Each year The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences extends invitations to join the academy. The 2014 invitees for Visual Effects are

Award season begins with the announcement of nominations for the 66th Annual Emmy Awards.

A conversation with artists from MastersFX about how they bring to life Falling Skies’ Cochise with practical and digital fx.

DreamWorks Animation vfx sup. Dave Walvoord talks about the studio’s new animation & lighting toolset, and about working with DOP Roger Deakins.

Real marionettes, actor stand-ins and CG models helped make up DirecTV’s new ‘marionette’ TVCs, with vfx from The Mill.

See how MPC made the Sentinels in this exclusive look from our WIRED series

The Foundry announced today the launch of OCULA 4, the latest version of its software plug-in toolset for NUKE, designed to address the problems with stereoscopic imagery. Get the details about what is new in this exclusive.

Weta Workshop and the early character design work they did on the iconic Godzilla.

We explore the Zebedee 3D mapping system which uses a handheld LIDAR scanner to map indoor and outdoor areas.

Cinefex has uncovered a new side to the revered stop motion and effects ‘pioneer’ Willis O’Brien.

We talk to Dutch studio The Ambassadors about their work from start to finish on a fully CG ‘claymation’ animated television commercial.

A new book presents storyboards and concept art discovered in the Lucasfilm archives from the original Star Wars trilogy.

Watch how Sony Pictures Imageworks turned Jamie Foxx into Electro for The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

In our final report from FMX2014, we cover the announcement that Cinema 4D will be supporting the Houdini Engine as well as have a sneak peek at the upcoming RealFlow 2014.

In a real world operation, ‘Sweetie” was a completely virtual girl rendered in Arnold and driven in realtime by an operator, then used in chat rooms to interact with internet predators.

We have a variety of sessions in our third recap from FMX. This includes a panel discussion on applying animation pipelines to vfx, the Arnold Renderer workshop, Shotgun, Rush, and Paul Debevec.

FMX day two, with a variety of presentations on films, commercials, animation, and more. With some help from Matt Leonard, we recap a few of the day’s offerings including the sneak peek at Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Find out what’s new in The Foundry’s latest release of MODO.

FMX 2014 got underway in Stuttgart, Germany on Tuesday. Over the years, this has become Europe’s premiere VFX related conference and this year is no exception. We recap some of the highlights from the first day, with help from fxphd prof Matt Leonard.

Behind the scenes of two recent TVCs for Evian and Nissan with VFX by Mikros Image and Digital Domain.