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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Carrara 8 Released


+ As the demand for an efficient, feature-rich and cost-effective 3D toolset expands, DAZ 3D responds with the release of Carrara 8.0, the latest version of its popular all-in-one 3D modeling, animation and rendering solution. Daz3D boast Carrara 8.0 is only complete, all-in-one 3D suite designed to be compatible with DAZ 3D content. This powerhouse will help grow your 3D world and enhance your 3D abilities. Not only can you manipulate existing DAZ 3D content in ways you've never imagined, but Carrara 8 gives you the ability to create your own custom content from scratch. What more could you ask for in an affordable, powerful, and complete 3D solution? Finally, there is a single solution for realistic figure posing and animation combined with advanced modeling, terrain-building, physics, and rendering that is readily compatible with a large array of 3D assets. An ideal 3D workhorse within any designer's creative suite, the highly-affordable Carrara lavishes speed and power that enables you to create more freely and deliver the highest-caliber results under even the tightest deadlines. list of the primary new features in version 8:
• Pro - 64-bit
• Pro - Bullet Physics Library (beta)
• Pro - Network Render Optimizations
• Pro - Negative Lights and Photometrics
• Pro - Editing of Posed Meshes
• Multi-Threading
• Improved FBX and COLLADA Data Exchange
• Plant and Vegetation Improvements
• Render Time Optimizations
• God Rays and Barn Doors
• Normal Maps
• Puppeteer for Carrara
>> More information

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Best Of Photoshop Tutorials - creme de la creme



+ We bring you Photoshop holly grail - to Learn Photoshop easy way using these best-of Photoshop tutorials showing you great tips/ tricks and industry insider techniques. This is no junk but a carefully complied list of highly useful handpicked tutorials. These 35+ Outstanding Photoshop tutorials will improve your design and quality of work. List includes step-by-step tutorials for creating various effects, matte painting, HDR, Image Enhancement, abstract art, photomontage, retro pop art, Vector style illustrations, Photo Manipulation, Portrait, Depth of feild and many more..Hope they will inspire you!!
>> Best of Photoshop Tutorials

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SHREK FOREVER AFTER - "Meet Rumpelstiltskin" Featurette


+ A behind-the-scenes look at the fourth chapter of the animated series, "Shrek Forever After." The film is directed by Mike Mitchell and features the voice talents of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz.


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Passion Paris collective Bonzom teams up with Carla Bruni


+ French animation company Passion Paris have just created a beautiful film for the Carla Bruni Born HIV Free campaign. It's by French animation and grafitti collective Bonzom - their film Baby In the Sky is intended to draw attention to the thousands of babies born every year with Aids. The animation is full of vivid colour and tinged with a dreamlike quality - the directors were keen that the film avoided the usual 'guilt trip' associated with many charity films/ads. France's first lady Carla Bruni has launched Born HIV Free, a campaign to highlight the plight of the hundreds of thousands of babies born each year with HIV. “The idea was to avoid playing on this concept of guilt to encourage people to give, more to promote the feeling of sharing and desire. In the case of mother-to-child HIV transmission, the drugs are available – the problem is one of mobilization,” explain Passion Paris executive producer Marc Bodin-Joyeux and Jack from Bonzom. Instead they’ve created an upbeat, universal film of hope to support the very serious aims of the Born HIV Free campaign.

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Download Acropora


+ Acropora (1.0.0012 RC1) Release candidate is now available for download. Acropora is a procedural voxel modeler for creating complex, organic mesh topologies that are useful for all types of 3D modeling applications. Acropora incorporates some of the latest advances in voxel modeling technology. As a procedural modeler, Acropora combines volumetric modifiers with multi-octave 3D noise sampling to generate detailed surfaces in far less time than conventional surface modeling software. Features include:
- A widevariety of base shapes and compound shapes as primary surfaces
- User-defined surfaces
- Voxelisation of user imported models
- Over 50+ volume modifiers
- Automatic generation of up to 15 octaves of three-dimensional noise
(volumetric, Perlin and fractal)
- Extensive voxel and noise editing tools
- Extensive post-processing of meshes (tesselation, smoothing,simplification,...)
- Batch processing
- Multiple LOD support
- Export to multiple mesh formats, DDS volume textures, and raw voxel data
>> Download Now

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Archmodels vol. 78


+ Evermotion is proud to anounce you that they have released a new Archmodels Collection. We believe that this is a new way of creating your own scenes for professional interior renders. Archmodels vol. 78 is consist of Highly detailed 3d models of small electrionic appliances with all textures, shaders and materials. It is ready to use, just put it into your scene. There are no boundaries anymore, no limitations except your own imagination. Archmodels vol. 78 is priced at 120 Euro + Shipping.
>> More information

