Nick Nakadake of Mulvanny G2 gives Brazil r/s 1.0 high marks in his review at CGArchitect!

"With such a rich and reliable 1.0 release, Brazil is sure to be an extremely valuable tool in the design toolbox of small and large companies alike...   Brazil has stepped up the evolution of rendering, and put the pressure on all the competition." -- Nick Nakadake

Cubicspace is shipping its ground breaking Windows-based real time visualisation solution, rtre™. By providing instant, interactive, superior quality visual feedback for anyone designing in 3D, buildings, interiors and other designs are produced to a higher quality and in shorter timescales.   [ more... ]

"In case you have not visited 3D Buzz lately, we are sending our members a short update regarding what we've been doing. We have some additions to the VTM family as well as the site that you may enjoy!"   [ more... ]

Marcel de Jong and Metin Seven from Seven's Heaven created this little creepy movie completely with MAX: http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Esadie/SONG.wmv

3DM-mc have an Interview with Juan Siquier online.

Time for yet another edition (the sixth) of the Realtime 3d GameArt competition.
This edition's goal : Create a space carrier ship and one fighter model
Read all the details at the CGchat forums.

Creative-3D reviews Messiah:animate: "...although you can control bone influence regions manually if you want, you'll probably never have to."
Gamasutra reviews DarkTree 2.0: "...a powerful tool." (Login required.)

Digitalproducer reviews 3ds max 5. A *great* in-depth review of R5 by talented artist Irfan Celik.
"A host of enhancements make this an upgrade worth getting."

A very interesting article by Martin Doudoroff documents some moderately obscure computer graphics software history: a suite of animation products produced in the late 1980's for the Atari ST personal computer platform. Although the fact is not widely known, this Atari software, published by a defunct computer magazine called Antic, directly preceded and led to the Autodesk 3D Studio and Discreet 3ds max products used by thousands of people today.

CGArchitect reviews SpeedTree MAX vs. Bionatics natFX.

Digital Film Tools is shipping zMatte, a blue and green screen keyer for After Effects compatible programs. Using proprietary matte extraction techniques and 16 bit processing, zMatte helps create mattes with minimal parameters. If it was shot correctly, there is very little to adjust. If not, there are tools to make it look right--tools such as multiple matte creation as well as Blur, Shrink and Wrap functions. Once the key is pulled, the foreground can be color matched to the background using color tools in addition to isolated color suppression.

Matt Donlan of Mirage Graphic Studio discusses Brazil r/s and its key role in his architectural visualization work.

New Version of 3D Application Provides Realistic Vector Output Styles, Photo Quality Raster Export, and SmartLayer™ Technology For Direct Integration With Macromedia Flash MX
BOULDER, Colorado, Sept. 23 PRNewswire -- Today Electric Rain, Inc.^® announced the release of Swift 3D^® version 3.0, a standalone application allowing designers to build and export 3D animations to the Macromedia^® Flash™ (SWF) file format, as well as other major vector and raster formats.

"Electric Rain continues to innovate and raise the bar in the 3D-to-vector industry," said Mike Soucie, President of Electric Rain, Inc. "Swift 3D V3 offers ground-breaking advancements in realistic vector rendering with new RAViX III rendering options, while the Swift 3D Importer for Flash MX creates a whole new approach for Flash designers and developers integrating 3D into their projects. And with a complete ray tracing rendering engine that supports bitmap textures and photorealistic output, it's clear that Swift 3D V3 is a big-time upgrade that provides significant value at an affordable price."   [ more... ]

Here's a good list of tools available for creating 3D models of plants and trees. (Keep in mind that there are a few missing though, like Blur's L-Systems object plugin.)

I just happened upon nathan's crappy website and it has a whole new look - and I must say its pretty unimpressive. I have long admired nathan's direction and lack ofingenuity when it comes to cool ass shiz in the L33t 3d model market and this site really sets him apart like a sore thumb as one of the premier 3d model resources out there for everyone or anyone needing to know where NOT to look for high-end 3d models. Keep up the 'good' work!

Montreal, Qc – September 19, 2002 – Di-O-Matic, a leading character animation software developer, announces today that it has recently acquired all rights to the stand-alone storyboarding software previously known as Storyboarder from Perpetual Minds, a Detroit-based research and development organization specializing in pre-production software solutions.

