Firstly Softimage XSI 7 has been release. This includes a new node based programming system – along the lines of Houdini – called Ice. Christoph Schinko has video of the launch presentation in London.

In RenderMan news, Nicholas Yue has put some rib client bindings 3delight RIB bindings for Java, Python and Ruby online. Bernard Edlington hosted the first RenderMan Community of Japan meeting in June. He has also set up the RenderSan website for the group. And Will Miller’s blog Reversed Normal has some nice RenderMan articles on it.

The RenderMan Repository has a couple of new articles – RenderMan Nuts and Bolts by Mark Hammel and Tal Lancaster, and Brent Burley’s notes on prman filtering.

Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell, from Disney and the University of Utah, also have a paper about Ptex – their technique for adding implicit texture mapping to subdivision surfaces. Also check out Jim McCann and Nancy Pollard’s Gradient Painting – there is a great video showing the potential of this technique.

In film news, there is an article about the 8K pipeline Double Negative used on Batman – The Dark Knight. Apparently after using 8K (actually mainly 5.6K) 4K seems quite easy! There is a great article about the Cinesite’s vfx in HBO’s Generation Kill on vfxworld. Also check out the trailers for Framestore-CFC’s The Tale of Despereaux and Watchmen – with vfx by MPC. You also might be interested in Ziga Dolar’s website, where he has some of interesting Shake experiments (or visit his current website).

Also Unfortunately it also seems like Meteor studios artists still haven’t been paid.

And finally – fancy building a small renderfarm and need somewhere to put it? You might be interested in the Ikea Renderfarm – a renderfarm built into an Ikea storage cabinet.

Pixar is looking for submissions for this years Stupid RenderMan Tricks:

This year’s SIGGRAPH RenderMan User’s Group meeting will be on Wednesday 13th, 2008. It’s now time to submit something for the 10th annual Stupid RenderMan Trick. The deadline for a Stupid RenderMan Trick is July 17th.

If you have a submission to consider send it to: stupidrattricks@pixar.com with the subject Stupid RenderMan Trick, a few paragraphs describing the trick and images, code snippets, etc. If ther is a large amount of material they would prefer a location to a web site with the material.

NOTE: Invitations to the User’s Group meeting will be mailed out to Pixar customers at a later time. Do not try to RSVP until you have received the invitation.

To get the ball rolling – and as I cannot fufill one of the criteria ie. being at the User Group Meeting – here is my Stupid RenderMan Trick.

People often equate a render farm to the Unix printing program LPR. However I couldn’t find anyone who had actually done it so I decided to build a renderfarm using CUPS (the updated version of LPR). All the details and code is available for download. Any comments will be gratefully received!