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Sunday, May 23, 2010

RealFlow 5



+ Next Limit Technologies is pleased to announce the customer release of RealFlow 5. RealFlow is a unique fluids and body dynamics software package which allows you to simulate anything from a single drop of water to a massive tsunami crashing across a beach, sweeping debris in its wake. This new version represents another huge leap forward in simulation software, and includes an enormous number of fantastic brand-new features and improvements, including:
# Hybrido, the revolutionary new hybrid technology, which makes RealFlow 5 the only product on the market which enables users to simulate large bodies of water with sophisticated secondary effects, like splashes, foam and mist
# Caronte, a cutting-edge body dynamics solver, which offers unmatched capabilities for large-scale, complex simulations
# A highly- accelerated particle-based solver, which means that simulations with standard fluids are now up to 20 times faster
# Each standard license of RealFlow 5 now comes with a free copy of the RealFlow Renderkit v2 for mental ray or Renderman (Windows/Linux only)

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FumeFX 2.0


+ Sitni Sati is proud to announce the release of FumeFX 2.0 for Autodesk's 3ds Max platform. FumeFX was the first commercially available gaseous fluid dynamics simulator for 3ds Max. It is a powerful fluid dynamics engine designed for the simulation and rendering of realistic fire, smoke, explosions and other gaseous phenomena. New features that have been added for FumeFX 2.0 are focused on minimizing project turnaround times and providing the ability to add more detail to the simulations - quickly and memory efficiently. FumeFX already has been production proven in titles such as 2012, Spiderman 3, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Superman Returns, Iron Man, The Host (Gwoemul) and various games cinematics such as Warhammer Online, Classic Transformers, Dante's Inferno and others.
>> New features FumeFX 2.0

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2010 NWDA & Planetside Animation Contest


+ Planetside Software (the makers of Terragen 2) and New World Digital Art (a company specialized in producing Terragen 2 resources and general purpose vegetation objects), are jointly hosting an open contest, sponsored by XFrog, World Machine, Deadline Renderfarm, and Planetside and NWDA itself. The contest has started already, but anyone can still join in. The contest is called "2010 NWDA and Planetside True 3D & Animation", for which participants would create an animation storyboard based on stills rendered in Terragen 2. The winning storyboard will be fully animated for free by emecstudios, and other winner prizes inlcude a copy of Terragen 2 with Animation, World Machine Professional, 1300 XFrog plant objects, and several free choices of NWDA presets and objects, and more.
>> More Information

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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Sony 3D Film Competition


+ Call for Entries has been announced for Sony stereoscopic 3D Film Competition. The competition is for budding 3D filmmakers to have the chance to have their work showcased on a 3D Blu-ray Disc that will be given away free with new Sony TVs (Sony BRAVIA 3D TV). Sony is looking for stereoscopic 3D shorts made to work with active shutter technology (ie NOT red-blue anaglyph). Each video sequence should, preferable, be around 5-10 minutes in length. 3D film may consist of character animation, a VFX sequence, motion graphics or a particularly cool arch-viz flythrough. The key factors are that it’s of a professional standard, has good quality stereo 3D, and is suitable for family viewing. The competition is open to anyone capable of producing a stereo 3D video sequence – be it a new short from scratch or re-rendering an existing project in stereo 3D. The closing date for entries is Friday 9th July 2010.You’ll need to render two sequences as single stream progressive scan 1920×1080 24fps (using any codec that plays back on a current non-3D PlayStation 3) with stereo sound – one for right eye, one for left.
>> More Information

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mental ray 3.8 for 3ds Max 2011



+ CGSociety has published an nice artcile by Jamie Cardoso, who takes a in-depth look at the rendering capabilities of mental ray 3.8 in 3ds Max 2011. mental ray® is a rendering software which generates images of outstanding quality and unsurpassed realism. It combines the physically correct simulation of the behavior of light with full programmability for the creation of any imaginable visual phenomena. Snippet: The standalone mental ray 3.8 is fully equipped with numerous powerful features such as Iray rendering mode; stereoscopic rendering; IBL mode, etc. However, while some of these new features are not yet fully integrated with 3ds Max, and others are only available via the command line or via plug-ins such as ctrl_ghost_settings. Actually, some of the existing parameters of the ctrl_ghost_settings plug-in are still being optimised. Finally, Pro materials’ shaders currently being used in earlier versions of Max are now automatically replaced by the new standard Autodesk shaders, when........Read On!!

