Chris Foster has posted the second part of his Aqsis screencasts showing off realtime depth of field and motion blur in the new Aqsis core. This is very impressive work! Pixar has been experimenting with cloud computing, and prman is now supported by Studio GPU. Also have a look at Mitsuba – a new research global illumination renderer, and at the other end of the scale Rudy Cortes has a blog following of his development of his RenderRan renderer.

Allan McKay raises some interesting points with his article discussing overtime versus productivity. If you are interested in learning more about employment law and how it relates to vfx then check out Vfx Law and Vfx Soldier. If you have recently been made unemployed you might want to check out the Autodesk Assistance Program which offers free, non-commercial software licenses and training. SideFX has also released Go Procedural – a set of new Houdini starter tutorials.

Check out Marvelous Designer – a tool for designing clothing – which has very impressive cloth simulation. In other animation news, Movie Reshape is a paper about tracking and reshaping humans in a movie sequence with some very impressive results. There is a great demo of the Modular Character System rigging system for Maya, and Gianpaolo Fragale’s Surfomatic is a rig to create surfboard motion for improving you animation posing and balance for 3ds Max and Maya.

Jack Binks has several Nuke plugins on his blog for merging HDR images and ASC CDL grading. There are some great Nuke tutorials from Franz Brandstätter and  tonnes of Nuke information from Nukepedia. Sam Hodge has a tutorial about creating point clouds in Nuke using 3delight and Cortex. And Cloud Compare lets you compare very large point clouds. MRV is a library currently in development to provide a fast, lightweight Python wrapper to the Maya API. It’s aim is to be more reliable and extensible than the standard Python API.

Disney has a lot of great information on their Digital Cinema website, including how to set up stereoscopic floating windows. Speaking of stereo 3d, PC Pro has an article about why bad 3d gives you headaches. If you’ve been having trouble find her, Kodak’s Marcie can be found here. If you are in need of  colour charts information, there is an average Macbeth Color Checker chart and information, You probably don’t want to feature in this gallery of people with the famous chart.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 13th, 2010 at 11:32 am 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.