Quite a bit of Pixar related news. There is a review by Gustavo Braga of their recently released RenderMan for Maya 1.0. I saw the announcement presentation in London which was good. However I think they do need to add a RIB archive Maya node as people will want to archive geometry. Having Maya running when doing a render is memory burden enough (just like Mental Ray for Maya). Pixar has also teamed up with Escape
studios to offer sales, training and support in the UK.

In other RenderMan related news Aqsis is running a monthly competition to promote using the Aqsis renderer. This months competition is “Decay”. Sitexgraphics has released Tweak AIR, which lets you do more interactive renders. In a similar vein nVidia now has a tool based on Gelato 2.0 called Sorbetto also designed for interactive renders. Not to be outdone Pixar showed off their interactive lighting tool lpics. This gives interactive feedback for placing lights by using precomputed 2D passes to work out the lighting. Also check out David Keegan’s website which has a lot of good RenderMan and Maya related information.

Not strictly RenderMan, but the people over at 3dvirtualight have a free renderer called Metropolight available (Windows only). This uses the Metropolis Light Transport algorithm to caluclate lighting. There seems to be an increasing trend towards more physically acurate renderers lately – such as NextLimit’s Maxwell renderer. And according to millimeter magazine there is also an increasing trend for vfx companies to build their own in house custom renderers.

Sorry for the lack of updates around Siggraph, but Jeremy Birn and Leo Hourvitz have good roundups of this years conference. Speaking of which the winners of the 2005 Fantasy Graphics Leage, organised by Eric Haines can be found here.

In other 3d software news Modo 201 has been released with added paint and rendering options. It also includes automatic UV unwarping tools similar to Unfold3d. The Pixel farm has also released a cheaper version of their PFTrack Tool called PFHoe. This starts at £49 and lets you track DV resolution footage. This software was developed from the University of Manchester’s Icarus project.

For Houdini users – in addition to the SideFX website and Odforce there is now also Jay Steele’s website Houdini Gems. SideFX is now selling directly in the UK and also has a course
at Escape Studios. Odforce is also currently running a Houdini hacking competition.

Anyone interested in fluid simulation should have a look at Nils Thuerey’s fluid simulator for Blender called elbleem. You may
also be interested in this article on fluid
simulation technology from vfxworld. Speaking of Blender there is an article its use in movie production.

In 2d news, Fx Guide is reporting that Flame and Inferno (only in Japan for now have been relased for Linux. And the upcoming Shake 4.0 SDK seminar in Australia.

Speaking of events it’s almost time for Alias’ annual 3December event. The London event is on Friday 2nd December. For those of you who have been away from your computer for the past couple of months, Alias is now owned by AutoDesk.

On the HDR imaging side of things, if you have a Canon digital camera Breeze Systems has a range of tools for dealing with taking multiple exposures and RAW conversion. There is
a also a tutorial for quick and dirty tone mapping using
Photoshop. You can also use Cinepaint by following this tutorial.

For some nice Earth images have a look at NASA’s new Blue Marble textures. These go up to a resolution of 500 metres per pixels and have data for different months through the year.

In movie news, one of our senior matte painters, Dave Early, is making a short film – for more details see the website (including trailer) for The Street Cleaner. Also aintitcoolnews has images of several V For Vendetta posters here and here. And Apple has the King Kong trailer and behind the scenes movies. For more information also look at Kong is King which has production webcast videos from Peter Jackson.

Anyone who visits the popular CG web forum CGTalk.com should check out Cg Cast.com which has podcasts from several forum moderators.

Any finally even with a brand new facility it seems that ILM is having problems with it’s toilet facilities.