At Pixar, Renderman NT is shipping, making the popular rendering software used in most visual effects films available to a much larger user base. However, Larry Gritz, developer of BMRT (available for download at www.bmrt.org/), the shareware rendering software most recently utilized in HOLLOW MAN and THE CELL, and co-author of ADVANCED RENDERMAN: CREATING CGI FOR MOTION PICTURES, is no longer with Pixar, though the hope is BMRT development will continue.

At the Ottawa International Animation Festival, Animation Toolworks introduced a completely new electronic audio-video device for animators, the LunchBox Sync. The LunchBox Sync is a successor to their Video LunchBox, which enables animators to test their work in progress instantly and eliminate time-consuming errors by monitoring pacing, lighting, audio synchronization and registration. The LunchBox Sync captures still images from a video camera and plays back this sequence of images at the same rate as film or television.

SGI, once the forefront graphic workstation provider, is trying to regain past success, by recently acquiring Intergraph, releasing Open Source Inventor and embracing Linux. The company is hopeful this approach to open source will lead to more interest in SGI's software portfolio. The Intergraph acquisition will allow SGI a more competitive stance in the PC workstation arena. The hope is these moves will lead to a viable turnaround path for further success and profitability. To learn more about SGI’s products visit their Website.

Fluid dynamics has been an emerging technique in CG, with several productions utilizing dynamics in features such as PERFECT STORM and U-571 and several software companies, like Alias and Realflow, are developing fluid software. Is applying dynamics to forestry and foliage, for natural wind and lifelike shadowing effects, the next application to use natural physical dynamics? We'll see. . .

Messiah, the plug-in softbody and character module for Lightwave, has developed a stand alone package, messiah:studio, that should prove to be strong competition to 3D software packages. With Renderman capabilities, a low price tag (US$1600), softbodies for creating cloth and realistic characters, inverse kinematics for simplified animation, and radiosity for realistic rendering, it will be interesting to see how other packages react to messiah's strengths.

High Dynamic Range Imaging is quickly becoming a prevalent digital technique. The ability to light quickly to live-action footage with such accuracy and quality is unmatched by any other technique. Lightwave has already incorporated HDRI into its latest release. Which other packages will follow suit? Rendering with HDRI is time consuming, but will the strong points overcome the deficits? The high quality results of THE MATRIX work by Manex, and the James Brown project, FUNK BLAST by Digital Domain suggest much more work in HDRI will be created as CPU's gain speed and the software evolves.

At the Apple World Wide Developers Conference Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, announced that Alias|Wavefront would be bringing out a version of Maya 3 for the Apple MAC OS X platform. Until now, Maya has only been available for high-end workstations including Windows NT and IRIX. This announcement is a significant one for both Apple and Alias|Wavefront, as well as for MAC users. Apple is poising Maya as the "premier 3D application for the MAC." With Newtek's Lightwave [6] as its only real competitor, Alias|Wavefront's flagship product will probably turn out to be just that.

Autonomous Effects recently released a new version of their SceneGenie plug-in suite for match-moving and combining live-action footage with CGI. The new version is available now, and boasts features like 3D tracking, an easy to use interface, faster tracking tools, optimizations and much more. Priced at US$995, SceneGenie 1.2 is available as a plug-in for 3D Studio MAX 2.5, 3.0 and 3.1.

Alias|Wavefront announced this week that the fifth major release of their Maya next-generation animation software will feature a universal rendering policy that enables Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited to "float" the Maya Batch Renderer across any number of machines. This new announcement furthers Alias|Wavefront's aim at synergy between all of Maya's tools throughout the production and post-production process and Alias|Wavefront's earlier announcement that Maya 3 will feature a new Trax compositing system further backs up this position.

Discreet, the producers of high-end 3D and 2D computer graphics tools this week launched their new unified paint, animation and 3D visual effects system: combustion*. The Macintosh and Windows NT-based system offers a single, unified paint, animation and 3D-compositing environment for visual effects creation. combustion* features Academy Award-winning technology from inferno* and an extremely fast caching architecture for igniting the desktops and creative imaginations of digital visual effects artists world wide.