Quite a bit of Pixar related news. There is a review by Gustavo Braga of their recently released RenderMan for Maya 1.0. I saw the announcement presentation in London which was good. However I think they do need to add a RIB archive Maya node as people will want to archive geometry. Having Maya running when doing a render is memory burden enough (just like Mental Ray for Maya). Pixar has also teamed up with Escape
studios to offer sales, training and support in the UK.

In other RenderMan related news Aqsis is running a monthly competition to promote using the Aqsis renderer. This months competition is “Decay”. Sitexgraphics has released Tweak AIR, which lets you do more interactive renders. In a similar vein nVidia now has a tool based on Gelato 2.0 called Sorbetto also designed for interactive renders. Not to be outdone Pixar showed off their interactive lighting tool lpics. This gives interactive feedback for placing lights by using precomputed 2D passes to work out the lighting. Also check out David Keegan’s website which has a lot of good RenderMan and Maya related information.

Not strictly RenderMan, but the people over at 3dvirtualight have a free renderer called Metropolight available (Windows only). This uses the Metropolis Light Transport algorithm to caluclate lighting. There seems to be an increasing trend towards more physically acurate renderers lately – such as NextLimit’s Maxwell renderer. And according to millimeter magazine there is also an increasing trend for vfx companies to build their own in house custom renderers.

Sorry for the lack of updates around Siggraph, but Jeremy Birn and Leo Hourvitz have good roundups of this years conference. Speaking of which the winners of the 2005 Fantasy Graphics Leage, organised by Eric Haines can be found here.

In other 3d software news Modo 201 has been released with added paint and rendering options. It also includes automatic UV unwarping tools similar to Unfold3d. The Pixel farm has also released a cheaper version of their PFTrack Tool called PFHoe. This starts at £49 and lets you track DV resolution footage. This software was developed from the University of Manchester’s Icarus project.

For Houdini users – in addition to the SideFX website and Odforce there is now also Jay Steele’s website Houdini Gems. SideFX is now selling directly in the UK and also has a course
at Escape Studios. Odforce is also currently running a Houdini hacking competition.

Anyone interested in fluid simulation should have a look at Nils Thuerey’s fluid simulator for Blender called elbleem. You may
also be interested in this article on fluid
simulation technology from vfxworld. Speaking of Blender there is an article its use in movie production.

In 2d news, Fx Guide is reporting that Flame and Inferno (only in Japan for now have been relased for Linux. And the upcoming Shake 4.0 SDK seminar in Australia.

Speaking of events it’s almost time for Alias’ annual 3December event. The London event is on Friday 2nd December. For those of you who have been away from your computer for the past couple of months, Alias is now owned by AutoDesk.

On the HDR imaging side of things, if you have a Canon digital camera Breeze Systems has a range of tools for dealing with taking multiple exposures and RAW conversion. There is
a also a tutorial for quick and dirty tone mapping using
Photoshop. You can also use Cinepaint by following this tutorial.

For some nice Earth images have a look at NASA’s new Blue Marble textures. These go up to a resolution of 500 metres per pixels and have data for different months through the year.

In movie news, one of our senior matte painters, Dave Early, is making a short film – for more details see the website (including trailer) for The Street Cleaner. Also aintitcoolnews has images of several V For Vendetta posters here and here. And Apple has the King Kong trailer and behind the scenes movies. For more information also look at Kong is King which has production webcast videos from Peter Jackson.

Anyone who visits the popular CG web forum CGTalk.com should check out Cg Cast.com which has podcasts from several forum moderators.

Any finally even with a brand new facility it seems that ILM is having problems with it’s toilet facilities.

First of all sorry Larry and Matt, but my girlfriend has forced me to sell some Gelato related T shirts. So if I have to get rid of them please someone
help me make a bit of money in the process! Also I must confess I am a little too big for them so the condition is very good. Speaking of money issues, anyone looking for employment should check out vfxfreelancer.com. The site lets you post your resume and offers a service
to digitise your showreel and offers a search engine to potential employers. Basic membership is free.

On the RenderMan front, Clement Greiner and Marcus Liebich have a tutorial describing how to use AIR (new version 3.0 out recently) to create geometry from shaders. This is possible because AIR’s pointcloud format can be output as .obj files. The tutorial uses Rhinoceros
and RhinoMan. Also another RenderMan renderer – 3Delight has reached version 4.0 and has new licensing. Now only the first license is free(with support at US$250), any additional licenses cost US$1000 (with support costing US$150). Alternatively if you are using Mental Ray you may want to check out this thread about Control Buffers. These offer you multiple outputs from one render – the same as secondary displays in RenderMan. Mental Ray 3.4 offers unlimited control buffers – Mental Ray 3.3 is limited to eight.

