pmG (project:messiah Group), the producers of the award-winning project:messiah 3D animation package, have recently revamped the company Website. The re-launch expands greatly on the previous version, adding strong news and informational components, a library of 25 easy to download MPEG-1 sample animations and promotes and sells online the company's full line of products, including project:messiah 1.5, the messiah:studio suite, messiah:animate and messiah:render.

Japanese software developer ExpressionTools, Inc. has released ExpressionToolsShade Professional R4/E (ETShade Pro R4/E), an English language version of their high-end 3D graphics application. With a fifteen-year history behind it, Shade offers an outstanding and intuitive user interface, leveraging Bezier curve modeling and high speed/high quality rendering. In Japan, Shade has been the leading tool for professional graphics, 3D design, industrial design and architecture, with user-base numbers in excess of 200,000.

Alias|Wavefront has signed an agreement with Microsoft Corp. to become an official tools and middleware developer for the Xbox Video Game System. Xbox, Microsoft's next-generation gaming system scheduled for release this fall, is positioned to become one of the most advanced on the market. Alias|Wavefront's Maya software, with its powerful modeling and animation toolsets and its open, extensible API is strongly established in the game development market as the package of choice for top quality interactive entertainment with many of the top-selling next-generation games producers.

Nothing Real, the producer of popular compositing tool Shake, has announced that their new Tremor compositing system has entered into worldwide beta testing. Tremor is a front room, client-based compositing solution, engineered to handle the most demanding needs of HDTV, commercial video and broadcast production professionals. The product is built around a new, simplified and streamlined interface and incorporates the mature and production proven technology based on Shake's rendering engine. Tremor will be sold as an integrated compositing hardware/software product.

Giant Studios' new animated short film FRUITS OF LABOR premiered this week in San Jose, California, and received a warm and enthusiastic response. The film features a cast of simple computer graphics characters - a shiny red apple, a man and a fly - animated in a stylized way and rendering with startling photo-realism. Rudy Poat, creative director for the project described the look as being, "something that looks like stop-motion and that fooled both the mind and the eye.

QEDSoft's QEDStream product line now natively supports the Kaydara FBX format. QEDStream users are now able to read FBX files, simplifying their production pipeline and enabling Web-content creation from the Kaydara suite of real-time 3D authoring tools. Designed to provide an authoring hub between major 3D packages, FBX provides a centralized working file format for vendors wishing to acquire, author and retarget 3D data and animation. "Using FBX and QEDStream in combination provides a superb channel for streaming both current and legacy content on the Web," said Michel Veys, COO of QEDSoft.

This week, Adobe has been teasing us with a taster of what's to come in their long-awaited upgrade to their compositing software After Effects. In order to compete with other packages on the market (namely Discreet combustion), Adobe has broken After Effects into two packages - a Standard version and a Production Bundle.

On March 6, 2001, U.K.-based Kelseus will release Version 1 of CLOTH, a new plug-in for 3D Studio MAX. CLOTH produces highly realistic animation of clothes on animated figures and objects, taking into account all of the cloth geometry that collides with another object - not just the vertices. It also boasts complete integration with Max Dynamic Effects such as the Wind and Gravity Space Warps, and it can maintain libraries of cloth materials, which can be re-used between scenes.

REALVIZ and Alias|Wavefront are now offering REALVIZ's award-winning ImageModeler to all new customers of Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited. ImageModeler provides computer graphics professionals with more intuitive and innovative image-based solutions to complex production challenges for the creation of graphics and visual effects for film, broadcast, game development and the Internet.

Sony Computer Entertainment of America has recently installed a 16 M-Series Camera (MCam) Real-Time Vicon 8 system in their 5,000-square-foot motion-capture studio. The system, which can capture the nuances of multiple actors simultaneously, will be used in the development of games for Sony's new PlayStation 2 system. "Vicon 8 motion-capture technology is a state-of-the-art hardware and software system with no equal in the industry," stated Jason Parks, motion-capture manager, Sony Computer Entertainment America.