Newplugins has released the latest version of its Vehicle Studio (formerly known as Vehicle Simulator) plugin for Max. A demo version is available for download.

Sci-Fi channel airing "Dark Kingdom - The Dragon King" 9/8C tonight. The show has lots of VFX created with Max by Uncharted Territory: 671 vfx shots, 6 Max artists, 8 months of work. The official show site is at Scifi.com/darkkingdom/.

A new great animation by Spanish artist Juan José Palomo. Also worth checking out is the latest addition to his personal gallery.

CGW has an interesting article by Ingrid Spencer on Josh Staub's "The Mantis Parable" short film.

Alex Lindsay and Ben Durbin review Endorphin 2.5 for CGW: "... a powerful addition to any character animation pipeline."

An MIT Media Lab project aimed at kids, I/O Brush uses a camera inside a brush to capture images or video frames which can then be used to paint on a large touch-sensitive screen. Sample movie available at bottom of page.

Included in this new version of Di-O-Matic's lip sync tool for 3ds max is a redesigned interface, audio cue to hear an example of the phoneme to make sure you are selecting the one you want and weighable phonemes so you can put emphasis on certain phonemes and have more control over your lip-sync. Voice-O-Matic 2 is currently in final development stages, a release date should be announced "soon". Read the whole PR at Di-O-Matic.com.

Features include new and improved adaptive behaviors, common object parameter selection and editing to speed up scene and character setup, and enhanced tools for integrating Endorphin into most 3D animation pipelines. Read the whole PR at Digitalproducer.com.

MotionBuilder 7.5 provides enhancements in animation workflow, augmented character rigging tools for complex character to character interaction, a new Undo system and improvements in the OpenReality SDK and Python scripting. MotionBuilder 7.5 is now available to MotionBuilder Platinum Members. The software is expected to become available worldwide in late March.

New animations created with Andy Murdock's upcoming character animation system posted at LotsOfRobots.com. One of the animations focuses on the capabilities of Automatron's 'Flavor Packets'.

Read more about it here Framestore CFC announced the formation of a feature animation studio in London under the name of "Framestore Feature Animation". The new venture will be headed by David Lipman (producer of Shrek 2 and co-executive producer on Shrek at Dreamworks).

This script creates a new animated camera that animates along the scene cameras. Every position and rotation is stored in an animation key. Update: It's now possible to insert cameras from the scene. Download the script here   [ more... ]

Mental Images Press Release As part of the deal, mental images will license intellectual property from ARTVPS with the exclusive right to its sublicensing. ARTVPS in turn will become an OEM partner of mental images for the integration of mental ray in future 64-bit versions of its RenderDrive; product range.   [ more... ]

CG-Academy.net have announced the availability of the first DVD in its Advanced MAXScript series entitled "The Matrix: Explained", a 5 hour long DVD from the MAXScript guru Borislav Petrov (Bobo).   [ more... ]

Frantic Software announced the release of Deadline 2.0 (build 2.0.18035) including among others a new Power Management feature, improved performance through Deadline Pulse, scriptable submission dialogs using VBscript, increased pool limit and several new plugins.
http://software.franticfilms.com/index.aspx

( Deadline is a network rendering management application )   [ more... ]

Autodesk, Inc. has posted Backburner v3.0.1, which should fix the monitor crash that can occur on Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP when selecting the task summary tab of a job. You can get it here.

Kees Rijnen has updated his Helium plugin (v1.01), a plugin for creating Flow-chart User Interfaces within 3ds max, via maxscript. As his site is down at the moment, you can download the new version here.