Ed Catmull, president and co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, announced at a SIGGRAPH press conference that Pixar will integrate NXN alienbrain VFX into its production process to provide media asset management for its upcoming CG film projects. NXN alienbrain VFX is the first of its kind digital asset and production management system designed specifically for high-end computer graphics projects.

Caligari Corporation's trueSpace6, the
latest version of its award-winning 3D modeling and animation
program, is now available. Caligari has added more than two dozen new
features to trueSpace6, allowing for more powerful modeling and
design, as well as increased functionality for game developers,
professional engineers and designers. New trueSpace6 features include
full color-coded layers to make creating complex models easier; a new
Scene Editor that combines six trueSpace editors (objects,

At SIGGRAPH 2002, Discreet announced and demonstrated for the first time its character studio 4, the latest extension to Discreet's 3ds max animation software. character studio 4 includes significant enhancements designed to provide animators an easy-to-use system. Additions such as a non-linear animation mixer, an animation analyzer and fixer and Quaternion Function Curves were implemented to help expand users' character animation techniques and capabilities.

SplutterFish, LLC, a 3D software solutions provider, announced at SIGGRAPH 2002 the launch of its Brazil Rendering System v1.0, a fully-integrated rendering suite for Discreet's 3ds max and Autodesk VIZ.

At New York's MacWorld Expo,
Alias|Wavefront announced Maya 4.5, the seventh major release of its
popular Maya 3D animation software. With this new release, Maya for
Mac OS X will be synchronized with Maya on other supported hardware
platforms. Current Maya for Mac OS X users will benefit from a
substantial number of feature additions and enhancements including
new modeling tools, integrated 3D Paint, multi-processor support for
rendering and numerous UI and workflow enhancements. "Maya 4.5 for

At the SIGGRAPH 2002
conference, Side Effects Software has announced Houdini Halo, a
stand-alone compositing and image-editing application, which will be
available in the fourth quarter of 2002. Houdini Halo is the newest
addition to the Houdini family of 3D software products, which also
includes Houdini Master, Houdini Select and Houdini Escape. Halo's
features include an interactive, visual way of creating custom
shaders, composite operators and more, without the need to write

This week at SIGGRAPH 2002, 3D animation software developer Kaydara,
Inc. has announced that both Discreet and NewTek products will
support Kaydara's FBX file format. Discreet will integrate support
for FBX into upcoming versions of its 3D animation and visual effects
software, including 3ds max, inferno, flame and flint. FBX is a 3D
file interchange format that allows for the universal interchange of
3D data between every major 3D package and a number of second-tier
applications. "Discreet is excited by the numerous opportunities

This
week at SIGGRAPH 2002 (Booth #8062), Discreet announced new product
releases for its visual effects and compositing systems inferno 5,
flame 8 and flint 8. According to Discreet, these latest versions
include software architecture modifications designed to improve
post-production workflow by offering digital artists increased
freedom, flexibility and speed. New features include support for
mixed resolutions, enabling artists to combine various film, video,
graphics and other multimedia formats within one project at any

NVIDIA Corporation announced from SIGGRAPH 2002 that it is open sourcing the NVIDIA Cg
Compiler technology under a nonrestrictive, free license. Available
in August 2002 for download from the developer.nvidia.com and
www.cgshaders.org Websites, this code will contain the parser that
reads the language and creates intermediate code for compilation, as
well as a generic back-end. Together, these components provide
everything required to create optimized Cg compilers for other

Belmont, California-based LifeMode Interactive, Inc. has released LifeStudio: Head, a complete facial animation solution for interactive game and multimedia developers. Created using LifeMode's Macro-Muscle proprietary technology, LifeStudio: Head Tools allows artists to quickly create a wide variety of characters, complete with photo-realistic textures, real-time animation and lip-syncing.