Chris Pendleton announced the release of a new version of Virtual Earth 3D and 3DVia. When you get to Live Search Maps and click 3D you'll be prompted to update your 3D control. As a part of this, you can also download the latest and greatest bits of 3DVia from Dassault Systèmes (or go to the 3DVia download center on Live.com).

As for Dassault, well, they've just opened up their 3D model inventory hosted in 3DVia.com's 3D online content library as a part of a program called "remix" which is effectively a 3D mashup creator with Virtual Earth. You now have access to thousands of models hosted on 3DVia.com that can be "remixed" in 3DVia and hosted on Live Search Maps for rendering in your Virtual Earth application. Whoa. Additionally, they've updated the UI and navigation to be more user friendly (thank you!) and released video tutorials illustrating among other things how to build a house in less than 5 minutes. You can read more in their press release.