Laika Inc has  donated some of their production Slim templates to Pixar’s RenderMan Depot under a very generous license. Their objective in releasing these tools is to spawn a vibrant and collaborative community of RMS users and developers.

Weta Digital has released a suite of open source Nuke nodes to wrap the 3DEqualizer Lens Distortion Plugin Kit.  Note that there is already a Lens Distortion Shake node by Mark Visser (Meteor Studios) and Michele Sciolette (Cinesite).

Mental Image has started a draft online book for their book MetaSL – Shading Language Tutorial and Reference by Andy Kopra and Lutz Kettner. They are inviting comments and discussion from the rendering community.

With the return of Brecht Van Lommel, the Blender renderer is going to be updated with the initial release of Cycles. This is a GPU accelerated renderer which uses Open Shading Language.

And finally the cryengine film tools blog is following efforts to bring movie techniques into the cryengine game engine. Cryengine is getting some very nice editing and rendering features and seems to be starting to think about addressing the film market.

Chris Foster has posted the second part of his Aqsis screencasts showing off realtime depth of field and motion blur in the new Aqsis core. This is very impressive work! Pixar has been experimenting with cloud computing, and prman is now supported by Studio GPU. Also have a look at Mitsuba – a new research global illumination renderer, and at the other end of the scale Rudy Cortes has a blog following of his development of his RenderRan renderer.

Allan McKay raises some interesting points with his article discussing overtime versus productivity. If you are interested in learning more about employment law and how it relates to vfx then check out Vfx Law and Vfx Soldier. If you have recently been made unemployed you might want to check out the Autodesk Assistance Program which offers free, non-commercial software licenses and training. SideFX has also released Go Procedural – a set of new Houdini starter tutorials.

Check out Marvelous Designer – a tool for designing clothing – which has very impressive cloth simulation. In other animation news, Movie Reshape is a paper about tracking and reshaping humans in a movie sequence with some very impressive results. There is a great demo of the Modular Character System rigging system for Maya, and Gianpaolo Fragale’s Surfomatic is a rig to create surfboard motion for improving you animation posing and balance for 3ds Max and Maya.

Jack Binks has several Nuke plugins on his blog for merging HDR images and ASC CDL grading. There are some great Nuke tutorials from Franz Brandstätter and  tonnes of Nuke information from Nukepedia. Sam Hodge has a tutorial about creating point clouds in Nuke using 3delight and Cortex. And Cloud Compare lets you compare very large point clouds. MRV is a library currently in development to provide a fast, lightweight Python wrapper to the Maya API. It’s aim is to be more reliable and extensible than the standard Python API.

Disney has a lot of great information on their Digital Cinema website, including how to set up stereoscopic floating windows. Speaking of stereo 3d, PC Pro has an article about why bad 3d gives you headaches. If you’ve been having trouble find her, Kodak’s Marcie can be found here. If you are in need of  colour charts information, there is an average Macbeth Color Checker chart and information, You probably don’t want to feature in this gallery of people with the famous chart.

Aqsis has been viewed a one of the slower RenderMan compliant renderers for a while now, but that image is set to change soon. The Aqsis Blog has a very nice video of realtime rendering using Aqsis. This is being rendered on the CPU with no hardware acceleration and looks like it could give Aqsis a great core rendering framework. The guys at Luxology – best known for their development of Modo – have also been looking at the performance benefits of GPU rendering versus CPU rendering. Their video suggests that the GPU is not a silver bullet for magically improving performance. There is more discussion about this at Ompf.

A new photo modelling application called Insight has been released as Open Source  for Windows and Linux. And a new online service called Scanner Killer has been released that offers photo modelling for $13 per stereo pair.

Chris Bond – the original founder of Frantic Films – has bought back the software department from Prime Focus. The new company Thinkbox now handles the development of the render farm management software Deadline and the volumetric particle toolkit Krakatoa.  Also Alembic is at version 0.9 – and looking for feedback moving towards a version 1.0 release.

Gavin Rothery has written a in depth 3 page blog post that goes into fascinating detail about the vfx on the film “Moon” on which he was the Concept designer and VFX Supervisor.

And finally Alex Segal has been writing about the issues he has been facing in his Anti Mental Ray blog, and Mach Kobayashi at Pixar has a page about his 2010 Stupid RenderMan Trick RSL minesweeper program built in SLIM.

Disney has recently released Partio. This is an Open Source library for manipulating particle files. It currently supports Houdini GEO and BGEO, Maya PDB and PDA and RenderMan ptc file formats. It contains a C++ and a Python API and several command line tools. The code is scheduled to be released on github soon.

Sadly also in the news is the recent death of Benoit Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot discovered f fractal mathematics – even having the Mandelbrot Set fractal named after him. There are obituaries from The New York Times and the BBC. He also recently did a TED talk which can be viewed here.

