Firstly Softimage XSI 7 has been release. This includes a new node based programming system – along the lines of Houdini – called Ice. Christoph Schinko has video of the launch presentation in London.

In RenderMan news, Nicholas Yue has put some rib client bindings 3delight RIB bindings for Java, Python and Ruby online. Bernard Edlington hosted the first RenderMan Community of Japan meeting in June. He has also set up the RenderSan website for the group. And Will Miller’s blog Reversed Normal has some nice RenderMan articles on it.

The RenderMan Repository has a couple of new articles – RenderMan Nuts and Bolts by Mark Hammel and Tal Lancaster, and Brent Burley’s notes on prman filtering.

Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell, from Disney and the University of Utah, also have a paper about Ptex – their technique for adding implicit texture mapping to subdivision surfaces. Also check out Jim McCann and Nancy Pollard’s Gradient Painting – there is a great video showing the potential of this technique.

In film news, there is an article about the 8K pipeline Double Negative used on Batman – The Dark Knight. Apparently after using 8K (actually mainly 5.6K) 4K seems quite easy! There is a great article about the Cinesite’s vfx in HBO’s Generation Kill on vfxworld. Also check out the trailers for Framestore-CFC’s The Tale of Despereaux and Watchmen – with vfx by MPC. You also might be interested in Ziga Dolar’s website, where he has some of interesting Shake experiments (or visit his current website).

Also Unfortunately it also seems like Meteor studios artists still haven’t been paid.

And finally – fancy building a small renderfarm and need somewhere to put it? You might be interested in the Ikea Renderfarm – a renderfarm built into an Ikea storage cabinet.

Pixar is looking for submissions for this years Stupid RenderMan Tricks:

This year’s SIGGRAPH RenderMan User’s Group meeting will be on Wednesday 13th, 2008. It’s now time to submit something for the 10th annual Stupid RenderMan Trick. The deadline for a Stupid RenderMan Trick is July 17th.

If you have a submission to consider send it to: stupidrattricks@pixar.com with the subject Stupid RenderMan Trick, a few paragraphs describing the trick and images, code snippets, etc. If ther is a large amount of material they would prefer a location to a web site with the material.

NOTE: Invitations to the User’s Group meeting will be mailed out to Pixar customers at a later time. Do not try to RSVP until you have received the invitation.

To get the ball rolling – and as I cannot fufill one of the criteria ie. being at the User Group Meeting – here is my Stupid RenderMan Trick.

People often equate a render farm to the Unix printing program LPR. However I couldn’t find anyone who had actually done it so I decided to build a renderfarm using CUPS (the updated version of LPR). All the details and code is available for download. Any comments will be gratefully received!

Firstly Bertrand Bry-Marfaing has implemented the bonus paper by Brent Burley “Shadow Map Bias Cone and Improved Soft Shadows” in the SIGGRAPH 2006, course 25, “RenderMan For Everyone”. Hosuk Chang has some really nice pages about his experiments with very large numbers of particles with RenderMan and beziers in RSL. And Tony Ambles has some test with his fluid dynamics simulation program.

Scratch-a-Pixel is a website that is building up a collection of articles about 3d rendering and comes with source code to implement them. There are only a few articles at the moment, but it should grow into a very useful resource.

The Python inside Maya group has been set up on Google Groups to collect knowledge about using Python with Maya. It is strongly linked to PyMEL – and enhanced API for Maya which is more Pythonic, and mapy – a program that lets you run Python Maya commands from an external text editor.

HP has teamed up with Dreamworks to create a new HP DreamColor 30 bit display to bring good colour fidelity to LCD displays. Also a research team at Rice University in Houston have created the darkest material in the world which absorbs more than 99.9 per cent of light.

Riggers may be interested by T. J Galda’s new book about Advanced Character Rigging: Creating Advanced Tendon and Muscle Systems.

The University of Hertfordshire’s digital animation course has set up a website at 3d HIT to share information and promote their work.

Nvidia has released the first edition of GPU gems for free. Also Gelato Pro has been released for free. Unfortunately this is because Gelato is being discontinued and nvidia is focussing their effects on Mental Ray.

ZignCreations has a cheap facial tracking software for sale. There is also a video here showing realtime 3d geometry video scanning.

HDRI Locations is a new service by Thomas Suurland which offers packs of HDRI environments and a series of background plates to go with them. He will also shoot images on commision.

If you want a digital camera that you can extend yourself, then certain Canon Powershot cameras can use the Canon Hacker’s Development Kit. This lets you access enhanced photography modes and run simple scripts on your camera. There is more information on Lifehacker and Wired.

Microsoft Excel may not be the fastest way to render 3d but it is possible. And finally Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch of Big Fat Brain knows you suck at Photoshop.

I have added a couple of articles about shader development with git. This is a really great source version control system – it just works the way it should. The only small downside is that Windows support isn’t as good. If you are on Windows there is MSysGit, but there aren’t any tools like TortoiseSVN yet.

I also have an article about installing Linux… on Windows Vista! using Sun’s VirtualBox. The more observant will notice that this gets around the issue of Git on Windows.

Hopefully someone else will find them useful. If nothing else it means I have some orginal content on my website – for a change!

After 8 years I figure it is about time I brought this website kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. So out goes the static HTML – and in comes WordPress. Hopefully this will let me update far more easily, and more often. I will be backporting the old news information over to the new site soon.

I have already added one small article to keep you going for now.

 Update – this is now imported up until the beginning of 2005. Also the HDRI page is back.

Autodesk has been busy buying up smaller companies, firstly with Mudbox and now cMuscle which has been rebranded as Maya Muscle. Digication has set up a site listing Maya feature requests – hopefully Autodesk has seen it.

