As you know we have spent the past month judging the 170-odd entries we received for this year’s CG Whiz awards.  I have to say the standard of entries was incredibly high, and our judges had an extra-tough job singling out those who showed the sheer talent and potential they were looking for.

There has been a lot of talk about the BOXX 8550 XTREME lately, and why it’s the fastest workstation in the world. Many of us are naturally suspicious of all the marketing hype, but on proper investigation, these claims are actually based in pretty solid facts... Here’s the low down.

Ever thought how hard it would be to design all the different buildings for a Medieval town and then deal with the layout and terrain?... Wow what a headache! Well, not such a headache any more. You can now create realistic looking medieval dwellings and villages that look like they have just come out of an episode of Merlin using CityEngine.

For those of you who have seen the latest instalment in the Harry Potter franchise, here's an interview with the sequence lead of the animated section explaining the Deathly Hallows. You can check out the full interview here.

Last Wednesday, Escape Studios had the honour of having Christian Manz, VFX Supervisor at Framestore come into our studios and talk to our students about life in the industry. Christian discussed the bits about the job that are great (Like getting to see your name up on the big screen after arduous months of working on a project) and the bits which aren’t quite so good (Like the long hours). It wasn’t just our students who enjoyed it, we loved it too.  Christian’s thirteen year career has been an epic one and his latest contribution to the industry as VFX Supervisor on the latest HP7 is particularly impressive. We spoke to Christian about the highs and lows of his career so far, and what it feels like to have been part of one of the biggest films of our recent times.

Hot off the press... The Foundry have just launched the public beta for their long awaited RED camera tool, STORM.

So an Iconic mascot after 4 decades has finally become a CG character. Having done this myself with the first CG Tony the Tiger I have to wonder whether this will work. The British public being such a fickle bunch! CG Tony was to be a furry character but was squashed at the last moment by Kellogg's in the States as going to far away from the 2D character of Tony (shame he was so cool furry).

With Movember now over, I just wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone for being so sporting and not taking themselves too seriously with their Mo'. We have raised £2,076 (currently) which leaves us ranked 468 Nationally, which we think is pretty good form.  I thought I’d share our leaderboard with you:

Here is a very interesting new bit af kit to address the problem of CG cloth. It's called Marvelous Designer.

Our next ZBrush short course is starting on December 13th and we only have a few places left - so you need to hurry if you want to have a chance to take part.