There is some interesting computational photography news from this year’s Siggraph from Microsoft Research with the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of California, Berkeley. Firstly Finding Paths through the World’s Photos is an update on last year’s Photosynth. It uses a set of images to recreate an environment from the cameras they were shot through. You can then move through that environment, through the most approriate images. This includes stabilisation and colour matching. Also Unwrap Mosaics is a method of texture mapping video footage directly without 3d geometry. It can also be used to track in other 2d layers. And finally Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene uses the parallax information to generate depth information from video footage. This is used to blend a set of photographs of the same scene to enhance the resolution and dynamic range of the footage. Hopefully this technology will be commercialised soon!

Maxon hs released a tool called Cineman which lets you render directly from Cinema 4d to Pixar’s prman, dna’s 3delight and sitegraphics AIR:

CineMan translates the entire CINEMA 4D scene, including lights and materials to a RenderMan-complaint RIB file. CINEMA 4D shaders are immediately available in RenderMan, and RenderMan shaders can even be used within CINEMA 4D as long as a compatible render engine is selected. Best of all, third-party render engines integrate seamlessly into CINEMA 4D, providing editor rendering and material previews.

The speakers for this years 10th Anniversary Stupid RenderMan Tricks at the Pixar User Group and it is an impressive lineup:

• Steve Agland — Animal Logic
• Ted Burge — Industrial Light & Magic
• Laurent Charbonnel
• Bernard Edlington — Nexus International LLC, and Yosuke Katsura — OLM Digital Inc.
• Daniel Maskit, Hanzhi Tang, Lauralea Otis, and Shoichi Matsubara — Digital Domain
• Rob Pieké
• Dan Piponi — Industrial Light & Magic
• Ian Stephenson — Bournemouth University/NCCA

There are also a lot of updates on Meteor Studios employees seeking their unpaid wages. The main point of information is this thread on cgtalk. There are articles in The Montreal Gazette, Playback Online, and CBC Radio. Brendan Fraser – who starred in Meteor’s last project Journey To the Center of the Earth – has put his support behind the artists.