If you didn’t get an iPod for Christmas this year, at least you can get some free textures from 3D.sk or free skin measurement data from Rutgers University. Alternatively if you happen to be writing a renderer, then Production Rendering edited by Ian Stephenson with contributions from Mark Elendt(Side FX), Rick LaMont(DotC), Scott Iversion(SiTeX Graphics), Paul Gregory(Aqsis), Jacopo
Pantalioni(LightFlow), and Matthew Bentham (ART) could be right up your street. If you are starting from the other end of the scale then Essential RenderMan Fast may be more to your tastes.

It seems like it’s pay review time at Industrial Light and Magic which has been in the process of renegotiating contracts, however it seems several people are not happy about the deal on offer. Unlike UK visual effects houses, ILM is unionized. And moving this side of the Atlantic Moving Picture Company has been sold to Thompson by their former group company Carlton. This can only be a bonus for digital lab services there.

Before the “big event” of Oscar night on February 27th, the far more interesting 2004 Scientific and Technical Oscars have been awarded. Of note to visual effects is the Scientific and Engineering Awards to Lindsay Arnold, Guy Griffiths, David Hodson, Charlie Lawrence and David Mann for their development of the Cineon Digital Film Workstation. Better late than never! Also available is the 2003 Awards which I didn’t have to to post at the time. Highlights included Scientific and Engineering Awards for Stephen Regelous for the design and development of Massive and Technical Achievement Awards for Henrik Wann Jensen, Stephen R. Marschner and Pat Hanrahan for research into simulating subsurface scattering and to Christophe Hery, Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri for practically implementing these techniques for Gollum, Harry Potter and The Hulk.

For more information on subsurface scattering there is a Popular Science magazine article about Henrik Wann Jensen and a Millimeter article on the increasingly realistic skin in movies. And Ryan Heniser has written a tutorial on using Subsurface Scattering
Using Depth Maps as used by Christophe Hery, Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri.

In other news there are exciting developments in open source 3D software such as Cg Kit, now at version 2.0. Imporevements include OpenGL viewer support and dynamics integration using the free Open Dynamics Engine all accessible through Python. Apple’s Xgrid software is available for beta testing. This lets you do distributed computation over a Rendezvous connected network. GPU has similar aims, but is based around the Gnutella network. Also Peter Quint has released a free Mental Ray to RenderMan translator written in Java. It is designed to work with Mental Ray output from Mental Ray for Maya and even translates several of the standard Maya shaders. He
has also written the AutoRIB application.

Speaking of Mental Ray one of the developers of the open source global Illumination renderer Toxic has been hired by Mental Images – congratulations! Celebrations are also in order for Paul Gregory who has an additional new arrival in addition to the completely revamped Aqsis website. This is in preparation for a version 1.0 release soon.

For some really good Maya API and general programming tips check out Rob the Bloke website by Robert Bateman. Any Image Based Lighting enthusiasts should have a look at Brock J. Stearn’s thesis and Lee Trout’s experiment. Also PFS Tools lets you create an manipulate high dynamic range video images.

If you need some inspiration the Concept Art Forums has some fantastic work on show. Also Moritz Moeller has a very interesting web blog about his experiences doing vfx work in India Moritz runs the Liquid Wiki which provides documentation on the open source Maya to RenderMan translator Liquid.

Finally a parting warning – transparency can be really bad for you!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 at 10:58 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.