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!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 1:24 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.