|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[the_ad id=”3278404″]
Boris FX’s SynthEyes 2025.5
Boris FX has rolled out SynthEyes 2025.5, and while it isn’t a complete reinvention of the matchmoving (camera tracking in VFX) wheel, it’s a smart, focused update that smooths out some long-standing pain points and adds a few genuinely useful tricks. If you’ve wrestled with messy tracking data or cursed at lens-distortion exports, this release is aimed right at you.
The headline feature is ML Motion Estimation, a new tracking mode that leans on machine learning to generate dense per-pixel motion vectors. That might sound like marketing jargon, but in practice it means fewer headaches when dealing with tricky footage — think handheld shots with motion blur or anything obscured by passing objects. The tracks simply hold better, solves are cleaner, and you spend less time in cleanup mode. For a task as time sensitive as matchmove, that alone is worth a look.
Another standout change is the new nondestructive lens workflow. Previously, managing distortion across different formats often felt like playing a shell game — distort here, undistort there, and hope your export settings didn’t trip you up. Now, distortion can be applied or removed at export without affecting the base solve. It’s cleaner, more predictable and easier to manage across pipelines whether you’re sending data to Maya, Blender, Nuke or anything in between.
There’s also a small but very welcome feature: mesh-to-tracker parenting. Drop a piece of geometry into your scene and snap it directly to a tracker, and it stays put through refinements and exports. It’s one of those quality-of-life additions that doesn’t sound exciting on paper but pays off immediately once you’re laying out objects or testing track alignment.
On top of those core changes, the update also polishes existing features. The Mask ML system, introduced earlier this year, now has dilation controls that make it easier to deal with fine details like hair or motion blur. Format support has been broadened as well, including Blackmagic’s URSA 17K BRAW, which means SynthEyes continues to keep pace with current production cameras. Add in some workflow niceties — automatic handling of rotated metadata, a proper LUTs folder for color management — and you get the sense that this is an update designed by people who know exactly what slows artists down.
Pricing hasn’t changed, with subscriptions starting around $325 a year or a perpetual license for about $655, which keeps SynthEyes competitively positioned against other trackers on the market. When you factor in the stability improvements and smarter automation, 2025.5 feels less like an incremental patch and more like a release that makes the software sturdier, faster and simply more pleasant to work with.
SynthEyes has always been a specialized tool — indispensable to the artists who need it and invisible to everyone else. With this update, Boris FX doubles down on that philosophy: no gimmicks, just solid improvements that make matchmoving a little less of a grind. If you’re already a user, you’ll notice the difference right away. And if you’ve been looking for a reason to test-drive it, 2025.5 might be that nudge.
borisfx.com/products/syntheyes
Price: $27 (monthly), $655 (perpetual), $215 (upgrade & support renewal)
Marvelous Designer
CLO Virtual Fashion’s Marvelous Designer 2025 doesn’t overhaul the program, but it does refine the workflow in meaningful ways. This release focuses on cleaner simulation, better export options and thoughtful improvements that make the day-to-day experience smoother. Given the improvements to mesh quality, setup time and animation flexibility, the update feels worthwhile for anyone who relies on the software regularly.
The interface has been reorganized to reduce clutter and make tools easier to find. It isn’t a drastic redesign, but the changes are noticeable by how quickly you can move between tasks. It feels more efficient, especially when managing complex garments.
Simulation quality is stronger thanks to a new quad-mesh engine that reduces triangulation, producing cleaner topology for export and rigging. IK joint mapping has also been improved, so avatars imported from Daz, Mixamo, Character Creator or MetaHuman align more accurately and require less manual adjustment.
In this update, animation has gained flexibility as well. In previous versions, you were limited to adjusting caches. Now, you can keyframe fabric properties, wind settings and avatar joints directly in the timeline. Testing layered cloth effects is faster, and the process feels more integrated.
The introduction of a beta fur strand system adds early support for basic hair and fuzz effects. You can preview strand density, length and curl, and export them as USD splines. It’s not production-ready for hero assets, but it’s already useful for look development and previs.
