time gives us the final converged image as input. However, as explained above, the compositor needs to run before the AA filtering. So the multi-stage compositors needs to be able to run on converged or denoised inputs while being AA free. In other words, it means that the render samples will be distributed between render passes convergence and final compositor AA. Engine Features While improving the compositing workflow is important for stylization flexibility, some features are more suited for the inside of the render engine. This allows builtin interaction with light transport and other renderer features. These features are not exclusive to NPR workflows and fit well inside the engine architecture. As such, the following features are planned to be directly implemented inside the render engines: Ray Queries Portal BSDF Custom Shading Depth Offset The development will start after the Blender 5.0 release, planned for November 2025. Meanwhile, to follow the project, subscribe to the development task. For more details about the project, join the announcement thread. Support the Future of Blender Donate to Blender by joining the Development Fund to support the Blender Foundation’s work on core development, maintenance, and new releases. ♥ Donate to Blender

Synthetic data in Unity now includes synthetic humans and homes in this major release of our open-source tools.The success of increasingly ambitious machine learning (ML)-driven computer vision (CV) systems depends on high volumes of richly annotated data. Since performance of these systems depends so much on the data, gathering better data is often the best way to improve model performance. Collecting and annotating real data is so expensive and time consuming, however, that a data-centric approach is not feasible for many projects. To that end, thousands of teams have turned to Unity for building synthetic data for computer vision.Today we are making a big leap forward in synthetic data with a major update to our open-source tools for building synthetic data, which we are calling Perception 1.0. A new Synthetic Humans package gives you diverse, poseable, randomizable, and deterministic 3D humans. The new Synthetic Homes dataset generator provides photorealistic home interior data for scene understanding and object detection. Additionally, the Perception package has been updated with depth and normal outputs, path tracing support, and Python visualization and analysis tools.With this expanded suite of tools, we want to enable you to build high-quality synthetic data faster than ever.We are excited to announce the release of Unity Synthetic Humans, a 3D person generator built from the ground up for human-centric CV synthetic data. Thousands of hours went into creating the content using a mix of scanning, simulation, and 3D artistry. Today, we are sharing all of this work for free under an academic use open-source license.Unlike other digital humans, which provide small variations on a handful of base character models, Synthetic Humans create massive diversity by combining libraries of hair styles, fully anonymized facial and ethnic generation, body models, and clothing. As a result, each generated human is anonymous and unique – instead of generating a specific person, you control the sampling distributions on axes of randomization, including ethnicity, height, weight, and age. For example, a dataset with 20% teenagers, 45% young adults, and 35% middle-aged and older, can be specified in the generation parameters.Key features:Wide range of diversity in age, body type, and skin toneRich labeling, including body keypoints and clothing segmentationFully rigged and skinned bodies and clothes compatible with the Unity Animation SystemPlacement randomization in 3D environments with collision avoidanceWe are also releasing Synthetic Homes, a large-scale dataset of synthetic home interiors, and the associated dataset generator. Use cases for in-home CV are innumerable, but gathering diverse home interior data in the real world is notoriously difficult due to privacy concerns and data collection restrictions. Synthetic Homes aims to accelerate model training for such applications by providing a large dataset of varied home interiors with accurate and rich labeling, as well as a configurable dataset generator.We include a variety of randomizations to maximize diversity. These include materials, furniture type and configuration, sunlight angle and temperature, day/night switching, interior lighting temperature, camera angles, clutter, skybox, door and curtain animations, and more. The dataset generator gives you control over many of these elements, enabling you