Thomas Suurland, known for his excellent renders of cars, announced the opening of HDRI-Locations.com, where he’ll be selling high resolution HDRI maps with matching backplates for use in virtual car photography. All HDRI maps are in 11500x5750 and all backplates are in 4368x2912. All HDRI locations come with 1 HDRI map and several backplates, so multiple images can be produced from each location. The files are available for instant download upon purchase.

Polish artist Szymon Masiak has recently finished his latest demoreel, check it out at Masiak3d.com. All scenes show Max / PFlow / Afterburn / FumeFX in action. Enjoy.

A message posted by Matt Fairclough at Terragen's forums provides a list of the latest features being incorporated into the 3D landscape generation software. A new alpha version has been released but it's currently only available to those who've pre-purchased a license of the program.

The latest animated shorts coming from French school Gobelins are now available online. Blind Spot and Voodoo, among others, are not to be missed (Oktapodi regrettably still remains unavailable). Ça vaut le détour!

L Pass Manager is a great new pass manager script created by Lukas Lepicovsky. The author has also made available some video tutorials that show you how to use it.

"A bunch of fixes and new features to existing scripts." Read on for more.   [ more... ]

Good to hear, Wacom's pressure-sensitive tablets are always appreciated by artists, but what we'd really like to see at this point is something that resembles drawing on paper (e-paper display?) with an undo button and all the capabilities of the digital realm. Either that or a tablet with and HDR display that would justify the backlighting. According to the press release, Wacom's new developments compared to older touchscreens offer superior optical performance, increased sensitivity and durability. Read the press release for more.

New features in Di-O-Matic's head creation software for 3DS Max include improved shapes and proportions for the default head, additional facial deformations, automatic Voice-O-Matic configuration for lip-synching, enhanced deformations including gender, ethnicity and phonemes, etc. Visit Di-O-Matic.com for more.

Enrico Gullotti from Italy has kindly made available a great set of tools for organic poly modeling, facial rigging and keyframing/animation.

The weather in La Jolla gets a bit humid during certain parts of the year. Wojciech Jarosz, Matthias Zwicker and Henrik Wann Jensen from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have presented a new method for calculating volumetric photon mapping that is faster and produces images with less noise. Read the article at UCSD.edu for more.

New features in Cubicspace's realtime visualization software include enhanced support for native Max materials and maps, new navigation modes, significant improvements to cameras, animations, views, etc. Visit Turbosquid.com for more.

The new version of the film look emulation and color handling software offers custom creation of film looks and the ability to share them with users of various applications. Read the whole PR for more.

Eyeon Software announced Eyeon Generation, a full-featured collaborative conforming, versioning and editing front-end system. Features include real time playback up to 4k, advanced collaboration capabilities, a versioning system, editing tools, compositing, customization through scripting, an integrated render farm manager and more. Generation is expected to ship in Q3, 2008. Read the whole PR at Eyeonline.com.

NVidia's CEO gave a long talk on his views on the future of visual computing. Read the article at Bit-tech.net.

A faster and cheaper kind of memory storage is in the works. NewScientistTech has the news.

GrowFX is a new plugin by Russian company Exlevel designed for creating and animating trees, plants, flowers and various types of vegetation. Following the steps of Thomas Luft's Ivy Generator, GrowFX incorporates building mechanisms that make plants grow and encircle any scene object and bend around different obstacles. An image gallery and downloadable demo version of the software can be found at Exlevel.com.

An image rendered with the Irradiance Particles implementation being developed for Mental Ray can be found at a thread at MayaLounge.com forums (French). The competition and features being offered by other renderers are clearly proving to be beneficial to Mental Ray users. In this light, it would be healthy for Max to have once again this kind of competition in the 3D field.

Film as a way of life: the team that worked on The Red Baron has posted some great videos showing various aspects of the production process of Nikolai Müllerschön's movie. Don't miss the "music video walking" at the end of "Actor Days Part 1" and the insights on LA from the aptly titled "Drive By Shooting" video. Check 'em out!

Spiral Graphics have announced Genetica 3.0, the latest version of their node-based seamless texture editor and graphics application. New features include vector drawing tools that influence effect maps (such as height and normal maps), a new editor for creating and manipulating HDRI environments, the ability to include diffusion and other light-scattering filters baked directly into the exported environment maps, animation capabilities in its Studio version, and more. Genetica 3.0 is scheduled for release in (northern hemisphere's) summer 2008. A video showcasing the major features to be introduced in Genetica 3.0 is available at SpiralGraphics.biz.

Vanilla Seed's "automatic and visual pass manager" for 3DS Max now features Combustion, AE, Fusion and Nuke export. Check out a sample video at Vanilla-Seed.com (click on "video 6").

The Pixel Farm announced the release of the latest version of their automated film review and clean up system. Version 4.0 features over 1000 enhancementes including improved media management, re-mastering and IO, smart folders with the ability to carry out user defined automatic tasks, an enhanced timeline and improved grain removal, etc. PFClean 4.0 is scheduled for release on May 1st. Visit ThePixelFarm.co.uk for the complete list of features.

Digieffects, makers of plugins for compositing and editing applications, have announced the upcoming release of Natural Forces: Vapor, Natural Forces: Aqua, Simulate: Illuma and Simulate: Camera. Studio Daily has the details.

A video has surfaced that offers a behind the scenes look at the production of Ilion's upcoming Planet 51 feature film. Max is being used as the core software for the project, along with a proprietary renderer related to Marcos Fajardo's good ol' Arnold renderer.

Phun is a Master of Science thesis project by Computer Science student Emil Ernerfeldt at the Umeå University in Sweden. Check out the sample video and download the latest version.

Check 'em out at Autodesk.com.

The latest version of Andersson Technologies' camera tracking software is now available. Features include improved solving, path locking, fine-tuning, tracker cleanup, a big new graph editor, and a more flexible user interface. Visit Ssontech.com for more.

Adobe has finally released a new version of Director (formerly Macromedia Director). Check out the list of new features at Adobe.com.

Italian artist Augusto Lombardi has posted his matchmoving, rigging and animation reel online.

The new release of Sorenson Media’s compression and encoding software offers speed increases, improved audio and video quality, workflow enhancements and many pre-processing options. More information at SorensonMedia.com.

Torgeir Holm reviews HDRI-Studio image collection: "... a great and varied collection of studio light images."

SAN RAFAEL, CA—April 1, 2008—Max users could soon have as many as four different versions to choose from. According to rumors the next release would add Max PDA, a cut-down version of Max tailored for frequent PDA/cell phone users which would feature creation and rotation of primitives (no keyframing), and Max Ringtone, a uniquely designed, revolutionary sound which would articulate in harmonic tones the 3D modeling, texturing, animation, rendering and visual effects capabilities of 3DS Max. All versions would maintain 100% data compatibility and would derive from the same binary trunk. An upgrade path to Max Ringtone would be provided for the two people still using GMax.