In this month's free tutorial, I have a real treat for you - something which I know many VFX artist wish they could do. It all stems from my experience working in the industry where I have so often witnessed artists resorting automatically to using Maya's Render Tool when they could actually be so much more efficient if they knew some of the alternatives available to them.

I noticed this cool little project knocking around the web and just couldn't resist sharing it with you.

The Ro.me site created in association with Google is doing the rounds at Escape Studios at the moment. In fact, you might even have read the story that Miles posted a few days ago.

Just by being on Linux, MARI has rocked the post industry. All those guys tired of dual-booting, of trying to get Photoshop to work in Wine or some other “in-elegant Linux solution”. Or for those trying to use a laptop hooked up to the network or two machines with a KVM switcher (you know who you are) MARI is like a breath of fresh air! No nasty print type things getting in the way of painting at high bit depths and HDR floating points. Everything works. No nasty greying out of pull downs as it only works in 8 bit situations; geometry size is not an issue either, texture size is 32k square. It’s eats massive data sets elegantly. It’s a Godsend.

No doubt you’ve heard about Rockstar’s latest release LA Noire - apparently a completely new type of video game. Up until recently, most games have been all about hand eye co-ordination but in LA Noire, which is set in the late 40s, the main skill is about being able to judge body language and characters’ faces to figure out if they’re lying or not - or ‘emotional perception’ as some are calling it.

OK, so hopefully the title got your attention, and we can get past the Kelly Brook distraction - she's currently "fronting" a new marketing campaign from Lynx "Angels will fall" which is all relevant, honest!

Ok, so there I was, happy in my comfort zone, knowing that the Green Lantern could never be a great movie and that nothing could ever live up to the comic book.

Last year, Apple shook the tech world when it released the iPad, and it quickly became the must have gadget for 2010. Apple is now in the spotlight again with lots of hype around iPad 2. It's all very well lusting after one of these little babies, but for me, the real question is "what can a 3D pro like me actually use it for?".

This month’s free tutorial is aimed at the experienced Maya user.  It has been designed by Mark Spevick, our VFX tutor, to help you master some of the advanced tools which can sometimes be complex and take a while to get to grips with. 

This months free tutorial has been specifically created by our tutors to help you learn to control occlusion. It's not taken from any of our online courses so it truly is a unique tutorial. You'll start off by looking in depth at the mib_amb_occlusion texture node and how careful use of 2 attributes will ensure that you obtain the perfect ambient occlusion pass.

So when an academy awarded influential film editor like Walter Murch makes very detrimental comments about 3D stereo some people should take a long hard look at it. What does 3D really add to the whole film experience except expense and a headache? You can find his comments here - all of which are very observant and true.

So when Activision, the distributor of Call of Duty Black Ops - a game that hit the $1 billion mark in sales in roughly the same amount of time as Avatar - mentions that it might take its development out of the UK you would hope that someone might sit up and take notice.

You can really impress future employers by taking advantage of our two expert tutorials this month. Taken from our Character Animation Foundation and ZBrush for 3D Artist courses, they are designed to give you pro-skills in very specialised areas.

Lighting and Shading are an integral part of the VFX pipeline and if you want to take your skills to a professional level these tutorials are the best place to start learning. What’s great about these tutorials is that they tackle pretty complicated subjects head-on and they are practical so, although you’ll understand the theory, you’ll also learn how to practically apply this knowledge. The best part is that these tutorials will sit in our resource centre permanently, so you can access them whenever you want and learn whenever it suits you.

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).

So a year on from the opensource announcements made by numerous studios the move seems to be going well. A lot of major facilities are opening up the process and offering solutions the most well known is probably OpenExr by ILM but numerous other facilities have begun releasing software and specs back to the community.

According to Variety we have been saved from yet more badly converted stereo films - check out the story here. Warner Brothers have canned the release of Harry Potter Deathly Hallows part 1 in 3D. This is due to quality issues, that were mainly due to time constraints, and Warner have come to the conclusion that the converted film was not high enough quality. I can only applaud them for not releasing yet another stereo nasty.

