The cloud is only just beginning to really show its power and what it can do. This OnLive demo of their new video compression technology is astounding. It will open a whole new era of computing and inter-op that we can only dream of. Imagine running maya on an Ipad? Well, it's not that far fetched an idea, and I reckon rental of maya is a definate possibilty in the future. But what about having the ability to run any app on any hardware? This truely is a game changer and from their humble beginnings in just the games' world I think OnLive just showed that the future will be a very different place and that they may be a major force.

So many people were impressed with The Foundry’s Mari presentation at our recent Bristol event, that I decided to find out a little more about the new product. For those that haven’t come across Mari before, it’s a new 3D creative texture-painting tool that was originally designed by Weta Digital for painting high-resolution textures on 3D models in King Kong and Avatar.

Ever thought how hard it would be to design all the different buildings for a Medieval town and then deal with the layout and terrain?... Wow what a headache! Well, not such a headache any more. You can now create realistic looking medieval dwellings and villages that look like they have just come out of an episode of Merlin using CityEngine.

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.

If you use Autodesk Maya for animating characters and models, then you may want to check out this cool new animation plug-in called IKinema.

Now, I realise that it’s a bit of a leading question, especially as all of us in this industry rely so much on technology…

The new version of V-Ray for 3ds Max is now available for pre-order. This new 2.0 has undergone a significant revamp and now includes the V-Ray 3ds Max rendering engine along with V-Ray RT CPU and V-Ray RT GPU - that’s a whole lot more than you used to get!

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.