to tune them to your liking.Interior lighting in homes is complex and intentional, making photorealism especially important. We used Unity’s multi-bounce path tracing to accomplish physically accurate global illumination and reflections. This accuracy can help bridge the so called “Sim2Real gap”, improving a model’s ability to perform well in the real world after training on synthetic data.The Synthetic Homes project includes a 100,000 image dataset, a configurable dataset generator, and a notebook for data analysis. The dataset includes rich labels for semantic and instance segmentation, bounding boxes, depth, and normals. It also includes environmental information like occlusion percentage and camera position. To enable you to iterate on the data we also provide the dataset generator, where you can tweak parameters like camera positioning, blur randomization, and image size.The Perception package powers synthetic data in the Unity Editor. We are broadly expanding the package in this release to support new CV tasks, increase quality, and speed up dataset development. New Perception features include:A conveyor belt sample illustrates the capture of video datasets with randomized object spawning and physics.Ray tracing integration provides highly photorealistic images using physically-based multi-bounce lighting with minimal setup.Occlusion labeler calculates how much of an object is occluded by other parts of the scene and how much is offscreen. This information makes it possible to filter out annotations on highly occluded objects.Depth and normal labelers capture rendering layers that can be used for new tasks or give models additional information to perform better predictions.Transparency and two-sided geometry support enables pixel perfect labeling of plants in agriculture and outdoor environments.We also want to give the community more impact on Perception, so alongside this release we are also opening up the package to accept contributions from the community.Data exploration and analysis are critical to iterating quickly on synthetic data, and we want to make that as easy as possible. With this update we are introducing a new dataset format called SOLO, designed for large-scale image datasets extensible to new types of annotations and metrics. SOLO datasets are separated on disk by frame, enabling distributed dataset generation and processing.In tandem with the SOLO format we are releasing pysolotools, a new open-source python package that provides utilities to work with the SOLO format. The pysolotools Python package provides an iterator interface that allows you to easily work with SOLO data on a frame-by-frame basis. It also includes a framework to easily retrieve common dataset statistics universal to most CV problems such as object counts, size distributions, and heatmaps. Finally, with pysolotools it is easy to write custom scripts to convert from SOLO into your needed data format. Even easier, pysolotools comes with pre-built converters to some popular formats, including COCO.Finally, we recognize that it is important to be able to visually verify the data that was created. pysolotools-fiftyone is an integration with the Voxel FiftyOne viewer to allow you to visually inspect SOLO datasets.You can learn more about building synthetic data on Unity’s Computer Vision hub, including tutorials, case studies, and links to all of the content and examples.Synthetic data for machine learning is a growing, fast-moving field. Connect with the community and with us on the Computer Vision forums, where you can share questions and ideas.

In depth video - Fast Global Illumination Add Mode By Jamesy on May 22, 2025 Videotutorials Global Illumination calculates simulated how light in a scene behaves. It simulates light bouncing around and spreading diffusely by calculating object proximity, angles and more. It gives quite convincing results, but can be slow. James Crowther shows how to optimise it in your scenes for better rendering times.Just yesterday we released another video on Blender's Fast Global Illumination feature, this time digging into the details and numbers of the "Add Mode". This is quite a technical video, and would be ideal for you if you are wanting to learn more about render optimisation, in particular, how the Add mode works.There's also a bonus where I demo how to recreate Add Mode using a compositor node network and Blender's Ambient Occlusion as an alternative to using Fast Global Illumination's Add mode.I quite liked the results of the node network as it gave more flexibility for being creative and greater control over how the ambient occlusion result is blended with the base image.

