Sitexgraphics’s AIR  9 was recently released. Vshade now has a toolbar option to reverse the graph flow and an option to use TweakAIR for interactive parameter tweaking, TweakAIR  can record a series of incremental changes to a scene, and  TweakAIR and BakeAIR can be used with a single AIR license. See the release notes for more details. Also a beta version of AIR Stream, a new Maya-to-AIR plug-in from developer Hai Nguyen, is available for testing by AIR users.

Also Aqsis 1.6 is now available. This includes many optimisation and performance enhancements, multiple layer support in the OpenEXR driver, and a Side Effects Houdini plugin. See the official announcement for more details.

Double Negative has released it’s first Open Source tool dnPtcViewerNode - a tool for viewing RenderMan point clouds (.ptc files) in OpenGL in Maya, written by Philippe Leprince and Michael Jones. This is only available as source for now, but has been compiled sucessfully against Pixar’s RenderManProserver, 3Delight and Maya 2010. Hal Bertram has an initial  release of his Interactive Tool for download. This is based on his 2005 Stupid RenderMan Interaction Trick.

Kevin Manners – one of the founders of TD College – has created FractureFX - a procedural, event-driven destruction plugin for Maya (2008 & 2009) which is currently being beta tested. There is a AutoDesk Siggraph MasterClass which demonstrates it’s capabilities. He also a book called Professional MEL Solutions for Production. 3D World magazine has a review here.

Finally, you can now paint on your iPhone using Autodesk Sketchbook. Other good painting apps for iPhone are Colors! and Brushes.

Rob Bredow, chief technology officer at Sony Imageworks, has announced that they are releasing several internal projects as open source. This includes Maya Reticle – a customizable display for Maya cameras, field3d – a voxel file format, pystring – a C++ library which brings Python like functionality to std::string and Scala Migrations for managing database schema.

Most interesting though is Open Shading Language which provides a shading language that can be embedded in many applications. This is being led by Larry Gritz (creator of BMRT, Entropy at Exluna and Gelato at nVidia). He is also involved in the open source OpenImageIO image library. This provides a simple interface for manipulating images and comes with some analysis tools.

Imageworks isn’t the only studio involved in releasing tools as open source – Rising Sun Pictures has releaseed PyShake - giving Python support in Shake, Affogato – a RenderMan exporter for XSI, Earth for tracking disk usage, and have contributed to Sun Grid Engine. (web sites seem to be currently down).

Scot Iverson has recently released AIR 8, and a new demo is now available.This has several inovative features that you will not find in othr renderers. The main new feature is shader-based procedural modeling – here are the details:

AIR 8 has two new shader types for creating objects during rendering: a procedure shader that populates a bounding volume with new objects on-demand, and an instancer shader type that creates new objects based on properties of a parent object. AIR 8 ships with a sample procedure shader for growing trees and a companion instancer shader for placing trees that demonstrate the flexibility, control, and efficiency possible with these new shader types.

A more detailed description is included in the AIR 8 press release:

http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air_8_0_press_release.html

Other AIR news since the last update on RenderMania:

• RhinoAIR, a Rhino-to-AIR plugin for Rhino 4
• An extensive set of user notes and additional tools for rendering Massive crowds with AIR
• Detailed information on using AIR with Houdini 9

Here are some amazing example of Tilt Shift Photography. This uses a shift lense to get very shallow depth of field, so that real landscapes look like they are minatures. Keith Loutit has combined this technique with time lapse photography get some very impressive results around Sydney, Australia.

Moritz Moeller writes to tell us her has added RIB export to the modelling tool Structure Synth and the tree generation program Arbaro. Structure Synth is a procedural modelling tool similar to the 2d procedural tools Processing, Shoebot, Drawbot, and Nodebox.

Update – Lukas Vojir has used Processing to make monsters!

Disney/Pixar have announced their 3d animated lineup until 2012. Next year’s Disney release Bolt already has a couple of trailers out, and it’s looking pretty good. The Hollywood Reporter also has an article about Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter and his career at Disney and Pixar. Disney is also breaking into India’s Bollywood market with their joint animated feature Roadside Romeo. Apparently it was rendered on the 8th fastest supercomputer in the world. And finally Pixar’s Toy Story even has it’s own religion Universal Protectionism, fashioned after Buzz Lightyear’s Star Command.

And just to get you in the mood for Halloween Ray Villafane has some amazing sculpted pumpkins on his website.

This year’s Stupid RenderMan Tricks is available to download from The RenderMan Repository. This year the presentations are available as pdf and quicktimes. Not all the tricks are online yet, but the ones that are, are very good. Update: Dan Piponi’s quine trick is here.

Not on quite the same scale, but nice none the less, J. Adrian Herbez has some nice advanced MEL tricks, such as making a OpenGl like API in MEL and creating classes in MEL – using Maya nodes to hold their data.

Keep an eye out for Thomas Bitmatta – he may only be 7, but might be your next supervisor soon at the rate he’s going. And finally all hail the mighty greeble!

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.