Laika Inc has  donated some of their production Slim templates to Pixar’s RenderMan Depot under a very generous license. Their objective in releasing these tools is to spawn a vibrant and collaborative community of RMS users and developers.

Weta Digital has released a suite of open source Nuke nodes to wrap the 3DEqualizer Lens Distortion Plugin Kit.  Note that there is already a Lens Distortion Shake node by Mark Visser (Meteor Studios) and Michele Sciolette (Cinesite).

Mental Image has started a draft online book for their book MetaSL – Shading Language Tutorial and Reference by Andy Kopra and Lutz Kettner. They are inviting comments and discussion from the rendering community.

With the return of Brecht Van Lommel, the Blender renderer is going to be updated with the initial release of Cycles. This is a GPU accelerated renderer which uses Open Shading Language.

And finally the cryengine film tools blog is following efforts to bring movie techniques into the cryengine game engine. Cryengine is getting some very nice editing and rendering features and seems to be starting to think about addressing the film market.