Matt Clinch is an Associate Partner at world renowned architectural visualisation practise Hayes Davidson; we asked Matt to give us some feedback on one of our recent online courses, V-Ray for Max, and here is what he had to say.

I have been looking at Maya to Mantra today, and thought: "Great! Means that sometime soon we'll be able to try out Houdini's Mantra Renderer in Maya".

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.

Our friends at Pixar have announced the release of RenderMan Pro Server 16! 

Shhhh, don't tell anyone but the images in this blog have been 'lifted' from our brand spanking new self directed course: VRay 2 for 3DS Max... We are very happy with it... But keep it quiet as it may help improve your skills ;-)

Chaos have been super busy working on their new V-Ray 2.0 for Maya, so when the opportunity came up to chat to Chaos’ top man, CTO Vlado Koylazov, we didn't hesitate to get the inside scoop. So, for the lowdown on where the new ideas come from, what's in store for future releases, and his favourite CG project, read on.

The long-awaited new version of Smedge has just been released, and it looks like Uberware have included some neat new features, worth taking a closer look at.

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.

The long-awaited V-Ray 2.0 has been released, with some great new features and additions that will really give you better and faster results.

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.