A tutorial by Jeff Patton on creating a material to simulate an Alucobond building façade. More at Jeff Patton’s blog.

Earlier this year, Xoio launched a mini site called Xoio-Air, that is dedicated to free resources that give back to the community. They’ve just released 65 free cutout people for download. Check it out on Xoio-Air.

The Art of VFX has posted a recent interview with Scanline Vice President and VFX Supervisor, Danielle Plantec. In the interview, Danielle discusses the work they recently completed for the film, Immortals. The full interview can be read at The Art of VFX.

Another utility for converting exported FiberMesh fur, fibers and hair from ZBrush to splines in 3DS Max, this time by UK artist Wayne Robson. The script is available for free. More at Wayne Robson’s blog.

Aladino Debert, of Digital Domain, talks about some of the challenges and also the process of creating their new fully CG spot in under a four week time constraint. Read the article on FX Guide.

Platige Image has recently completed an impressive trailer for the role-playing video game developed by Polish studio CD Projekt RED, adapted from the book series by Andrzej Sapkowski. The video was directed by renowned Polish director Tomek Baginski, with 3DS Max used as the main production tool. [more...]

FiberMesh to Splines is a new plugin by Marius Silaghi designed to convert exported FiberMesh fur, fibers and hair from ZBrush to splines in 3DS Max. More at Marius Silaghi’s site.

An interesting turn of events. One of the original developers of 3D Studio and 3DS Max, Gus Grubba, who’s worked as a senior software engineer for the Yost Group, Autodesk and later Mental Images, has joined Imagination Technologies to focus on Brazil 3 renderer integration with 3DS Max. More at Brazil’s forums.

ScriptAttack announced the upcoming release of BonyFace 3.0, the latest version of its commercial script for rigging and animating facial expressions. New features include an improved rig for eyes, mouth and jaw, enhanced controls, many UI changes, a lipsync layer, and more. BonyFace’s price will be raised after version 3.0 is released, it’s still being offered at the old price now along with a free update to the new version. Also of note, ScriptAttack announced the upcoming development of BonyRig, a tool for rigging and animating whole characters. More at ScriptAttack.

“The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.” The visual medium pays homage to the written word in this great short film by US artists William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg. The complete version is finally available online, watch it on Vimeo. For more information check out the making of and an entertaining interview with the directors.

Miguel Gómez from Dimensión 2.5 interviews the developers of Nuke, Mari, Hiero and more on the origins and evolution of the company. (English|Spanish)

Thinkbox Software has just released XMesh, a set of tools for caching animated scene geometry to an external file sequence and loading this data later for rendering. It has been tested and polished for years in production and offers the following advantages over Max’s PointCache modifier: [more...]