As of last month Autodesk released the 2013 update of their 3D software, and with that you’ll find a variety of enhancements and new features that make these versions pretty special. In our competitive industry, having the latest and greatest tools to complete the job is always a bonus, and the 2013 versions may well set you on your way to creating work that stands out from the crowd. Of course for many of you, the cost can make upgrading a tricky business and that’s why we want to make sure you’re all aware of a promotion that could help stretch the pennies a little further.

The 9^th annual Architectural 3D Awards, hosted by CGarchitect.com, are taking place on July 4th 2012 and a last call for entries has just been sent out, with only three weeks remaining. The competition is open to everyone in the Architectural Visualisation industry, and looks to award the best imagery, animation and real-time projects created over 2011 and 2012. This year there are five categories for the award, and only five entrants will be shortlisted for each category - Image (Commissioned), Image (Non Commisioned), Film/Animation (Commissioned), Film/Animation (Non Commissioned) and Real-Time.

The fifth week of the Maya Core evening course is equivalent to day five of the intensive day time class, so we have now covered one week of the comparable daytime course. The advantage of the evening course is you have more time to soak in the deluge of information showered onto you, but the daytime class are constantly thinking in Maya so perhaps absorb it more thoroughly.

After last week’s fruity frolics and forays into furniture, we began week four of our Maya Course finishing the seat cover of our poly modelled chair. The back row gang was complete again as our comrade James returned as he was unable to attend last week’s lessons. He was gutted to miss the chair making exercise, because he’s a budding furniture designer now hoping to get an internship at a London studio, and believes learning Maya will boost his creative potential.

NVIDIA very recently put out a call for Maya artists to submit new models to be considered and potentially used as benchmarks for Autodesk’s Maya. NVIDIA developed a CUDA plug-in for Maya that delivers fluid simulation, hence their involvement in this. For more details on that, check out this demo.

“What have I got myself into?…” was the worrying thought running through my mind, as my second class in Maya Core reached the half-way point. This was the less than confident start to my personal experiment, where I’m hoping to demonstrate how Escape Studios can instruct a complete 3D newbie, and turn me into a (hopefully) competent Maya operator.

On 16^th November 2011, Escape Studios and Autodesk joined forces to organise a Softimage user group meeting.  The event was held at the Autodesk London office on Broadwick Street, where product manager Jason Brynford ‘Chinny’ Jones presented updates as well as a preview on the Softimage roadmap. An over subscribed event, the UGM attracted an obvious attendance from users within Soho but also users from as far as Sweden, France, Bulgaria, and Germany.

As a creative professional, we hope you’re going to find the information below as exciting as we do. Last week, 14^th November 2011, NVIDIA announced the arrival of NVIDIA Maximus, a technology that is set to revolutionise the way we all work. Delivering significantly increased speed and productivity to any pipeline with a single system that allows you to achieve a range of compute-intensive and graphics-intensive tasks simultaneously, you may start to wonder how you ever managed without it.

A Softimage UGM in the UK has been a long time coming, something that Autodesk are very aware of. So, we've partnered up with Autodesk to make it happen. We are delighted to announce that Jason “Chinny” Brynford-Jones, Softimage product manager and demonstration guru, is making the trip to London to chair this meeting. It certainly wouldn’t be the same without him. A blast from the past for some of you, “Chinny” has been with the Softimage family for 15 years. He started out as a demonstrator in London and has since gained a reputation as being the cheerful face of Autodesk Softimage.  He has been working in Product Management for the last 8 years and is now a Technical Product Manager at Autodesk in Montreal.

What exactly is Alembic? I know that some of you will have a fair idea, but I can guess that an awful lot of you simply won't have the first idea about what it does and why it should matter to you.