Some interesting software news. Snap DV lets you take a DV video file and produce panoramic photos from them. And for £49.99(US$95.00) it’s a bargain! It was recently used in The Aviator. Also Sequence Publisher from Iridas is a set of command line batch conversion tools for outputting to a variety of movie formats. According to the website a Linux version is coming soon.

And finally Andrew Chapman has a great article explaining The Unix Shell for VFX Arteeests. It covers pretty much everything you need to know to get up to speed quickly on Linux. And if you are not sure about some areas of Maya then the Maya Wiki (link from Deathfall) has tips covering many essential areas. And you have a week if you want to submit any work for the Animago Awards 2005 for Digital Content Creation in the German-speaking countries.

If you didn’t get an iPod for Christmas this year, at least you can get some free textures from 3D.sk or free skin measurement data from Rutgers University. Alternatively if you happen to be writing a renderer, then Production Rendering edited by Ian Stephenson with contributions from Mark Elendt(Side FX), Rick LaMont(DotC), Scott Iversion(SiTeX Graphics), Paul Gregory(Aqsis), Jacopo
Pantalioni(LightFlow), and Matthew Bentham (ART) could be right up your street. If you are starting from the other end of the scale then Essential RenderMan Fast may be more to your tastes.

It seems like it’s pay review time at Industrial Light and Magic which has been in the process of renegotiating contracts, however it seems several people are not happy about the deal on offer. Unlike UK visual effects houses, ILM is unionized. And moving this side of the Atlantic Moving Picture Company has been sold to Thompson by their former group company Carlton. This can only be a bonus for digital lab services there.

Before the “big event” of Oscar night on February 27th, the far more interesting 2004 Scientific and Technical Oscars have been awarded. Of note to visual effects is the Scientific and Engineering Awards to Lindsay Arnold, Guy Griffiths, David Hodson, Charlie Lawrence and David Mann for their development of the Cineon Digital Film Workstation. Better late than never! Also available is the 2003 Awards which I didn’t have to to post at the time. Highlights included Scientific and Engineering Awards for Stephen Regelous for the design and development of Massive and Technical Achievement Awards for Henrik Wann Jensen, Stephen R. Marschner and Pat Hanrahan for research into simulating subsurface scattering and to Christophe Hery, Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri for practically implementing these techniques for Gollum, Harry Potter and The Hulk.

For more information on subsurface scattering there is a Popular Science magazine article about Henrik Wann Jensen and a Millimeter article on the increasingly realistic skin in movies. And Ryan Heniser has written a tutorial on using Subsurface Scattering
Using Depth Maps as used by Christophe Hery, Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri.

In other news there are exciting developments in open source 3D software such as Cg Kit, now at version 2.0. Imporevements include OpenGL viewer support and dynamics integration using the free Open Dynamics Engine all accessible through Python. Apple’s Xgrid software is available for beta testing. This lets you do distributed computation over a Rendezvous connected network. GPU has similar aims, but is based around the Gnutella network. Also Peter Quint has released a free Mental Ray to RenderMan translator written in Java. It is designed to work with Mental Ray output from Mental Ray for Maya and even translates several of the standard Maya shaders. He
has also written the AutoRIB application.

Speaking of Mental Ray one of the developers of the open source global Illumination renderer Toxic has been hired by Mental Images – congratulations! Celebrations are also in order for Paul Gregory who has an additional new arrival in addition to the completely revamped Aqsis website. This is in preparation for a version 1.0 release soon.

For some really good Maya API and general programming tips check out Rob the Bloke website by Robert Bateman. Any Image Based Lighting enthusiasts should have a look at Brock J. Stearn’s thesis and Lee Trout’s experiment. Also PFS Tools lets you create an manipulate high dynamic range video images.

If you need some inspiration the Concept Art Forums has some fantastic work on show. Also Moritz Moeller has a very interesting web blog about his experiences doing vfx work in India Moritz runs the Liquid Wiki which provides documentation on the open source Maya to RenderMan translator Liquid.

Finally a parting warning – transparency can be really bad for you!

Well people have been mentioning my lack of updates (not naming names – you know who you are!) and it seemed pretty sad not having any 2004 entries. Just to say work has been keeping me busy and writing up a webpage is the last thing you need when you get home.

