Current News
News > Canon 5D Mark III raw vs. Blackmagic Cinema Camera raw
The Magic Lantern free custom firmware for Canon DSLR cameras provides another notable feature not present in Canon’s original firmware, continuous raw recording on the Canon 5D Mark III. Check out some sample videos on EOSHD’s website and a comparison video showing Canon 5D Mark III raw vs. Blackmagic camera raw on Cinema5D.
Tutorials > Creating a popping popcorn animation with Particle Flow
A tutorial by AlvaroMd on Vimeo.
News > Ray Harryhausen Tribute
US VFX artist and stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen passed away on May 7th. His pioneering work in bringing to life animated creatures in a pre-CG era, from Jason and the Argonauts to Clash of the Titans, has prompted a number of filmmakers and artists to pay tribute to his life and work: Steven Spielberg & others pay tribute to Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury & others’ tribute, Harryhausen’s career in pictures, tribute video, a compilation of every Ray Harryhausen animated creature in feature films. Fans of Harryhausen’s work can find more information on his life and FX artwork in his autobiography, “An Animated Life“.
Books > The Art of Moving Points
Brian Tindall from Laika Studios and formerly Pixar has released a new ebook on ITunes called “The Art of Moving Points”. The book covers facial modelling and how to create character facial rigs using point weight containers attached to deformers. Find out more on hippydrome.com
Scripts > Tumblr.Max
Klaas Nienhaus, creator of the Sketchfab for 3DS Max plugin, has released a new script that posts WIP images directly from your viewport to a Tumblr blog in a single click. See a video, read the instructions and download the free script from klaasnienhuis.nl
Tools > Shotgun 5.0 released
New features in Shotgun Software’s web-based project management, collaboration and review tools include: a new set of collaboration tools, better ways to stay up to date about the things happening in a project, cleaner UI, etc. More on Shotgun Software’s blog.
On The Web > Implicit skinning
Rodolphe Vaillant, Loïc Barthe, Gaël Guennebaud, Marie-Paule Cani, Damien Rhomer, Brian Wyvill, Olivier Gourmel and Mathias Paulin have put up a video on Vimeo for a SIGGRAPH 2013 paper showing a new “implicit skinning” technique they have developed. The video demonstrates its real-time speed and its ability to produce more realistic deformation in areas where you’d normally either lose volume or get unnatural deformation. Check it out on Vimeo.
On The Web > Killzone: Shadow Fall tech demo
Guerilla Games have released a detailed tech breakdown of their upcoming Killzone instalment for Playstation 4. Read the 100 page presentation here and watch a video demonstration on YouTube
Tutorials > Animation methods in 3DS Max: beyond keyframes with controllers, constraints, and wired parameters
Autodesk’s Chris Murray presents an hour long intermediate tutorial on animating using controllers and wiring in 3DS Max. Watch it on YouTube.
Reviews > RichDirt 2
French artist Matt Guetta reviews EnRichPro’s Richdirt 2 material for adding procedural dirt to renders: “Everything RichDirt done can be done by hand with a map of VRayDirt and some additional nodes, it’s just that instead of spending hours you will do in a few seconds and that is precisely why RichDirt is an interesting plugin!” (French|English online translation)
On The Web > Latest NVIDIA realtime demo available
If you have an NVIDIA card (at least an GTX670 though reportedly working on GTX660′s as well) you can download NVIDIA’s latest tech demo and check it out on your PC. The tech demo shows off what NVIDIA describes as a “lifelike human” named Digital Ira. Features on show here include real-time tessellation, subsurface scattering, a complete HDRI pipeline and more. Find out more and download the demo on NVIDIA’s website.
News > Otoy and Mozilla unveil ORBX.js JavaScript library for streaming applications to HTML5 browsers
ORBX.js will allow users to stream desktop applications through a standard HTML5 Web page, without requiring any plugins or native code extensions. The companies demonstrated 3DS Max 2014 and other software running entirely through HTML5 on all major browsers. Watch a video on YouTube, read the press release (PDF) and find out more on Otoy’s forum.




