A short film that started as "a protest against the rather strange selection of short films some festivals have". Created by Tom Weber, Ilija Brunck and Jan Bitzer at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Still camera, long take, few elements, and a particular sense of humor. Certainly not your average short. Check it out!

Neil Blevins introduces his pipeline for shading and texturing hard surface models for photoreal effects work, animated feature films, ride films or video game cinematics. The lecture includes practical demos in Photoshop and Max, using the Scanline, Brazil and Mental Ray renderers. With a focus on texturing thousands of objects fast and efficiently, this intermediate level course is useful for any 3D application or renderer and will add many new tricks to your personal arsenal. Find out more at The Gnomon Workshop.

Melbourne-based Zero One Animation have created an impressive 7 minute 3D stereoscopic installation for Melbourne Museum exhibition "A Day In Pompeii", showing the destruction of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The whole project was done with 3DS Max using V-Ray, FumeFX, Afterburn, PFlow Box 2 and Box 3, Rayfire and Grant Adam's RPmanager, and composited in Fusion. A preview can be seen at CGTalk, the exhibition web pages can be found at Melbourne Museum's website.

Updated several older scripts, here's the major updates:
bitmapCollector: Rewrote part of the script to get around a max bug introduced into max 2010.
edgeDivider: Now works on multiple edges.
objectDetacher: Added a count-up in the prompt area so you see how many objects the script has detached at a given point. Cleaned up the code a bunch, and fixed a bug which caused the script to sometimes not select the correct detached objects.
soulburnScriptsLister: Rewrote part of the script to get around a max bug introduced into max 2010.
Find them at: http://www.neilblevins.com/soulburnscripts/soulburnscripts.htm

A new trailer for Sony Pictures' adaptation of Judi Barrett's book for children is now available.

Madrid-based Ilion have made available a new trailer for Planet 51.

A new technology developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Adobe that yields impressive results. Check out the sample video and paper details.

New features in the open source HDRI Lighting Kit include GPS tags (choose your lighting set by region), standalone GUI that connects to major 3D apps, multiple lights, new tags to build stronger and more accurate lighting setups, etc. Also of note, Bob Groothuis has made available seven HDRIs from his Dutch Skies 360° collection for free. More at HDRLabs.com.

BenVista have released the latest version of their image resizing software. PhotoZoom Pro 3.0 can be used as a stand-alone application and as a Photoshop plugin. New features include: improved S-Spline interpolation technique, higher quality image enlargements and downsizing, makes short work of interpolation artifacts such as halos, film grain functionality for increased natural look, multi-processor support, increased image support (metadata, ICC profiles, color spaces, layers, 16 bits/channel and 32 bits/channel HDR images, etc). More at BenVista.com.

Max Underground news updates can now be followed using Twitter.

Spiral Graphics has disclosed the features of Genetica 3.5, their seamless texture, animation, and HDRI environment map editor. New features include: texture synthesis to create seamless textures from photographic sources with a vast range of creative options for controlling the texture generation process, ability to remove unwanted perspective and distortion from photos, a multi-core rendering engine that brings significant speed improvements, texture bombing, etc. The new version can be pre-ordered for a 25% discount. Learn more at Spiral Graphics website.

The destruction kit plugin for Max has been updated with new features including glue for sticking objects together and break the connection during simulation (three types of glue available), deformable/pointcached objects support, simulation by manually dragging the time slider, improved UI and more. Complete list of features and new sample videos at MirVadim.com.

Mozilla has released the latest version of Firefox. Lots of additions, a noticeable speed improvement and enhanced support for the latest HTML standards. Check out a demo video and download it from Mozilla.com.

StudioGPU has announced the release of MachStudio Pro, a stand-alone visualization and rendering software that lets CG artists and lighters create and manipulate lights, materials, and cameras in a real-time, non-linear workflow environment. The new release adds a 3DS Max 2009 exporter, materials library and animatable fog. MachStudio Pro is priced at $4999. Check out the features page and video tour for more.

Take a look at this great short film by Korean independent animation team MESAI. Some concept sketches can be found at MESAI's website. (Note: not created with Max)