You’ll all know about the release of RenderMan Studio which replaces MTOR. There is also a new Pixar short called Lifted – you can view it here.

Alexei Puzikov has updated his ShaderMan tool. It has been rewritten in Python and now also supports several modes in addition to RenderMan Shader Language such as Cg and now runs on Linux. It also has a new home on google code with the source available under a BSD license. He is also currently available for work.

Also a new relighting system called Lightspeed has been developed by ILM, Tippett and Stanford and MIT graphics labs. This uses hardware shaders, but improves on Pixar’s Lpics by supporting opacity, motion blur and automatic translation of Renderman shaders.

HDR Labs is a new website set up by Christian Bloch. He has several tools for creating and managing HDR images and panoramas and is releasing a book all about HDR imaging. It should be available in August according to it’s Amazon web page. There is also a set of command line (with GUI) open source HDR tools called pfs Tools. Also Jeremy Pronk has a paper about Spatial Image Based Lighting which allows for local variation in lighting. This will have a poster presentation at Siggraph 2007.

Also one to look out for at Siggraph this year is BTF Shop by Solomon Boulos, Jan Kautz and Fredo Durand which is a paper about mainipulating pysically measured surfaces based on their BTF (Bidirection Texture Function). It is being presented as part of the Appearance Capture & Editing session.

Andrew Chapman has started a project called Cortex to provide a set of Python tools for doing common TD tasks such as interfacing with RenderMan. Rising Sun Pictures has released PyShake – a python plugin for Shake. They also have a RSP open source website. And if you want to manipulate OpenEXR images with python there is a library from James Bowman. All links are courtesy of Philippe Leprince’s new blog.