Scot Iverson has recently released AIR 8, and a new demo is now available.This has several inovative features that you will not find in othr renderers. The main new feature is shader-based procedural modeling - here are the details:

AIR 8 has two new shader types for creating objects during rendering: a procedure shader that populates a bounding volume with new objects on-demand, and an instancer shader type that creates new objects based on properties of a parent object. AIR 8 ships with a sample procedure shader for growing trees and a companion instancer shader for placing trees that demonstrate the flexibility, control, and efficiency possible with these new shader types.

A more detailed description is included in the AIR 8 press release:

http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air_8_0_press_release.html

Other AIR news since the last update on RenderMania:

• RhinoAIR, a Rhino-to-AIR plugin for Rhino 4
• An extensive set of user notes and additional tools for rendering Massive crowds with AIR
• Detailed information on using AIR with Houdini 9

Here are some amazing example of Tilt Shift Photography. This uses a shift lense to get very shallow depth of field, so that real landscapes look like they are minatures. Keith Loutit has combined this technique with time lapse photography get some very impressive results around Sydney, Australia.

Moritz Moeller writes to tell us her has added RIB export to the modelling tool Structure Synth and the tree generation program Arbaro. Structure Synth is a procedural modelling tool similar to the 2d procedural tools Processing, Shoebot, Drawbot, and Nodebox.

Update - Lukas Vojir has used Processing to make monsters!

Disney/Pixar have announced their 3d animated lineup until 2012. Next year’s Disney release Bolt already has a couple of trailers out, and it’s looking pretty good. The Hollywood Reporter also has an article about Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter and his career at Disney and Pixar. Disney is also breaking into India’s Bollywood market with their joint animated feature Roadside Romeo. Apparently it was rendered on the 8th fastest supercomputer in the world. And finally Pixar’s Toy Story even has it’s own religion Universal Protectionism, fashioned after Buzz Lightyear’s Star Command.

And just to get you in the mood for Halloween Ray Villafane has some amazing sculpted pumpkins on his website.

This year’s Stupid RenderMan Tricks is available to download from The RenderMan Repository. This year the presentations are available as pdf and quicktimes. Not all the tricks are online yet, but the ones that are, are very good. Update: Dan Piponi’s quine trick is here.

Not on quite the same scale, but nice none the less, J. Adrian Herbez has some nice advanced MEL tricks, such as making a OpenGl like API in MEL and creating classes in MEL - using Maya nodes to hold their data.

Keep an eye out for Thomas Bitmatta - he may only be 7, but might be your next supervisor soon at the rate he’s going. And finally all hail the mighty greeble!

There is some interesting computational photography news from this year’s Siggraph from Microsoft Research with the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of California, Berkeley. Firstly Finding Paths through the World’s Photos is an update on last year’s Photosynth. It uses a set of images to recreate an environment from the cameras they were shot through. You can then move through that environment, through the most approriate images. This includes stabilisation and colour matching. Also Unwrap Mosaics is a method of texture mapping video footage directly without 3d geometry. It can also be used to track in other 2d layers. And finally Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene uses the parallax information to generate depth information from video footage. This is used to blend a set of photographs of the same scene to enhance the resolution and dynamic range of the footage. Hopefully this technology will be commercialised soon!

Maxon hs released a tool called Cineman which lets you render directly from Cinema 4d to Pixar’s prman, dna’s 3delight and sitegraphics AIR:

CineMan translates the entire CINEMA 4D scene, including lights and materials to a RenderMan-complaint RIB file. CINEMA 4D shaders are immediately available in RenderMan, and RenderMan shaders can even be used within CINEMA 4D as long as a compatible render engine is selected. Best of all, third-party render engines integrate seamlessly into CINEMA 4D, providing editor rendering and material previews.

The speakers for this years 10th Anniversary Stupid RenderMan Tricks at the Pixar User Group and it is an impressive lineup:

• Steve Agland — Animal Logic
• Ted Burge — Industrial Light & Magic
• Laurent Charbonnel
• Bernard Edlington — Nexus International LLC, and Yosuke Katsura — OLM Digital Inc.
• Daniel Maskit, Hanzhi Tang, Lauralea Otis, and Shoichi Matsubara — Digital Domain
• Rob Pieké
• Dan Piponi — Industrial Light & Magic
• Ian Stephenson — Bournemouth University/NCCA

There are also a lot of updates on Meteor Studios employees seeking their unpaid wages. The main point of information is this thread on cgtalk. There are articles in The Montreal Gazette, Playback Online, and CBC Radio. Brendan Fraser - who starred in Meteor’s last project Journey To the Center of the Earth - has put his support behind the artists.

Firstly Softimage XSI 7 has been release. This includes a new node based programming system - along the lines of Houdini - called Ice. Christoph Schinko has video of the launch presentation in London.

In RenderMan news, Nicholas Yue has put some rib client bindings 3delight RIB bindings for Java, Python and Ruby online. Bernard Edlington hosted the first RenderMan Community of Japan meeting in June. He has also set up the RenderSan website for the group. And Will Miller’s blog Reversed Normal has some nice RenderMan articles on it.

The RenderMan Repository has a couple of new articles - RenderMan Nuts and Bolts by Mark Hammel and Tal Lancaster, and Brent Burley’s notes on prman filtering.

Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell, from Disney and the University of Utah, also have a paper about Ptex - their technique for adding implicit texture mapping to subdivision surfaces. Also check out Jim McCann and Nancy Pollard’s Gradient Painting - there is a great video showing the potential of this technique.

In film news, there is an article about the 8K pipeline Double Negative used on Batman - The Dark Knight. Apparently after using 8K (actually mainly 5.6K) 4K seems quite easy! There is a great article about the Cinesite’s vfx in HBO’s Generation Kill on vfxworld. Also check out the trailers for Framestore-CFC’s The Tale of Despereaux and Watchmen - with vfx by MPC. You also might be interested in Ziga Dolar’s website, where he has some of interesting Shake experiments (or visit his current website).

Also Unfortunately it also seems like Meteor studios artists still haven’t been paid.

And finally - fancy building a small renderfarm and need somewhere to put it? You might be interested in the Ikea Renderfarm - a renderfarm built into an Ikea storage cabinet.

Pixar is looking for submissions for this years Stupid RenderMan Tricks:

This year’s SIGGRAPH RenderMan User’s Group meeting will be on Wednesday 13th, 2008. It’s now time to submit something for the 10th annual Stupid RenderMan Trick. The deadline for a Stupid RenderMan Trick is July 17th.

If you have a submission to consider send it to: stupidrattricks@pixar.com with the subject Stupid RenderMan Trick, a few paragraphs describing the trick and images, code snippets, etc. If ther is a large amount of material they would prefer a location to a web site with the material.

NOTE: Invitations to the User’s Group meeting will be mailed out to Pixar customers at a later time. Do not try to RSVP until you have received the invitation.

To get the ball rolling - and as I cannot fufill one of the criteria ie. being at the User Group Meeting - here is my Stupid RenderMan Trick.

People often equate a render farm to the Unix printing program LPR. However I couldn’t find anyone who had actually done it so I decided to build a renderfarm using CUPS (the updated version of LPR). All the details and code is available for download. Any comments will be gratefully received!