An interesting series of articles by game theorist Eric-Jon Rossel Tairne in which he examines the relationship between the game-world and the player in various historic video games including Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.

RE:Vision Effects has released the latest version of their plugin for compositing applications for adding (and removing) motion blur in post. The new version offers significant speed improvements and compatibility with Nuke and Autodesk Composite. More at RE:Vision Effects.

A plugin by the AFK team that produces as output a heatmap and a threadmap of the rendering process in Mental Ray. The heatmap shows visually the amount of time spent for each individual pixel in the image showing clearly which bits in the image take very long or no time at all. More at AFK’s
website.

A script by Australian artist David Mackenzie for speeding up your workflow that brings a Maya-style Hotbox to 3DS Max.

A script by Raphael ‘Insanto’ Steves that offers Max functionality in a file browser.

New features in Google’s modeling software include: ability to model geo-location with Google Maps, color imagery and more accurate terrain when adding a geo-location to your model, improvements to the Match Photo tool, new set of tools for additive and subtractive modeling, Outer Shell, etc. More at Google.

New features in Maxon Computer’s 3D software include: improved rendering, enhanced dynamics, new deformers and character animation capabilities, etc. More at Maxon.

Ken Pimentel from Autodesk has posted the results of the recent survey asking Max users about their platform of preference in case Max could be ported to other OSs in the future. His words at a recent post are quite surprising: “If 3ds Max were to ever even consider a port, key internal technology would have to make the leap ahead of us. That just happened…” The link to the recent survey should be shared with Linux users.

Check out the latest batch of great short films produced by students at French school Gobelins!

A script by Allan McKay for automating steps in FumeFX 2.0. Rather than babysitting the software, you’re able to set it up and walk away for 30 minutes and have the finished results all rendered and ready to rock.