Firstly some news I meant to post ages ago! Techimage held their ApprenticeFest 2003 on January 30th. They now have some more details from the day up on the Techimages website. Also Sean Lewkiw has his notes online using channel operators (CHOPs) as dynamics.

On the software side of things, Aqsis is going from strength to strength. It now supports BMRT DSO’s including rayserver and of a
compile of Liquid using the Aqsis libraries. Brian Perry has also created a Liquid shader tweaker called Liquifier. The main Liquid website is here. There is also a new Renderman RIB exporter for Lightwave called Light-R available from Deathfall. Also there is another open source renderer out called Pixie.

Film Gimp has also been making news – first going to Mac OS X (posted earlier) and now with a name change to CinePaint. This maybe a small thing, but probably quite a good move to get away from the general preconceptions of plain vanilla Gimp. There are also a couple of new modellers out – firstly Jpatch. This is a spatch clone built in java. And Equinox3D which looks promising and supports softimage and wavefront file formats.

And lastly fancy recreating Helms Deep in realtime? Someone has gone for the retor look and done it in Doom. Also if you didn’t think a bit of graphics theory was useful, think again – it can help you avoid speeding tickets! If you are perl programmer then have a go at Perl Golf (evil!). As we gear up for the Oscars, spare a thought for the film that only made %26. And finally a practical use for old maya CD’s.

I also have to meantion the story on Cinesite LA VFX closing as reported in the Hollywood reporter. This is bad news for the vfx guys over there – they will be keeping scanning and recoring and digital lab services though. Luckily Cinesite London is still going strong so I am not out of a job just yet (touches every piece of wood I can find…) and will be moving into a funky new building later this year.

PS I am groaning under HDRI information… will try and get bits out soon. For a taster though check out Andrew Whitehurst’s ambient occlusion with shadowmaps tutorial. And ZJ’s ambient/reflection occlusion tutorials here.