Constructing a whole city spread out over 385 square kilometres in just 4 weeks seems like a tall order. Base Productions faced this very dilemma when creating 6 CGI sequences for National Geographic's Mega Cities, to create the large Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. They managed to get around it by using CityEngine to procedurally generate buildings, and only concentrate on a few hero buildings to recreate the huge city. You can check out the opening sequence to see the final result, and although the buildings aren’t very detailed, it gives you a great feel for the density of the city and its size.

Gary Mundell, Southpaw’s CEO sheds some light on how using a production asset management system like TACTIC, can help studios better manage their production pipelines and streamline their workflows. Here's what he had to say...

Hot of the press: the latest release of NUKE and NUKEX has just been released!

The latest version of Maxwell Render has been released this week, with a neat new technology called Maxwell Fire. This is a new interactive rendering tool which gives users instant results when setting up a scene, so you can preview scene lighting and materials within seconds. This is pretty neat and should make a difference to your workflows.

As part of the new release of RenderMan Studio 3 and RenderMan for Maya 4, we ran a competition to give three lucky people the chance to win a limited edition Pixar’s RenderMan Walking Teapot.

This is hot of the press: the brand new version of Luxology’s modo 501 has just landed and it’s packed with loads of new features.

The cloud is only just beginning to really show its power and what it can do. This OnLive demo of their new video compression technology is astounding. It will open a whole new era of computing and inter-op that we can only dream of. Imagine running maya on an Ipad? Well, it's not that far fetched an idea, and I reckon rental of maya is a definate possibilty in the future. But what about having the ability to run any app on any hardware? This truely is a game changer and from their humble beginnings in just the games' world I think OnLive just showed that the future will be a very different place and that they may be a major force.

So many people were impressed with The Foundry’s Mari presentation at our recent Bristol event, that I decided to find out a little more about the new product. For those that haven’t come across Mari before, it’s a new 3D creative texture-painting tool that was originally designed by Weta Digital for painting high-resolution textures on 3D models in King Kong and Avatar.

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.

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