Seeing as I didn’t even mention Siggraph this year I should mention that CGI Festival 2004 is currently underway in London. Andy Nicholas has a writeup from the first day of events. By the way Jeremy Birn has a great writeup on Siggraph 2004.

Recent books to come out include Saty Raghavachary’s Rendering for Beginners: Image synthesis using RenderMan (Amazon link
). I haven’t read it yet, but there are some nice samples on his website and it seems to cover RenderMan pretty thoroughly. Saty is currently a software developer at Dreamworks.

If you are more interested in writing your own renderer Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys‘s new book Physically Based Rendering : From Theory to Implementation is the book for you. It is written in litteral programming, meaning that the book is also the full source to their renderer PBRT.

In other Renderman news GLRex is a simple modeller that can spit out RIB or OpenGL code to help you learn. Also Matthew Lewis has tonnes of RenderMan information. And Brent Walkins has several alternative shading models to download as convenient SLIM files.

Also anyone thinking about building/upgrading their renderfarm should have a look at Dan Maas’ RenderMan Benchmark page. He has free benchmarking software to download so please do contribute generously.

In tutorial news, Andrew Whitehurst has a new tutorial on creating a realistic eyeball and comping it into a real plate. My guess is the one on the left – very nice work. If you want to exercise the other side of your brain there Jan Walter has a great tutorial on writing Mental Ray
shaders and how they compare to RenderMan. Talking about Mill Film people you should also check out Jordi Bares web site. Riggers will also be interested in Cg Muscle – a website all about CG muscles aiming to create an open source muscle system for Maya.

And in VFX news there are some new websites on the radar including VFX Soup with interviews from various vfx supervisors and resources for them. VFX Blog which includes an interview with Jody Duncan – editor of Cinefex magazine. Cinefex’s will publish it’s 100th edition soon. Also vfx Online should hopefully have some good stuff soon.

In software news there is a new commercial 3ds Max connection called "http://www.archonus.com/">PaxRendus from Archonus, a neat, standalone, open source ink renderer called Inkulator (imports .obj files) and a Linux video editor called Lives. For the adventurous how about coding your own Fluid dynamics simulator? Also Peter Quint’s AutoRIB Java RIB processor has a
new home on sourceforge.

If you use OpenEXR at all Exr Tools by Billy Biggs is a useful collection of exr related tools. Paul Schneider has made avaiable precompiled OpenEXR Shake plugins for anyone having trouble compiling them.

It is also that time of year for Fantasy Graphics Leage. Choose your teams now in time for Siggraph 2005! Also any Perl fans should check out the Perl Advent Calendar as it ticks its way to Christmas. (its far more fun than shell scripting).

Just a quick note to say this site and my email may go down for a few days. I am currently moving everything to a better server so things should improve eventually.

As for real news, Goran Kocov has updated BlenderMan – a free python export script for Blender. It now has support for Aqsis, facevarying UV’s and midpoint shadows amongst many other updates. However if you prefer using Wings3D then Moritz Moeller and Danny Coy have written a really good document on how to use RIBBit for Wings3D.

As an alternative to HDRshop there is now HDRIE. This is open source and also runs on Linux. If you want to see a demo of HDR image based lighting in real time (and have a much better graphics card than mine!) then check out Masaki Kawase’s demonstration here.

Also Jason Schiefler has a short project in production called Jonh and his dog (not my spelling mistake for once ;o) Jason’s other job is Animation Lead at Weta. Speaking of which the Return of the King "http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/returnoftheking/">trailer is out, as well as the Matrix Revolutions one. Should be a good autumn for movies.

And just a quick note Anze Javornik would like to add a correction that his SL Builder program works with any RenderMan complient renderer, not just Aqsis.

Just a really quick note to say that Pixar has officially announced the release of RenderMan Pro Server for MacOS X. Should go quite nicely with your new G5.

Also there is a new warping and morphing program called Ooze from Primordial software in development. And there is a new Shading language GUI called SL Builder designed primarily to work with Aqsis.

Firstly I guess you’ll have noticed the lack of updates lately. There’s quite a good reason for this as I have now joined the 3D department at Cinesite starting with The Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s on my IMDB entry so it must be true ;o) Cinesite has also moved to a brand new office which is pretty nice.