Multiple previous studies indicate mouth taping isn't very helpful, and may actually be dangerous. Credit: Deposit Photos Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. One of social media’s most recent alleged health hacks is “mouth taping.” Countless TikTok accounts and wellness articles are touting the supposed benefits of attaching an adhesive strip of tape over your lips before turning in for the night. Promised results include improved sleep quality, an end to snoring, better oral health, and somehow even a strengthened jawline. It probably doesn’t take much pause before a few questions spring to mind. What if your snoring is particularly bad? What if you deal with sleep apnea? What if you simply aren’t thrilled at the thought of sealing your mouth shut before falling unconscious for hours at a time?  Researchers at Western University in Canada recently reviewed 10 previously published studies that examined mouth taping as far back as 1999. Their resulting paper published on May 21 in PLOS One lays out what may be a pretty predicable conclusion: Please don’t try mouth taping at home without consulting an actual medical professional. Terrible TikTok advice There are many reasons why you may involuntarily switch from breathing through your nose to your mouth when asleep. Simple congestion from a cold or allergies is often enough to block nasal passages, while a deviated septum coupled with other health factors may result in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Depending on the individual, relief often comes from any combination of medication, exercise, dieting, or medical devices like a CPAP machine. But in recent months, various media outlets and social media accounts have suggested taping your mouth closed before going to bed as a quick and easy workaround. The implied logic here is that if your respiratory system no longer has your mouth as an option, it’ll simply make sure your nose can pick up the slack. This, if you can believe it, is not how things work. “Mouth taping is a contemporary practice that is often celebrity-endorsed, but is not necessarily scientifically accurate,” the study’s authors explained in a statement. “Many people are not appropriate for mouth taping, and in some cases it can lead to risk of serious health harm.” Scant evidence and an asphyxiation risk To reinforce their warning with actual science, researchers reviewed 10 studies on mouth taping’s efficacy that collectively involved a group of 213 patients. Out of those 10 investigations, just two suggested that a small subset of people with mild obstructive apnea may see “some slight improvement” in their sleep.  Meanwhile, other studies didn’t determine any evidence to support taping your mouth for reducing sleep-disordered breathing, snoring, or apnea. Nearly half of the reviewed studies also included discussions regarding the possibly serious risks of asphyxiation. “There was explicit discussion in four out of ten of the studies indicating that oral occlusion either through taping, sealing, or chin strapping could pose a serious risk of asphyxiation in the presence of nasal obstruction or regurgitation,” the authors write. This danger could be especially serious for people dealing with any number of common respiratory troubles, including sinonasal disease, enlarged tonsils, hay fever, chronic rhinitis, or a deviated septum. Mouth taping isn’t necessarily terrible across the board, however. The reviewers note there appears to be a “very specific use-case scenario” for people with mild obstructive sleep apnea. In those cases, blocking the mouthway “may improve” their apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), a common medical measurement that tallies disruptive sleep events per hour.  But in general, it’s clear that taping your mouth based on the advice of total strangers online is not a great idea.“It seems that there is a potentially serious risk of harm for individuals indiscriminately practicing this trend,” the paper’s authors conclude while cautioning that, “Further studies are required to elucidate any clinical benefit this practice may have.” If you are suffering from poor sleep, excessive snoring, or dry mouth due to sleep issues, the best remedy remains consulting with a qualified medical professional—preferably one who isn’t looking to boost their follower count.