Magnus Wrenninge has posted this years Siggraph Volumetrics Course on his website. This covers the volumetric tools used at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Dreamworks Animation,  Rhythm and Hues, Double Negative and used in SideFX Houdini. It includes details about modelling, simulating and rendering volumes. It also covers the FELT volumtric scripting language and SELMA (SEmi-LAgrangian MApping)  used at Rhythm and Hues, Field3d and Svea at Imageworks, and the DNB volumetric renderer at Double Negative.

Jupter Jazz has announced that the first license of their 3delight nuke plugin - Atomkraft - will be completely free. They have also revamped their website recently. Also Josh Burton has released Morpheus – an animation rig currently in free beta.

The big news from this year’s Siggraph is a new open source data interchange format called Alembic from Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light and Magic. Alembic is designed for transferring baked animated geometry from animation to lighting or vfx, and is based on HDF5 and boost and in C++ and Python.  Sony has also release OpenColor IO. This is a library for managing colour between different applications consistantly, and includes plugins for several popular graphics applications, and several reference profiles.

Also Disney Animation Studios has released a paper called Artist Friendly Hair Shading. This builds on the Marschner shading model, but gives it more artist friendly controls. It includes a pseudocode implementation.

VFX World has an article about the vfx Double Negative did for the film Inception, and there are trailers out for Harry Potter 7,  Tron: Legacy and Sucker Punch – which seems to try and get as many CG cliches as possible on screen at once!

Scott Iverson has recently released AIR 10. The new photometric lights, and approximate spectral rendering sound like they are worth checking out. This is the full list of new features:

• 64bit Linux support
• Unlimited threads
• Stereo rendering which does not require modifying existing shaders.
• Spectral colour rendering
• Physical light sources which support IES profiles
• User defined structs in RSL
• Exporting outlines as vectors

Also Francois Lord has released an open source Python library called NukeProcess. This lets you write Python scripts to run Nuke from the command line. There are many people who miss this feature from Shake, so this should help plug the gap.

And finally I have recently changed jobs. I am now working at Dr D Studios in Sydney Australia after 8 years at Cinesite in London. The Australian Winter is a lot better than the London one!

The guys at Jupiter Jazz have recently released AtomKraft. This is a  plugin for Nuke which lets you render directly with 3delight inside your compositing tree. This lets you the use a single application for lighting and compositing your shots- using a similar workflow to The Foundry’s Katana. AtomKraft is currently under closed beta – get in contact with them if you are interested. There are more details in the AtomKraft FAQ.

Also of interest is darktable. This is an open source photographic light table application, for organising and enhancing your photographs.Thanks to Moritz for the links.

Finally if you are in the area go and check out the Sci-Fi Airshow. It’s great to see that ILM vfx supervisor Bill George has been able to keep these machines flying!

You wait for ages, then 2 open source vfx releases come along at the same time!

Disney Animation Studios’s 3d paint format and API Ptex is available to download.  Ptex avoids the need to UV complex meshes by saves out a set of texels for each face of a subdivision surface. These are independent, so it is possible to have different resolutions on adjacent faces. It does rely on adjacency information to filter across face boundaries, so you need to transfer your texture if mesh topology changes. I think it also only works if you have quadrilateral faces. Hopefully this will be picked up by the popular 3d paint packages soon – the author of 3D Coat has started experimenting with ptex.

And Sony Picture Imagework’s has released the first specification and code for Open Shading Language. This is a set of libraries and a compiler that can be used in any rendering engine, and will be used in SPI’s internal renderer – developed from Arnold. The language has been designed for raytracing from the start, and introduces the concept of radiance closures. These are functions that return a sampling pattern based on the material BRDF to the renderer. The renderer can then bundle coherent rays from several materials together to exploit raytracing caches better. Shaders can be linked in a similar fashion to coshaders, although the language does not define a scene description API (like RIB or mi) so the implementation is up to the renderer developer.

They also have some things which should have been added to RSL a long time ago such as more string tools, runtime determination of varying vs uniform variables, and arbitraryderivatives.  They also have an interesting approach to secondary outputs called Light Path Expressions. This uses regular expressions to express which ray types you want in your secondary image. This looks powerful, but also a bit intimidating.

There is a good introduction to OSL by the lead developer, Larry Gritz, and a story by fxguide here.

Dan Bethell and Johannes Saam released RmanConnect today. This is a RenderMan display driver and Nuke node which communicate over TCP/IP so that you can render directly into Nuke. This has been primarily been developed for 3Delight, but should work with other RenderMan renderers, such as Prman. The source code has been released under a BSD license. Also Libero Spagnolini has an impressive shader building tool called  Shaderlink available to download which is built around 3Delight and PyQT. 3Delight itself was recently updated to version 9.0 and 3delight for Maya to 5.0. Highlights include support for Maya 2010, an unlimited thread license, multi-camera rendering and RIB fragments – see all the changes in the changelog.

Also the openSourceVFX.org website opened recently. This is intended to be a central portal of open source VFX projects and is being run by Larry Gritz, Chad Dombrov and Philippe Leprince. their goals include listing and presenting valuable open-source projects for the VFX community and giving a voice to OS project leaders and VFX pros to promote their work and keep us updated.