First of all sorry Larry and Matt, but my girlfriend has forced me to sell some Gelato related T shirts. So if I have to get rid of them please someone
help me make a bit of money in the process! Also I must confess I am a little too big for them so the condition is very good. Speaking of money issues, anyone looking for employment should check out vfxfreelancer.com. The site lets you post your resume and offers a service
to digitise your showreel and offers a search engine to potential employers. Basic membership is free.

On the RenderMan front, Clement Greiner and Marcus Liebich have a tutorial describing how to use AIR (new version 3.0 out recently) to create geometry from shaders. This is possible because AIR’s pointcloud format can be output as .obj files. The tutorial uses Rhinoceros
and RhinoMan. Also another RenderMan renderer – 3Delight has reached version 4.0 and has new licensing. Now only the first license is free(with support at US$250), any additional licenses cost US$1000 (with support costing US$150). Alternatively if you are using Mental Ray you may want to check out this thread about Control Buffers. These offer you multiple outputs from one render – the same as secondary displays in RenderMan. Mental Ray 3.4 offers unlimited control buffers – Mental Ray 3.3 is limited to eight.

Some interesting software news. Snap DV lets you take a DV video file and produce panoramic photos from them. And for £49.99(US$95.00) it’s a bargain! It was recently used in The Aviator. Also Sequence Publisher from Iridas is a set of command line batch conversion tools for outputting to a variety of movie formats. According to the website a Linux version is coming soon.

And finally Andrew Chapman has a great article explaining The Unix Shell for VFX Arteeests. It covers pretty much everything you need to know to get up to speed quickly on Linux. And if you are not sure about some areas of Maya then the Maya Wiki (link from Deathfall) has tips covering many essential areas. And you have a week if you want to submit any work for the Animago Awards 2005 for Digital Content Creation in the German-speaking countries.