Introduction Hello everyone, I am Akshay Kumar from Kashipur, Uttarakhand, India. I am a 26-year-old CGI artist. I mostly prefer hard-surface 3D modeling and texturing. I have been working in this industry for the last 4 years, and I love doing this work. It's my passion and profession.I used to play many video games and love to watch sci-fi films. I was very curious about how games are made. I was good at art in school, and my elder brother belongs to this industry, which developed a huge interest in 3D. My brother guides me at every stage as he is also a great artist. So I started learning 3D animation from the Gloss Institute of Visual Arts and Animation.I worked on many AR/VR products and PC and VR games at my studio, mostly on texturing. Old Bolt CutterI was looking for gaming props to add to my portfolio, saw an old bolt cutter, and it clicked for me. There were many details in modeling and texturing that were challenging. I was trying to make it look realistic. It was a small prop with a lot of details to work on. It inspired me. I started collecting references of the asset and watched some videos of the inner parts, how they are connected. First, I observed references and started work.ModelingI started working on high poly first. I tried to model every little and big detail in the high poly. My model is 70-75% symmetrical, but for a realistic look, I had to add some imperfections. So I modeled one side and mirrored it. And then added some surface imperfections manually. I did the same for low poly. I tried to keep the model so low-poly that there were no extra edges, and it could cover all details. I kept the mesh on the screws and metal plate to preserve the details. UVsI kept optimizing edge flow to ignore the artifacts in the mesh. I tried to understand the shape to maintain the proper edge loop. So I didn't need to leave edges in the middle. It can be a problem during baking. Good edge flow helped me do a clean and proper unwrapping. I hid the seam, trying to keep no visible seams on the mesh. I set the texel density according to the details using Autodesk Maya and RizomUV to unwarp my model. I divided it into two parts: for big and small shapes.TexturingI divided the prop into two parts to get more details in texturing. I baked the high poly mesh details on the low poly. I used the following settings for baking.I had to work manually on some parts to fix normals and ambient occlusion. Then I started creating base materials. I tried to add details according to the age of the prop: I added some scratches and damages to the surface, AO noise, dirt, and some colour splashes. I imagined how the tool was used and added details accordingly. I focused on the metal of the assets. I searched the metals and understood the nature of metal – how it deals with time, how the real shape is created, where and how it is connected. Is it a single shape or connected with a weld? I worked accordingly.I added rust according to the surface, where dirt would stay on the asset, in which position the asset was kept, where it was in contact with the hand, and if it falls down, where it would hit.For some types of dents, I used some brushes to add depth.I used an anchor point for information from the lower mask, used it for the outer edge of damaged depths, and inverted it to add dirt and rust into the depths.I added some anisotropy to achieve a realistic feel of the material and broke it at some spots.I was also checking the texture maps from time to time to understand if everything was going well or not.Lighting & RenderingAfter completing it from my side, I showed it to some friends – to see if I was missing some details and to get some advice – and worked on that. For better composition, I watched some videos and some artwork on ArtStation – how they showcase their work.I found out which details I have to show in which condition – which angles and intensity of the light will work perfectly. I also played with the value of the camera's field of view and added depth of field. I went with 3-point lighting (key light, fill light, and back light) – and added some manual lights according to the scenes and details I had to showcase.Some details needed reflection, and some needed contrast. I was careful with shadows – they shouldn’t be too hard or soft. I needed to balance it. I tried many scenes, lighting positions, and HDRIs – some worked properly, some didn’t work out.I changed the lights for many renders in Blender's Cycle according to the view. I set up some Compositing nodes, added some glare, adjusted the overall brightness and contrast, and added some shade of vignette.ConclusionThe main challenge was preserving both small and large details within a limited polycount. Every shape should be modeled and connected just like in real life, where dents and scratches go, how to control the intensity of dust and rust, and the level of dirt. Are surface imperfections okay, or do they look odd?I learned a lot from this project. I went through the full game asset creation pipeline – from high poly to low poly. It improved my skills in hard surface modeling – how to optimize a low poly model with better edge flow and no artifacts. I worked more deeply on realistic texturing – understanding smart masks and alpha brushes, finding the right amount of detail (no more, no less), and building a scene and theme that fit the asset. I learned what can be enhanced in compositing and what can be brought out with lighting. I studied how different types of lights behave – which ones need more intensity, which ones need less, the right angles, how they affect the props, and where to place the camera focus.My advice to beginners: break your project into steps. First, you have to figure out what type of artwork you want to work on. You should search for more and more references to gather information. Focus on small details – these are what add realism to your props. Try to understand the shape, details, and life of the asset.Study your references carefully before starting. Gather as many as you can. Set up your workflow and always keep in mind what you want to achieve. Try new things – sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t – but you’ll always learn. These things will bring you new ideas and techniques. Pay attention to small details. At the beginning, we usually avoid the challenging parts – don’t do that. At least try to take them on – it helps you upgrade your skills.Thanks.Akshay Kumar, Hard Surface ArtistInterview conducted by Emma Collins