(Updated December 1st, 2005) The teaser has been removed.
Pixar has posted more information along with a short teaser for their upcoming short film "One Man Band". Check it out!

Ballistic Publishing's Elemental 2 is now available. The Elemental series showcase quality digital artwork created with Autodesk software.

Daniel Martinez Lara has got Pepeland.com online again with a new design, animations and images.

Nextlimit has pushed Maxwell Render release again a bit further into future. They will publish a release candidate (RC1) version this week, official day for this is December 2, 2005 (Friday). Final version will be out during December according to Nextlimit.

Check out this beautiful short by Russian artist Alexei Petrov: "Life as a big clock where people like cogs can dance or be just a detail." The animated short was created combining 3D output from 3DS Max and RenderMan along with sequences of photographs. The playful coreography of inanimate objects, the dreamy air of the sequence, the social commentary along with the human touch that the cogs exhibit bring back echoes of certain sequences by that English master called Charles Chaplin. Enjoy!

More information on Andy Murdock's character animation system: "There will also be a set of tools called 'Flavor Packets'. The first Flavor Packet is called 'Secondary Mojo' which adds spring effects to the entire or parts of the skeleton. This allows you to work pose to pose and then quickly create secondary spring motion with a touch of a button. The second Flavor Packet is called 'Harryhausen' which will make your animation look like a stop-motion animation." A message posted at LotsOfRobots.com hints at a late 2005 release.

Ixor3D is a new CG visualization company that provides 3D modeling, rendering and animation services to architects, interior designers, real estate developers, as well as product and industrial designers around the world. Artists working at Ixor3D include Jesús Selvera (a.k.a. Zuliban) from Mexico and Andronikos Bisogiannis from Greece. We wish them the best of luck with their new venture.

Well, not exactly, this is actually a collection of five V-Ray Architectural Material shaders for 3DS Max. Created by Simian visualization studio, each material has been carefully designed to help CG artists produce quality imagery.

As reported earlier, developers at German production house Scanline have been working on an Ocean Dynamics and Hydro Fluid Simulation software called "FlowLine". Scanline have now put up a website with more information on the software and a gallery showcasing some very impressive animations created with Flowline. Also of note on the fluid dynamics simulation front, check out the latest experiments posted by Stanford professor Ron Fedkiw.

David Marks, formerly beta manager for 3ds Max at Autodesk, is now at Frantic Films and has helped launch their new online forum in support of Frantic's R&D efforts and as a general VFX tech web-board.  (Press Release here.)  Frantic is a very software agnostic studio that stresses professional workmanship over tools.  As a result, they've had to develop tools like Deadline for use in their eclectic pipeline.  With any luck, this forum could be a place to get some great insight into the variety of, and reasoning behind, all the software and tools Frantic works with.

Todd Sheridan Perry reviews Max 8 for Digital Media Net: "... Lots of efficiency tools."

Neil Blevins has added 2 new scripts (objectDropper and objectDetacher) and has modified 2 others (sLib and makeObjectsUnique) so that they deal with groups a bit better, all available from Neilblevins.com.

Real-time SpeedTrees for Playstation developers: Press Release here.   [ more... ]

Press Release here

5D-Software – Screampoint’s 3dsMax to Google Earth Exporter v1.0
http://www.5d-software.com   [ more... ]

CG Academy is currently developing an extensive series of training DVDs on the subject of Lighting & Rendering in a CG environment. The DVDs will form a high quality, in depth course. But they need your help!   [ more... ]

CGSociety has started offering prints of CG artwork. Visit CGProShop for more.

MagicTracer is a raster to vector conversion program that includes both raster and vector editing tools. Its auto-tracing detects curves, arcs, circles, orthogonal lines, and corners. MagicTracer exports the vector data it generates to DXF or DesignCAD drawing files, a trial version is available for download.

Courtesy of Zygote. Visit 3DScience.com for more.

Ephere have released another update for their hair simulation plugin. Visit Ephere's forums for the complete list of changes.

Reuters has the article.

Look for "Day Two" presentations, "After Effects Demo".

NUMBAH ONE!  Super-Fly Jean-Eric hosts this dope trailer (homey, check this) for CG Channel's Animation Series with Jonathan Abenhaim and Emilio G., covering (I think) some killah Biped animation techniques in 3ds Max.   It might be a DVD or online or somethin.  Volume 1 is due the middle of this month for $59USD.  So, Yo yo YO! See you later, BRO! Peace. Out.

Alteros 3D: a 3D/2D graphic viewer with a customizable interface
press release here....

Helium is a Schematic Framework that allows you to create Flow-chart User Interfaces within 3ds max, via maxscript. There are some interesting examples on the Helium page, and the current version (v0.8) can be downloaded.

Updated 12 Nov 2005: The site seems to be down since just after I posted the link. I'll let you all know when the site is up and running again.