Sorry about the lack of news lately – it has been building up – I just haven’t had time to post it!

Firstly some good news for people looking for a way into high end 2D applications. Firstly you can see a demostration of Film Gimp on MacOS X at tomorrow’s Macworld Exhibition. This port uses Fink, but a Quartz native version is in the works. Also a demo version of Eyeon Digital Fusion has been released and Avid have plans to release free DV editting software which should be avilable later this year.

For 3D things go from strength to strength with Alias Wavefront updating Maya Personal Learning Edition to 4.5 and including more tutorials. But Sidefx has the most to offer with their Houdini Apprentice Challenge where you could win a HP workstation or ATI graphics cards. The deadline is midnight (EST) June 15 2003. Also if you are in the UK there is an Apprenticefest that is taking place on the 29th January with talks on how to get the best out of Houdini.

If your bookshelf is getting a little bare then look out for Essential RenderMan Fast by Ian Stephenson (author of the Angel renderer), which is designed as a general introduction and overview of the RenderMan specification. This was released on December 13th. Also MEL Scripting for Maya Animators by Mark R. Wilkins and Chris Kazmier (both technical directors at Dreamworks) is available (although not through Amazon.com yet). In the meantime supplementary material is available from the MELscripting website.

In not so good news the state of the economy has hit another effects company – this time Centropolis which was announced just before Christmas. I think this has more to do with Das Werks – Centopolis’ parent company – which has been in financial trouble lately (reported earlier last year). This has also led to shots from the Matrix being pulled from the company. Foundation Imaging also had an auction of their assets last year (sorry I didn’t get this up in time!). I just hope this is the last of the big layoffs for now.

And finally a bit of movie news – Lord of the Rings has several interactive demonstrations of the effects from LOTR including the prelude scene and Helms Deep battle. And Robin Rowe has an article about using Digital Domain’s Nuke in the new Star Trek: Nemesis movie. If Star Wars is more your cup of tea you can satisfy your lust by folding your own Star Destroyer instead.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 8th, 2003 at 10:20 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.