Well people have been mentioning my lack of updates (not naming names – you know who you are!) and it seemed pretty sad not having any 2004 entries. Just to say work has been keeping me busy and writing up a webpage is the last thing you need when you get home.

Seeing as I didn’t even mention Siggraph this year I should mention that CGI Festival 2004 is currently underway in London. Andy Nicholas has a writeup from the first day of events. By the way Jeremy Birn has a great writeup on Siggraph 2004.

Recent books to come out include Saty Raghavachary’s Rendering for Beginners: Image synthesis using RenderMan (Amazon link
). I haven’t read it yet, but there are some nice samples on his website and it seems to cover RenderMan pretty thoroughly. Saty is currently a software developer at Dreamworks.

If you are more interested in writing your own renderer Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys’s new book Physically Based Rendering : From Theory to Implementation is the book for you. It is written in litteral programming, meaning that the book is also the full source to their renderer PBRT.

In other Renderman news GLRex is a simple modeller that can spit out RIB or OpenGL code to help you learn. Also Matthew Lewis has tonnes of RenderMan information. And Brent Walkins has several alternative shading models to download as convenient SLIM files.

Also anyone thinking about building/upgrading their renderfarm should have a look at Dan Maas’ RenderMan Benchmark page. He has free benchmarking software to download so please do contribute generously.

In tutorial news, Andrew Whitehurst has a new tutorial on creating a realistic eyeball and comping it into a real plate. My guess is the one on the left – very nice work. If you want to exercise the other side of your brain there Jan Walter has a great tutorial on writing Mental Ray
shaders and how they compare to RenderMan. Talking about Mill Film people you should also check out Jordi Bares web site. Riggers will also be interested in Cg Muscle – a website all about CG muscles aiming to create an open source muscle system for Maya.

And in VFX news there are some new websites on the radar including VFX Soup with interviews from various vfx supervisors and resources for them. VFX Blog which includes an interview with Jody Duncan – editor of Cinefex magazine. Cinefex’s will publish it’s 100th edition soon. Also vfx Online should hopefully have some good stuff soon.

In software news there is a new commercial 3ds Max connection called "http://www.archonus.com/">PaxRendus from Archonus, a neat, standalone, open source ink renderer called Inkulator (imports .obj files) and a Linux video editor called Lives. For the adventurous how about coding your own Fluid dynamics simulator? Also Peter Quint’s AutoRIB Java RIB processor has a
new home on sourceforge.

If you use OpenEXR at all Exr Tools by Billy Biggs is a useful collection of exr related tools. Paul Schneider has made avaiable precompiled OpenEXR Shake plugins for anyone having trouble compiling them.

It is also that time of year for Fantasy Graphics Leage. Choose your teams now in time for Siggraph 2005! Also any Perl fans should check out the Perl Advent Calendar as it ticks its way to Christmas. (its far more fun than shell scripting).