ElevenLabs ships Eleven v4, AMD agrees to buy World Labs, PixiEditor's team announces Trexel

Voice, worlds and 2D assets this week. ElevenLabs released new voice models aimed at acted performances, AMD agreed to buy the company behind Marble, the PixiEditor team announced an all-in-one 2D asset suite, and you can now generate splat worlds from inside Claude.

Eleven v4 brings more directable voices

ElevenLabs launched Eleven v4, which it calls its most emotive text-to-speech model, plus Eleven v4 Turbo, a faster variant built for real-time voice agents. ElevenLabs says v4 handles multi-speaker dialogue more naturally, takes inline direction tags like [laughs], supports more than 90 languages, and clones a voice from about 10 seconds of audio. ElevenLabs also cites Artificial Analysis rankings that place v4 first.

For a small team that means more directable character dialogue without recording every line, and Turbo's low latency is what live, voiced NPCs need. Both are available now in the ElevenLabs app and API, and ElevenLabs says Creator plans and up get 3x credits on v4 until October 12. Only clone voices you have the rights to use.

AMD agrees to buy World Labs, the company behind Marble

AMD signed a deal to acquire World Labs in an all-stock deal AMD values at about $8.2 billion, expected to close by the end of 2026 pending regulatory approval. Fei-Fei Li becomes AMD's chief scientist, and the World Labs team continues under AMD. World Labs makes Marble, which generates explorable 3D worlds, and announced its Atlas world model at the start of September.

AMD frames the deal around AI compute and research, and neither company has said what happens to Marble or its API. If you use Marble today, nothing has changed yet, but treat its long-term roadmap as an open question.

Trexel, an all-in-one 2D asset suite, is announced

Pixi Labs, the team behind the open-source 2D editor PixiEditor, announced Trexel, a desktop suite for making 2D game assets in one place: tiling textures, tilemaps, PBR maps (the extra texture layers that tell an engine how a surface reacts to light), node-based particles, frame-by-frame and skeletal animation, procedural vegetation, skyboxes and game UI with 9-slice panels (frames that stretch without distorting their corners). Everything is meant to edit live into Godot and Unity, with Unreal planned later. Trexel is commercial, not open source, and pricing is undecided. It is waitlist only for now, with a beta planned for 2027.

Generate splat worlds from inside Claude with Echo

SpAItial released a Claude plugin and a hosted MCP server for Echo, its world generator. MCP is the standard way AI assistants connect to outside tools. From Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor or VS Code, you can generate an explorable Gaussian splat world (a 3D scene built from millions of soft, colored points) from a text prompt or an image, edit it, and export it as a .ply file. A generation takes about 5 to 10 minutes on Echo 2-Standard and comes back as a hosted link you can walk around in. You need your own SpAItial API key, and pricing was not stated.

Also worth your time

• Godot 4.8 reached feature freeze with dev 7, so the feature list for the next release is locked. Highlights include animated decals, experimental project-wide symbol renaming, editing 2D and UI nodes while the game runs with undo, screen reader support on iOS and Android, and .NET 10 for C#. Still a dev snapshot, with no beta or release date given.
• Suno opened Speech in beta: type text, pick a voice and a musical style, and it returns narration over an original music bed as one track. Suno warns accents can drift; it fits trailer or intro narration better than in-game dialogue.
• Maxon added an official MCP server to Cinema 4D 2026.4, so Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Desktop or local models can drive scene cleanup, render passes, rigging and simulations, with every action undoable. Off by default and full subscription only, according to CG Channel.
• Unity's agent plugin now works with Grok Build, xAI's coding agent, alongside Claude Code and Codex.
• Animator Anderson Rohr's free motion capture library passed 130 FBX moves with Everyday Actions Pack 2, cleared for commercial use without attribution. CG Channel reports the files target the Unreal Engine 5 mannequin and other common skeletons and retarget in Blender.
• ElevenLabs also ran a $300M employee share sale at a $22B valuation, double its February round. That is cash for staff rather than new funding, but a sign of the company's momentum.

Reply and tell us which voices you are giving your characters.