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Saturday, May 15, 2010

CGFilm: Levity - Xero Error Minus1



+ UAE's First Computer Generated Scifi film Premieres at Gulf Film Festival 2010 and selected for the upcoming Cannes International Film Festival 2010 in May. 'Levity - Xero Error Minus1' is U.A.E’s first Computer Generated Sci-Fi film. It premiered at the Gulf Film Festival 2010 - On April 10th & 11th to a full house, rave reviews and resounding applause. For its international premiere it got accepted at the upcoming 2010 Edition of Festival De Cannes in May. It will be featured at Various other international film festivals throughout the year.
'Levity - Xero Error Minus1' will become part of a series of CG films in the ‘Xero Error’ universe. These films are planned as events in history that are witnessed by the time traveling cyborg hero XE7. Created, scripted and directed by Ashraf Ghori, this 8 minute film was produced by Xpanse CGI an animation studio based in Dubai Media City. The voice acting for this short was provided by 9 Dubai-based talents, with a team of 7 behind its production. It took 4 months to complete the production with a budget of $40,000. Director Ashraf Ghori began initial groundwork on Xero Error two years ago and has since gained a steady fan following for Xero Error from 88 countries worldwide. Xpanse CGI plans on a full length Xero Error feature film which will be announced at a later date.
>> Watch the trailer video

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V-Ray 1.50.SP5 for 3ds Max


+ Chaos Group is glad to announce the availability of the new V-Ray 1.50.SP5. The new build adds compatibility with 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011 and includes new features, together with many modified and improved ones. The list of additions and bug fixes is listed below. The new service pack is available for immediate download from Chaos Group website download section.
Some of V-Ray New features and updates Includes:
*Added VRaySamplerInfoTex texture and VRaySamplerInfo render element
*Added VRayObjectSelect render element which allows to extract objects with specific IDs
*Added an option to the VRayPhysicalCamera to perform image distortion based on a texture map
*Allow the user to specify texture bounds for 3d displacement
*Added displacement slot to VRayFastSSS2 material
*Added displacement slot to VRayLightMtl material
*Added "prepass id" parameter to VRayFastSSS2 material so that multiple materials can share the same illumination map

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Genetica Texture Pack 6 and Viewer 3.5


+ Spiral Graphics Inc. has released its sixth free seamless texture pack, with 136 path and plant textures that can be used royalty-free in game, movie, and other art-related projects. The new pack makes extensive use of the texture synthesis ability recently added to Genetica 3.5. Texture synthesis allows artists to easily create seamless textures from photographs. Genetica Viewer, Spiral Graphics' free texture rendering tool, has also been updated to version 3.5. The updated Viewer is able to open texture files created with version 3.5 of Genetica, meaning that it too can now render textures based on photographic sources. Spiral Graphics Inc. is a software development firm focused on creating innovative software tools for the computer graphics community.
>> Viewer 3.5
>> Texture Pack 6

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DAZ 3D - Digimi Game Developer Kit


+ Extending the use of its renowned 3D content and toolsets toward game developers, DAZ 3D-Gizmoz today announced the availability of the Digimi Game Developer Kit, which allows users of DAZ Studio to create and customize high-quality 3D characters and directly export them into their favorite game engine. DAZ 3D-Gizmoz has additionally instated a brand new content catalog, dedicated specifically to game developers, which further enhances game development possibilities by providing fully licensed content and models for distribution within any project or pipeline. With tools that allow artists to easily customize levels of detail, reduce model mesh and texture sizes, and improve overall pipeline performance, the Digimi Game Developer Kit includes the following tools:
Decimator for DAZ Studio - Enabling drastic polygon reduction to complete models or selected objects by either a percentage or fixed number of polygons, users may utilize the decimator to create any number of Levels of Detail to accommodate any game engine.
Texture Atlas for DAZ Studio - Users can easily combine, size, scale or convert their textures into a single texture map. This yields the opportunity to reduce the size of the textures and scale, or convert them to other image formats to fit game engine compatibility.
FBX Plug-in for DAZ Studio- Morphs, skeletons, cameras, weightmaps and animations may all be exported, directly from DAZ Studio and into any preferred game engine, utilizing standard FBX format.

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Best of Times - An Innovative New Animation Project


+ Best of Times is an project by experimental filmmaker and animator, Jeff Scher. Scher's work has appeared in museums worldwide and also in the NY Times Opinionator Blog. His commissioned work includes a music video for Bob Dylan and short films for HBO, IFC, Nickelodeon, PBS, and the Sundance Channel. Scher teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Kanbar Institute of Film & Television's Animation program and at the School of Visual Arts MFA Graphic Design program. This new project is in the form of a Vook, a mixed-media e-book. The Vook, called Best of Times, includes 14 of his animated films, along with accompanying brief, meditative essays. It's available for viewing on a Web browser, and as an iPhone and iPad app. This project is a red-letter moment in the synthesis of animation and computer graphics. It represents the increasing number of unique opportunities developing for digital artists and animators.
>> More Information

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