Mental ray has been in the news too as it has recently been bought by Nvidia. If you have been using the mental ray mia shaders then you’ll want to have a look at Master Zap’s blog, Jeff Patton’s blog, David Johnson’s blog and the 3dlight blog.

The Golden Compass is playing in cinemas at the moment. There are articles about the vfx from vfxworld on the effects from Rythm and Hues and Cinesite, Framestore-CFC, Tippet, Rainmaker and Digital Domain. For 2008 there are trailers out for The Dark Knight and Prince Caspian – the sequels to Batman Begins and the Chronicles of Narnia respectively.

The DI TechNet mailing list has recently been set up at for technical (engineering) discussions in the areas of Digital Cinematography, Digital Intermediate, Telecine and related Production and Post-Production workflows. This is a replacement for the “DI Forum” list which became defunct in August. The group moderator is Martin Euredjian of eCinema Systems. Also if you are interested in colour management then have a look at Sean McHugh’s Cambridge in Colour website. He has a ton of information about colour spaces, and some nice panoramic photographs. There are also some articles on why to always use linear lighting from Unframed vfx and a tutorial by Rob Nederhorst.

In tech news Vector Magic is an online tool for producing vector images based on raster input. This isn’t new, but it seems to be more accurate than the competition. Calle Lejdfors and Lennart Ohlsson at Lund University have created PyGPU which lets you run image processing programs on the GPU directly from Python. Finally Mosaic is a fully featured RIB exporter for Blender also written in Python.

If you would like an open source playback system to view your images with then check out djv and for performance testing new hardware Maxon can run a series of tests with it’s Cinebench software. In beta is a tool called Cloudwright. This is a tool for creating prodedural sky images, and can also be called using it’s SDK. Also Crazy Bump is a tool for extracting displacement and normal maps from photographs and uses hardware shaders for preview.

And finally if you wondered how the vfx was done in Eastenders (or even that it had vfx!) here is how they do it!.

Some of the coursenotes from Siggraph 2007 are appearing on the internet. Sony’s course about producing Surf’s Up is an extremely impressive 127 pages long! Pixar has been busy too – with 1 course, 2 papers and 6 technical notes this year. Videos of this year’s Siggraph presentation can be purchased now at Siggraph Encore.

Holomatix Rendition is a very impressive interactive, realistic renderer which works with standard Mental Ray shaders in Maya. Also BTFShop mentioned earlier should be available after Siggraph for download from Sourceforge.

In non-Siggraph news, if you are a texture artist then you might be interested in the textures available from CgTextures.com has a large range of textures to download. Also Gamedev.net is holding a realtime shader competition with models that you can use.

Finally vfxworld has an article about Under Dog which we at Cinesite (and Framestore-CFC) have been working on recently

You’ll all know about the release of RenderMan Studio which replaces MTOR. There is also a new Pixar short called Lifted – you can view it here.

Alexei Puzikov has updated his ShaderMan tool. It has been rewritten in Python and now also supports several modes in addition to RenderMan Shader Language such as Cg and now runs on Linux. It also has a new home on google code with the source available under a BSD license. He is also currently available for work.

Also a new relighting system called Lightspeed has been developed by ILM, Tippett and Stanford and MIT graphics labs. This uses hardware shaders, but improves on Pixar’s Lpics by supporting opacity, motion blur and automatic translation of Renderman shaders.

HDR Labs is a new website set up by Christian Bloch. He has several tools for creating and managing HDR images and panoramas and is releasing a book all about HDR imaging. It should be available in August according to it’s Amazon web page. There is also a set of command line (with GUI) open source HDR tools called pfs Tools. Also Jeremy Pronk has a paper about Spatial Image Based Lighting which allows for local variation in lighting. This will have a poster presentation at Siggraph 2007.

Also one to look out for at Siggraph this year is BTF Shop by Solomon Boulos, Jan Kautz and Fredo Durand which is a paper about mainipulating pysically measured surfaces based on their BTF (Bidirection Texture Function). It is being presented as part of the Appearance Capture & Editing session.

Andrew Chapman has started a project called Cortex to provide a set of Python tools for doing common TD tasks such as interfacing with RenderMan. Rising Sun Pictures has released PyShake – a python plugin for Shake. They also have a RSP open source website. And if you want to manipulate OpenEXR images with python there is a library from James Bowman. All links are courtesy of Philippe Leprince’s new blog.

Firstly thanks to Ted Gocek there is now ShaderMan 0.7 in the downloads section.

Scott Iverson has some news about some recent updated to AIR:

3delight and 3delight for Maya have also been updated. See the new features here.

SpiderMan 3 has a new trailer out. Speaking of movies Jonas Ussing has put together a list of movie vfx “behind the scenes” movies found on the internet.

Autodesk is hosting 3December 2006 on December 4th. Although it only seems to be in London this year.

If you are interested in fluids David Cline has an interesting paper explaining Fluids for the rest of us which explains a lot of the background maths.

Alex York has set up a web board for the University of Teeside students.

Finally Michael Ashikhmin has posted his reasons for leaaving graphics research. He has some very interesting views on how Siggraph could be improved.

Several of the internets most prolific Mental Ray programmers and users have come together to create the website My Mental Ray. Of particular interest is Francesca Luce’s section, with her ctrl_buffers for outputting mutliple passes at once from a Mental Ray render. This is a nice complement to the Los Angeles mental ray User Group and the Mental Ray shader writing tutorials by Jan Walter. There are also quite a few Mental Ray shades to download at Binary Alchemy.

Also Pixel Corps is offering a 4 day Gelato training course for just US$25. Probably worth checking out if you are nearby.

And finally I have updated the copy of Shaderman in the downloads section as Alexei’s website seems to be down. Thanks to Zoran Arizanovic for finding a copy!