Tweak Software, the guys who created RV-image and sequence viewer software, have teamed up with The Foundry to build an RV/NUKE integration package that provides a beautifully seamless workflow between the two applications, which are said to deliver high-performance RV playback as you work in NUKE.

The guys at IKinema have an awesome idea in development that is making their award winning animation technology more available to the masses. For those of you who don’t know IKinema, it is a plug-in for Maya that lets you create full-body animations quickly and easily with brilliant realistic results. It is a time saving tool that eliminates the need for characterisation or special rigs as it does the hard work for you, letting you work directly onto a rig. You can combine multiple models into a single animation, retarget from any source to any target, customise or tweak motion capture and animation as well as retarget data inside Maya in real-time.

My, what a busy week! There are announcements from the likes of Pixar about their RenderMan software, interviews with London studios such as Pixomondo and the much more education controversy. Here's my pick of last week's more interesting stories.

With all the excitement of new courses starting here at Escape in 2012, we’ve not yet had time to share the work that last year's students put together at the end of their courses.

After an interesting last week in our Los Angeles studios, I have come back to what seems to have been a week dominated with announcements about the state of our education system. But my round up of news is not just about education news, and this week, there is news about what the London Olympic stadium is going to look like, details of Cinecite's internship program and lots more...

For all of you architects and designers out there, we’ve just launched a competition which could see you win the latest kit on the market! In association with HP and Chaos Group we have a much coveted prize up for grabs for one lucky winner who can answer three questions correctly. The successful winner will take home an HP EliteBook laptop with software V-Ray for 3ds Max – two essential tools to compete in a fast paced, competitive industry.

Digital artist Kelly Richardson recently completed an artist’s residency at the Pixel Palace, a new digital media arts programme of the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne. During her time there, she began initial research and production into an ambitious new three projection video installation entitled ‘Mariner 9’. During her residency, the Pixel Palace commissioned a short film about the work being developed where she explains some of her processes and ideas behind the new installation.

For those of you who logged into my November Free Tutorial entitled Animate a Bird and Make it Fly, you'll remember that I promised to deliver a second part to it. This tutorial uses a pre-created rig, which you can buy here and explores the mechanics of bird locomotion. It costs just $5 and trust me, it’s worth it. If you'd like a re-cap of what was in part 1, you can find all the details here.

We came across this video and just had to share it with you all. Check it out!

For anyone with an iPhone or an iPad here is a great app from our friends at MPC. If you are interested in entering the VFX industry, this is something which I would highly recommend. MPC's app shows the jobs they have available as soon as they are published, and is a great way of finding out about those entry level positions that aspiring artists are after.