Just a quick note to say this site and my email may go down for a few days. I am currently moving everything to a better server so things should improve eventually.

As for real news, Goran Kocov has updated BlenderMan – a free python export script for Blender. It now has support for Aqsis, facevarying UV’s and midpoint shadows amongst many other updates. However if you prefer using Wings3D then Moritz Moeller and Danny Coy have written a really good document on how to use RIBBit for Wings3D.

As an alternative to HDRshop there is now HDRIE. This is open source and also runs on Linux. If you want to see a demo of HDR image based lighting in real time (and have a much better graphics card than mine!) then check out Masaki Kawase’s demonstration here.

Also Jason Schiefler has a short project in production called Jonh and his dog (not my spelling mistake for once ;o) Jason’s other job is Animation Lead at Weta. Speaking of which the Return of the King "http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/returnoftheking/">trailer is out, as well as the Matrix Revolutions one. Should be a good autumn for movies.

And just a quick note Anze Javornik would like to add a correction that his SL Builder program works with any RenderMan complient renderer, not just Aqsis.

Just a really quick note to say that Pixar has officially announced the release of RenderMan Pro Server for MacOS X. Should go quite nicely with your new G5.

Also there is a new warping and morphing program called Ooze from Primordial software in development. And there is a new Shading language GUI called SL Builder designed primarily to work with Aqsis.

Firstly I guess you’ll have noticed the lack of updates lately. There’s quite a good reason for this as I have now joined the 3D department at Cinesite starting with The Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s on my IMDB entry so it must be true ;o) Cinesite has also moved to a brand new office which is pretty nice.

Now that Siggraph 2003 has been and gone there are some roundups from Jeremy Birn, Flipcode and Vfxpro. Tal has also got the Siggraph course notes and the 2003 Stupid RAT tricks up at the RenderMan Repository. If you are interested in this type of stuff you may also want to check out Andrew Chapman’s RIB pre-processing using cpp and Hal Bertram’s shadeop showing a memory leak in Prman 11.1.1 (fixed in 11.3).

Also some more current news. There is a new renderer called Lucille out. It reads RIB geometry, but is not RenderMan complient and is inspired by Square USA’s Kilauea (parallel global illumination raytracer). Cgkit, a Python RenderMan binding, has reached version 1.0.1 (stable) and is well worth trying out. And finally Java has a RenderMan complient renderer in the form of Jrman. (sorry it has taken so long to mention it!).