Other practical enhancements add up quickly. UV generation now accounts for sides and backs of garments. Auto-sewing and fitting are more accurate, sculpt tools are more responsive, and the modular garment library makes it easier to reuse and adapt designs. Export workflows benefit from PBR support, updated stitching options, two-way zipper presets and better OBJ handling. Texture management has also been streamlined, making the software more reliable in production pipelines.
Marvelous Designer remains a specialized application — indispensable for artists working with digital clothing but less likely to be touched by those outside that space. The 2025 release builds on that foundation with practical updates that strengthen its role in pipelines for film, games and real-time projects. It’s not a flashy release, but it is a dependable one.
For character artists, costume designers and simulation specialists, Marvelous Designer 2025 offers a set of improvements that translate directly to faster, more reliable work. It may not grab attention with big new features, but the refinements here make the software easier to trust, and that’s what really matters in production.
marvelousdesigner.com
Price: $39 per month, $280 per year; $1,900 per year (stand-alone enterprise)
SideFX’s Houdini 21
With the August release of Houdini 21, SideFX shifted focus to refining and unifying its tool sets, while still delivering a few forward-looking advances. Featuring more than 300 enhancements across animation, simulation, rendering and machine learning, the update offers a comprehensive end-to-end workflow designed to keep artists working inside Houdini rather than bouncing around multiple applications.
The animation system is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this release. A new motion mixer and animation catalog give animators nonlinear workflows for blending, layering and reusing clips. The AutoRig Builder and ragdoll-tether constraints expand the rigging tool kit, while the “Scene Animate Prop” node allows objects to be animated and triggered in context. Together, these features help streamline the way character and prop performances are built, adjusted and reused across sequences.
Houdini 21 introduces the Otis solver, a GPU-accelerated soft-tissue system that can simulate muscle, fascia, skin sliding and collisions in near real time. The demo character, “Otto,” highlights how naturalistic motion can now be achieved without prohibitive computation times. Importantly, setups can be transferred to different characters — even nonhuman ones — while machine-learning-trained deformers offer a faster alternative for artists who need convincing results without full simulations.
With this release, the long-anticipated Copernicus context graduates from beta with GPU-driven tools. Artists now have access to real-time Pyro FX, reaction-diffusion patterns, shape scattering and texture-baking workflows. Pyro itself gains new presets for fire and smoke, debris simulations with the updated MPM solver and added controls for turbulence and noise. The emphasis is on speed and iteration, enabling VFX teams to visualize results faster while retaining fine control over detail.
The OpenGL viewport has been replaced with a modern Vulkan-based renderer, bringing ambient occlusion, geometry lights, Gaussian splats, Hydra 2 integration and MoltenVK support for macOS users. In Solaris, Karma XPU has been updated to handle more complex shading setups, allowing up to 16 shader layers to be combined. The result is a viewport and rendering pipeline that gives artists higher fidelity and faster iteration across lighting and look development.
Rather than headline-grabbing AI, Houdini 21 uses machine learning in targeted, practical ways. Corrective joints, deformation speedups, point-cloud surfacing, style transfer and up-res tools for simulations are all implemented as nodes. This approach ensures artists remain in control of the creative process while benefiting from meaningful efficiency gains.
The release rounds out with improvements across procedural modeling and environment creation. Terrain erosion has been redesigned for greater realism, while quad-remeshing, unsubdivide SOPs and improved UV flattening tools strengthen everyday modeling tasks. Unified GPU-accelerated baking in both Karma and COPs further reduces iteration time.
Houdini 21 emphasizes stability, speed and production readiness. Instead of chasing entirely new workflows, SideFX has refined and expanded the existing tool sets, ensuring they are reliable enough for large-scale use. For animators, riggers and VFX artists alike, this release represents a confident, polished step forward — one that makes Houdini a more accessible and efficient tool for studios looking to deliver complex work under demanding schedules.
sidefx.com
Price: $1,415 per year (Houdini Core), $3,369 per year (Houdini VFX), $195 per year (Karma Renderer), $525 per year (Houdini Engine)
Software reviews were written after being tested on a Puget Workstation AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7975WX 4.0GHz 32 Core 350W: 128GB DDR5-5600 RAM and NIVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Ge 48GB PCI-E. (pugetsystems.com)
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose recent credits include I’m a Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. He can be reached at todd@teaspoonvfx.com.
