MiniMax-Remover is a fast and effective video object remover based on minimax optimization. It operates in two stages: the first stage trains a remover using a simplified DiT architecture, while the second stage distills a robust remover with CFG removal and fewer inference steps.
There are several free or open-source VFX asset management systems available that can be used in production environments. These tools vary in scope—from lightweight tools to full-fledged pipeline frameworks. Below is a breakdown of the most notable ones and what makes them stand out.
1. Free & Open-Source VFX Asset Management Systems
1.1 OpenPype (formerly Pype)
License: Open source (Apache 2.0)
– Asset management and project structure setup – Integrates with Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Blender, and others – Includes publishing, versioning, and task tracking – Web interface (OpenPype Studio) for overview and management
Strengths: Actively developed, modular and extendable, production-proven in real studios
– Production tracking, shot management – Web-based interface with intuitive UX – Built-in review and feedback system – API for integration into pipelines
Strengths: Great for team collaboration, focuses on communication between departments
License: Proprietary (older versions may be available for small studios/educational users)
– Project management, review, and pipeline integration – Strength: Industry-proven Note: Current versions are commercial; older community editions may still be used.
1.4 Tactic
License: Open source (EPL 1.0)
– General-purpose asset and workflow management – Web-based, highly configurable
Strengths: Adaptable to VFX pipelines, powerful templating/scripting
Drawbacks: Steep learning curve, not VFX-specific out of the box
Why: – Specifically built for VFX and animation pipelines – Extensively integrates with key DCCs – Actively maintained with a large community – Includes both asset and task management – Works out-of-the-box but is customizable
DB Browser for SQLite (DB4S) is a high quality, visual, open source tool designed for people who want to create, search, and edit SQLite or SQLCipher database files. DB4S gives a familiar spreadsheet-like interface on the database in addition to providing a full SQL query facility. It works with Windows, macOS, and most versions of Linux and Unix. Documentation for the program is on the wiki.
Finn Jäger has spent some time in making a sleeker tool for all you VFX nerds out there, it takes a HEIC iPhone still and exports a Multichannel EXR – the cool thing is it also converts it to acesCG and it merges the SDR base image with the gain map according to apples math hdr_rgb = sdr_rgb * (1.0 + (headroom – 1.0) * gainmap)
A major new update which includes more than 100 new features including powerful AI tools designed to assist you with all stages of your workflow. Use AI IntelliScript to create timelines based on a text script, AI Animated Subtitles to animate words as they are spoken, and AI Multicam SmartSwitch to create a timeline with camera angles based on speaker detection. The cut and edit pages also include a dedicated keyframe editor and voiceover palettes, and AI Fairlight IntelliCut can remove silence and checkerboard dialogue between speakers. In Fusion, explore advanced multi layer compositing workflows. The Color Warper now includes Chroma Warp, and the Magic Mask and Depth Map have huge updates.
While in ZBrush, call up your image editing package and use it to modify the active ZBrush document or tool, then go straight back into ZBrush.
ZAppLink can work on different saved points of view for your model. What you paint in your image editor is then projected to the model’s PolyPaint or texture for more creative freedom.
With ZAppLink you can combine ZBrush’s powerful capabilities with all the painting power of the PSD-capable 2D editor of your choice, making it easy to create stunning textures.
ZAppLink features
Send your document view to the PSD file editor of your choice for texture creation and modification: Photoshop, Gimp and more!
Projections in orthogonal or perspective mode.
Multiple view support: With a single click, send your front, back, left, right, top, bottom and two custom views in dedicated layers to your 2D editor. When your painting is done, automatically reproject all the views back in ZBrush!
Create character sheets based on your saved views with a single click.
ZAppLink works with PolyPaint, Textures based on UV’s and canvas pixols.
A Modular AI Image Generation Web-User-Interface, with an emphasis on making powertools easily accessible, high performance, and extensibility. Supports AI image models (Stable Diffusion, Flux, etc.), and AI video models (LTX-V, Hunyuan Video, Cosmos, Wan, etc.), with plans to support eg audio and more in the future.
SwarmUI by default runs entirely locally on your own computer. It does not collect any data from you.
SwarmUI is 100% Free-and-Open-Source software, under the MIT License. You can do whatever you want with it.
A stand-alone, decoder-only autoregressive model, trained from scratch, that unifies a broad spectrum of image generation tasks, including text-to-image generation, image pair generation, subject-driven generation, multi-turn image editing, controllable generation, and dense prediction.
Playbook3d.com is a diffusion-based render engine that reduces the time to final image with AI. It is accessible via web editor and API with support for scene segmentation and re-lighting, integration with production pipelines and frame-to-frame consistency for image, video, and real-time 3D formats.
Need to tweak a filter you applied hours ago? New in GIMP 3.0 is non-destructive editing for most commonly-used filters. See the changes in real time with on-canvas preview.
Exchange files with more applications, including BC7 DDS files as well as better PSD export and many new formats.
Don’t know how big to make your drawing? Simply set your paint tool to expand layers automatically as needed.
Making pro-quality text got easier, too. Style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels, and more, and you can still edit your text, change font and size, and even tweak the style settings.
Organizing your layers has become much easier with the ability to select multiple items at once, move them or transform them all together!
Color Management was again improved, as our long-term project to make GIMP an advanced image editor for all usages.
Updated graphical toolkit (GTK3) for modern desktop usage.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of the Windows operating system that enables you to run a Linux file system, along with Linux command-line tools and GUI apps, directly on Windows, alongside your traditional Windows desktop and apps.
The VFX Reference Platform is a set of tool and library versions to be used as a common target platform for building software for the VFX industry. Its purpose is to minimise incompatibilities between different software packages, ease the support burden for integrated pipelines and encourage further adoption of Linux by both studios and software vendors. The Reference Platform is updated annually by a group of software vendors in collaboration with the Visual Effects Society Technology Committee.
With it, you can develop, optimize, and deploy your applications on GPU-accelerated embedded systems, desktop workstations, enterprise data centers, cloud-based platforms, and supercomputers. The toolkit includes GPU-accelerated libraries, debugging and optimization tools, a C/C++ compiler, and a runtime library.
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