The Only Limit is Your Creativity! September 20, 2002 - nPower Software announces the release of Power Solids, the second of a series of "Power" plug-ins for Discreet 3ds max, and Power Translators.
The revolutionary Power Solids plug-in brings the power of solids modeling with precise higher order surfaces into 3ds max.
For the first time, 3ds max / VIZ users will have access to precise animated Booleans and filleting.   [ more... ]

A great collection of (copyrighted) photographs of clouds, storms, tornadoes, etc. Check it out!

A good resource for those looking for photos of hands.

3D Festival Copenhagen 2003 will be held at Bella Center, Scandinavia’s largest exhibition and congress location in Copenhagen, Denmark, 7-10 May 2003. The 3D Festival Expo includes conferences, awards, film festivals, exhibitions and online experiences. Game Developers World is a new conference that will run alongside the 3D Festival Conference focusing on all aspects of game creation.
3D Festival’s website, powered by CGNetworks, has been revamped and offers quality articles and information on the 3D design and digital visual effects industries.
Read the whole PR for more information.

A couple of new pics at Raph.com.

Very interresting tutorial, that will show you how to use Shag:Fur to create good-looking trees and other plants. http://www.3dm-mc.com/tutorials/tree/

CGI Magazine reviews Facial Studio in its July 2002 Issue, read the review here.

Read the whole PR at Digitalproducer.com.

Talented Spanish artists Jorge Seva and Sergio Miruri have updated their website, which can now be found at Omness.com. Check out the great renders (some of them from their Isidore movie project, for which they are looking for production support). Keep an eye for the arrow/scrollbar or you'll miss many of the pictures.

- Discreet Showcases Innovation in Workflow, Asset Utilization and Creativity with New Product Advances at IBC 2002—Spotlight Focuses on Groundbreaking Linux Rendering Software
- Discreet Unveils burn—New Linux-Based Background Rendering Software
- Discreet Presents New Versions of inferno, flame and flint at IBC 2002

Creative-3D reviews ZBrush 1.5: "...a unique piece of graphics software".

CGArchitect interviews Scott Kirvan and Steve Blackmon of Splutterfish, the company behind the Brazil renderer. The article's got some hints on what's being worked on for version 2.0 of the renderer.

Realviz announced ImageModeler 3.5, an update to their modeling software that helps users extract 3D models from photographs. Version 3.5 offers an upgraded calibration engine and modeling tools, as well as refined texturing control. No word yet on the final release date. Read the whole PR at Digitalproducer.com.

Mesmer Press's new book covers the basics of computer animation with discreet's 3d studio max 5

Seattle, September 9th, 2002 -- Mesmer designed the Illuminated series for people learning how to use computer animation software on their own, at work, or in a school setting.   A complement to the book, a "teacher's aide" in PDF format, is available to educators and instructors free of charge, and provides lesson plans, chapter overviews, quizzes, and more to help teachers make the most of [3ds max 5] in the classroom.   [ more... ]

AdvantEdge is a blue screen matte extraction plugin compatible with Adobe, Apple, Avid, Discreet and other graphics applications. AdvantEdge includes Ultimatte's new Video Correction filter designed to reduce the artifacts found in 4:2:2, 4:1:1, and 4:2:0 video image formats. The UI includes other features such as Separate Shadow Mattes, Smart Matte Sizing, and Roto-Screen Correction. AdvantEdge is being offered at an introductory price of $995 until September 30, 2002. OSs supported include Windows, Apple's OS 9/OS X, SGI IRIX, and Red Hat Linux.

3DVF has a great interview with Steven Stahlberg. Meet the artist behind the impressive (and beautiful!) 3D pictures. (English | French)

From Brandan Duncan (Jissai Graphics), author of the Luminaire Global Illumination Tools, comes MaxShade - a 3ds max scripted shading language.
And it's free - for both 3ds max 3 as well as 4/5!

Latest Version of Tracking Software Now Available Bringing Advanced Automatic & Manual 3D Tracking to Today’s Digital Artist, For Seamless Integration of Computer Generated Elements Into Live Action Sequences
Sophia Antipolis, France – September 2, 2002 – REALVIZ^®, a leader in image processing software development, has announced the availability of MatchMover^® 2.5 Professional. REALVIZ MatchMover Professional is the professional way to automatically track 3D camera data and motion from videos and film sequences. Start tracking Automatically, and if necessary, move smoothly back and forth between Automatic and Manual processes, with no interruption of workflow, providing the ease of automatic tracking, with the precision control matchmoving professionals demand.   [ more... ]

Posted Fri Sep 6, 2002 19:06 PST by Richard Annema | Source: