Jeremy Birn has put up his notes about Siggraph 2006. This includes a link to some photos of the presentations. Duncan Brinsmead’s talk looks very impressive, as do the new RenderMan features. There are also pics of the Teapot exhibition including the Pixar walking teapots, except this years heat sensitive (user group) and flame (exhibition) teapots.

Non-Siggraph related, there will be a series of vfx lectures at the Tate modern in London in September, hosted by Supernatural Studios and sponsorred by Escape Studios.

If you have problems with heavy animation rigs, then Mark Wilson’s Point Oven lets you save out a lightweight mesh in Lightwave Motion Designer (mdd) format. These can be used in XSI, Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave and Messiah. They can also be used to transfer geometry and animation between applications.

Finally Michael Duffy has set up a blog with his experiments setting up a short film pipeline at home. Hope he has time to finish it!

It’s Siggraph week so the main news is the announcement of RAT 7.0, RenderMan for Maya 2.0, and RenderMan Studio 1.0. RenderMan Studio will be replacing MTOR and is based on RenderMan for Maya. These will also support the new Autodesk Maya 8.0. Although there is no information about whether it will support 64bit operating systems.

Also this years RenderMan course notes are online courtesy of Tal at The RenderMan Repository. This years course was organised by Rudy Cortes, who also runs The RenderMan Academy. As both are currently at Walt Disney Feature Animation there is a lot of insight into the look development workflow at Disney. Disney also has a new website to Upload your resume.

And if you really want the ultimate graphics card Nvidia has released the Quadro Plex 1000.