As some of you may have seen, we've got a fantastic event coming up in March - a two day masterclass with the doyens of CG animation, Pixar.

To answer comments posted by Zeropuff1234, we asked the CityEngine’s creator, Pascal Mueller, CEO of Procedural Inc to shed some more light on what CityEngine can do and how to get a more realistic look by populating cities with people.

We’ve got some exciting news: we’ve hired games industry veteran Tim Flett. Tim will be our new Business Development Manager for Games and Interactive, in charge of growing our professional services, which include training, technical consulting as well as hardware and software solutions.

This 3D reconstruction of ancient Pompeii is quite neat. Generated with Procedural’s CityEngine, it shows how quickly a 3D city can be created using a plug-in, and eliminate the time-consuming tasks of manual modeling and design often required in games, post-production and architectural visualisation. It is also up to 10 times more efficient at creating urban environments than existing packages. It is completely brand new to Escape Studios – no need to say we are quite excited about it.

We have lots of exciting new developments from our friends at Luxology.

I’ve seen in the news this week that Scottish MP Joe Fitzpatrick has been defending Dundee’s videogames industry after the Scottish Parliament was urged to recognise the fact violent games are easily obtainable for children.

We’ve just made another free tutorial available to you all: Camera Projection in Nuke is a great opportunity for those of you who want a better understanding of Nuke's 3D environment.

Here's a selection of what our game course students have created. As I mentioned before, I'm really proud of what the guys have come up with, and I would love to show you every single students work, were it not for amount of space it would take up on the blog. So here, as a compromise, is a selection:

Ptex is a technique for per-face, multi-resolution texture mapping without the need to setup your UV's manually. While the paper by Brent Burley (Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Dylan Lacewell (Walt Disney Animation Studios & University of Utah) has been around for a while, last Friday, Disney released the project as open source.

For those of you interested, we’re hosting a free compositing webinar taking place on the 28th of this month.  I'll be taking you though the principles of compositing as well as the tips and tricks which will make the most complicated task seem straight forward.