The big news from this year’s Siggraph is a new open source data interchange format called Alembic from Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light and Magic. Alembic is designed for transferring baked animated geometry from animation to lighting or vfx, and is based on HDF5 and boost and in C++ and Python.  Sony has also release OpenColor IO. This is a library for managing colour between different applications consistantly, and includes plugins for several popular graphics applications, and several reference profiles.

Also Disney Animation Studios has released a paper called Artist Friendly Hair Shading. This builds on the Marschner shading model, but gives it more artist friendly controls. It includes a pseudocode implementation.

VFX World has an article about the vfx Double Negative did for the film Inception, and there are trailers out for Harry Potter 7,  Tron: Legacy and Sucker Punch – which seems to try and get as many CG cliches as possible on screen at once!

Scott Iverson has recently released AIR 10. The new photometric lights, and approximate spectral rendering sound like they are worth checking out. This is the full list of new features:

• 64bit Linux support
• Unlimited threads
• Stereo rendering which does not require modifying existing shaders.
• Spectral colour rendering
• Physical light sources which support IES profiles
• User defined structs in RSL
• Exporting outlines as vectors

Also Francois Lord has released an open source Python library called NukeProcess. This lets you write Python scripts to run Nuke from the command line. There are many people who miss this feature from Shake, so this should help plug the gap.

And finally I have recently changed jobs. I am now working at Dr D Studios in Sydney Australia after 8 years at Cinesite in London. The Australian Winter is a lot better than the London one!