Attention all gamers, developers and insomniacs… TIGA, the trade association representing the UK games industry, are running a GameHack event on the 28^th and 29^th April, 2012 at Pinewood Studios. This is an overnight 'hackathon' where participants have 24 hours to develop an original game concept. Working within a team this is a great opportunity for participants to network with peers as well as some of the best developers in the UK games industry. As an added bonus, there are some really awesome prizes up for grabs. Check out the range of prizes and more about the event here. 

Wednesday 29th of February marks the official release of HIERO, a VFX tool we’ve been lusting over for the past 6 months. Following rigorous beta testing this product is now ready for integration with VFX pipelines around the globe. To give this product the welcome it deserves, The Foundry are hosting launch events in LA, Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, Paris, Hamburg, Munich and Sydney. Escape Studios are teaming up with The Foundry for the launch in London, an event we hope you can all attend. The event is on Tuesday, 6th March at the VUE Leicester Square, running from 7-9pm, followed by drinks. Registrations will start at 6:15pm so try to get there early to avoid queues.

Great news for all you animators out there, Escape Studios and Natural Motion are teaming up to bring you an incredible promotion on endorphin 2.7. Here's the deal: you can save up to 90% on this software if you buy before February 14th, 2012.

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.

This is possibly the moment many of you have been waiting for… HIERO, The Foundry's latest software project, has gone to beta. A closed beta ran over a short period of time for few individuals who got their name on a waiting list nice and early, and from what I’ve heard, they really enjoyed putting it to the test.

MARI has already gained a reputation for being a powerful compositing tool, but the team at The Foundry continue developing this software to make MARI an even faster, more flexible tool.

The news is travelling fast that The Foundry have a new product in development. This product is called HIERO and is thought to be the 'missing link' in shot management system for VFX pipelines. Designed specifically to help increase output and manage multiple jobs, this tool is said to be a game changer for the post production community.

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.

Back in September, Escape Studios and The Foundry joined forces to run a series of free MARI tutorials. To start with, there were two training programmes on offer, but due to an overwhelming demand we scheduled in a third. The aim for the tuition was to introduce professional artists working in the industry to some key features available in MARI, that are fast becoming an integral part of the modern pipeline.

Check out this KATANA Demo by Andy Lomas (Product Manager for KATANA at The Foundry) at NAB 2011 earlier this year, prior to yesterday’s version 1.0 release.