Absolute genius on the part of the creatives at Leo Burnetts for Norton.

Firstly a big thank you to all of you who entered our CG Graduate Design Awards. We were really impressed with the standard of entries and it made last week’s judging day with our friends at The Mill pretty tough.

For the hardcore 3d artists who have been doing this for many a year, it's sad to see an iconic brand lose its identity after such a long and illustrious career. it has always been a love hate relationship for ATI/Nvidia among all 3D artists. I come from a time when graphics cards in PC's where absolutely atrocious; that was before VGA and when 4 colours was a big deal. There was I, with my silicon graphics 4D20 and a geometry engine running GL. How advanced was I?!

Last week, I had the pleasure of judging the short films produced by the graduating class of 2010, BA in Animation at the University of West England. The top prize up for grabs was our new Self-Directed ZBrush Course, and the top five contenders for the winning spot were (in no particular order):

Now almost as hyped an event as the World Cup itself, the Nike ad this year starred a host of big names, from our own Wayne Rooney through to Franck Ribiery of France, Italy’s Fabio Cannavaro and even shiny Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal. Most people will have seen at least one of the shorter clips, if not the full thing, and the eagle eyed among you will know that the guys at the Mill were on hand to provide the VFX wizardry.

Everyone knows the importance of a well put together show reel, but it's surprising how many there are out there that fail to tick all of the right boxes.  Very often a show reel will fail to showcase the breadth of skill of the candidate, or will let itself down with a few issues that are fairly simple to fix.  Therefore, we've put together a list of points to help you perfect your show reel and to maximise the impact it has on prospective employers.   After much discussion at Escape Studios, plus a fair bit of back and forth on Twitter, we have whittled down the list to these 8 tips:

An article on the Telegraph’s website caught my eye today – apparently, professional computer gamers have the reactions of fighter pilots but the bodies of 60-year-old chain smokers. Dr Dominic Micklewright, from the University of Essex, conducted a series of physical and psychological tests to determine whether playing on computers could be defined as a sport.

This month's free tutorial is part of a series that discusses alternative methods of recreating naturalistic lighting in an exterior environment. Taken from our Advanced Lighting with Maya and Mental Ray course, this tutorial concentrates on optimising raytrace shadows within a manually lit scene, and will teach you how to add ambient shadows via a custom occlusion shader. This tutorial will give you the production level skills expected of a junior lighting artist.

We've teamed up with 3D World to give you guys the chance to improve your Maya Skills.  Seth Gollub, senior animator at Framestore New York shares some of his Maya animation tips, letting us in on a few secrets along the way.

This month's Free Tutorial is taken from our Advanced Shading with Maya & Mental Ray online course and is one of many videos which explains how to harness the power of Maya's utility nodes to simplify, speed up & add realism to your work.  This tutorial is great because you'll use a practical example.

On one of my (out of work hours) trawls around the internet, I came across this little gem (if you can, watch fullscreen).

I came across this the other day, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been more excited. Star Wars (the original three, we won’t talk about the new lot) has been a huge inspiration for so many people in the industry over the years, and to see how the graphics were done is fantastic.

All the talk of stop motion animation last week got me thinking, so I went in search of some great examples of this type of work. This Western Spaghetti viral is awesome. 

Towelling for grass, cotton balls for smoke and cling film for water – Wes Anderson has reverted to traditional forms of animation in his new film Fantastic Mr Fox.

I’ve mentioned 3D movies before on the blog, but this week another article on the topic caught my eye. Pixar has said that it’s hoping 3D films will encourage people to watch movies at the cinema – rather than pirate copies or illegal downloads at home.

At the moment, the trumpet to blow seems to be that film and games production are converging. If you believe the hype, we'll be in some sort of nirvana where we all use the same approaches etc to the art of making both.