Now that Siggraph 2003 has been and gone there are some roundups from Jeremy Birn, Flipcode and Vfxpro. Tal has also got the Siggraph course notes and the 2003 Stupid RAT tricks up at the RenderMan Repository. If you are interested in this type of stuff you may also want to check out Andrew Chapman’s RIB pre-processing using cpp and Hal Bertram’s shadeop showing a memory leak in Prman 11.1.1 (fixed in 11.3).

Also some more current news. There is a new renderer called Lucille out. It reads RIB geometry, but is not RenderMan complient and is inspired by Square USA’s Kilauea (parallel global illumination raytracer). Cgkit, a Python RenderMan binding, has reached version 1.0.1 (stable) and is well worth trying out. And finally Java has a RenderMan complient renderer in the form of Jrman. (sorry it has taken so long to mention it!).

Firstly some news I meant to post ages ago! Techimage held their ApprenticeFest 2003 on January 30th. They now have some more details from the day up on the Techimages website. Also Sean Lewkiw has his notes online using channel operators (CHOPs) as dynamics.

On the software side of things, Aqsis is going from strength to strength. It now supports BMRT DSO’s including rayserver and of a
compile of Liquid using the Aqsis libraries. Brian Perry has also created a Liquid shader tweaker called Liquifier. The main Liquid website is here. There is also a new Renderman RIB exporter for Lightwave called Light-R available from Deathfall. Also there is another open source renderer out called Pixie.

Film Gimp has also been making news – first going to Mac OS X (posted earlier) and now with a name change to CinePaint. This maybe a small thing, but probably quite a good move to get away from the general preconceptions of plain vanilla Gimp. There are also a couple of new modellers out – firstly Jpatch. This is a spatch clone built in java. And Equinox3D which looks promising and supports softimage and wavefront file formats.

And lastly fancy recreating Helms Deep in realtime? Someone has gone for the retor look and done it in Doom. Also if you didn’t think a bit of graphics theory was useful, think again – it can help you avoid speeding tickets! If you are perl programmer then have a go at Perl Golf (evil!). As we gear up for the Oscars, spare a thought for the film that only made %26. And finally a practical use for old maya CD’s.

I also have to meantion the story on Cinesite LA VFX closing as reported in the Hollywood reporter. This is bad news for the vfx guys over there – they will be keeping scanning and recoring and digital lab services though. Luckily Cinesite London is still going strong so I am not out of a job just yet (touches every piece of wood I can find…) and will be moving into a funky new building later this year.

PS I am groaning under HDRI information… will try and get bits out soon. For a taster though check out Andrew Whitehurst’s ambient occlusion with shadowmaps tutorial. And ZJ’s ambient/reflection occlusion tutorials here.

Sorry about the lack of news lately – it has been building up – I just haven’t had time to post it!

Firstly some good news for people looking for a way into high end 2D applications. Firstly you can see a demostration of Film Gimp on MacOS X at tomorrow’s Macworld Exhibition. This port uses Fink, but a Quartz native version is in the works. Also a demo version of Eyeon Digital Fusion has been released and Avid have plans to release free DV editting software which should be avilable later this year.

For 3D things go from strength to strength with Alias Wavefront updating Maya Personal Learning Edition to 4.5 and including more tutorials. But Sidefx has the most to offer with their Houdini Apprentice Challenge where you could win a HP workstation or ATI graphics cards. The deadline is midnight (EST) June 15 2003. Also if you are in the UK there is an Apprenticefest that is taking place on the 29th January with talks on how to get the best out of Houdini.

If your bookshelf is getting a little bare then look out for Essential RenderMan Fast by Ian Stephenson (author of the Angel renderer), which is designed as a general introduction and overview of the RenderMan specification. This was released on December 13th. Also MEL Scripting for Maya Animators by Mark R. Wilkins and Chris Kazmier (both technical directors at Dreamworks) is available (although not through Amazon.com yet). In the meantime supplementary material is available from the MELscripting website.

In not so good news the state of the economy has hit another effects company – this time Centropolis which was announced just before Christmas. I think this has more to do with Das Werks – Centopolis’ parent company – which has been in financial trouble lately (reported earlier last year). This has also led to shots from the Matrix being pulled from the company. Foundation Imaging also had an auction of their assets last year (sorry I didn’t get this up in time!). I just hope this is the last of the big layoffs for now.

And finally a bit of movie news – Lord of the Rings has several interactive demonstrations of the effects from LOTR including the prelude scene and Helms Deep battle. And Robin Rowe has an article about using Digital Domain’s Nuke in the new Star Trek: Nemesis movie. If Star Wars is more your cup of tea you can satisfy your lust by folding your own Star Destroyer instead.