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

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

Last night, Escape Studios and The Foundry kicked off The Foundry Live Tour with an evening presentation at Aardman Animations' private screening room before a packed audience of CG specialists from the Bristol area.

Yesterday, Pixar announced an unprecedented price drop in their flagship product RenderMan® Pro Server. The 40% reduction will allow studios and freelancers that were previously unable to buy into the technology, to get a slice of the Film / VFX industry standard renderer. With the global CG expansion, Pixar appreciate that the growth of renderfarms is real and happening now, this move allows existing customers to ramp up their rendering capabilities in a more cost effective manner whilst allowing smaller shops and freelancers access to the toolset.

To celebrate the new release of RenderMan Studio 3 and RenderMan for Maya 4, we’re giving three lucky people the chance to win a limited edition Pixar RenderMan Walking Teapot.

Escape Studios will be taking the Foundry’s products on the road with an event at Aardman Animation studios in Bristol on the 25th of November.

BOXX machines will now be even faster following nVidia’s recent announcement that they will be releasing a brand new graphics card, the Quadro Fermi 2000. This is the lastest addition to the nVidia Quadro Fermi Series, which are the industry’s only GPU-accelerated cards made for coping with HD-SDI video and 3D stereoscopics.

One of the biggest challenges facing TD's is moving data from one system to another. For example, getting the nice particle animation that you have done in Houdini into Maya for rendering.

RenderMan Studio 3 has arrived and it packs some punch! Speed and lots of features and enhancements, including support for Maya 2011.

RenderMan Studio is Pixar's advanced suite of tools for shading and lighting TD's.

It's been a few years since Paul Debevec produced his paper with Jitendra Malik, Recovering High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs, at SIGGRAPH. Since then, people all the world have begun to generate high dynamic range still images and probes - essentially capturing all the light information from a scene in mulitple passes using digital cameras and then merging these into a single HDR image. A simple web search for HDR Images in google images will present you with an array of hyper-real looking images, or try here for some examples.