Autodesk has been busy buying up smaller companies, firstly with Mudbox and now cMuscle which has been rebranded as Maya Muscle. Digication has set up a site listing Maya feature requests – hopefully Autodesk has seen it.

Mental ray has been in the news too as it has recently been bought by Nvidia. If you have been using the mental ray mia shaders then you’ll want to have a look at Master Zap’s blog, Jeff Patton’s blog, David Johnson’s blog and the 3dlight blog.

The Golden Compass is playing in cinemas at the moment. There are articles about the vfx from vfxworld on the effects from Rythm and Hues and Cinesite, Framestore-CFC, Tippet, Rainmaker and Digital Domain. For 2008 there are trailers out for The Dark Knight and Prince Caspian – the sequels to Batman Begins and the Chronicles of Narnia respectively.

The DI TechNet mailing list has recently been set up at for technical (engineering) discussions in the areas of Digital Cinematography, Digital Intermediate, Telecine and related Production and Post-Production workflows. This is a replacement for the “DI Forum” list which became defunct in August. The group moderator is Martin Euredjian of eCinema Systems. Also if you are interested in colour management then have a look at Sean McHugh’s Cambridge in Colour website. He has a ton of information about colour spaces, and some nice panoramic photographs. There are also some articles on why to always use linear lighting from Unframed vfx and a tutorial by Rob Nederhorst.

In tech news Vector Magic is an online tool for producing vector images based on raster input. This isn’t new, but it seems to be more accurate than the competition. Calle Lejdfors and Lennart Ohlsson at Lund University have created PyGPU which lets you run image processing programs on the GPU directly from Python. Finally Mosaic is a fully featured RIB exporter for Blender also written in Python.

If you would like an open source playback system to view your images with then check out djv and for performance testing new hardware Maxon can run a series of tests with it’s Cinebench software. In beta is a tool called Cloudwright. This is a tool for creating prodedural sky images, and can also be called using it’s SDK. Also Crazy Bump is a tool for extracting displacement and normal maps from photographs and uses hardware shaders for preview.

And finally if you wondered how the vfx was done in Eastenders (or even that it had vfx!) here is how they do it!.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 9:40 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.