Massive announced today that they’re shipping the new 3.5 version of their software. New Agent Fields handle local interactions between large numbers of agents for such things as collision avoidance, pedestrian visualization and flocking. Users can define an area, or field, around an agent in which another agent’s proximity, orientation, velocity, direction and color can be assessed.

If any event could challenge the Super Bowl for outstanding TV advertising it is the Olympics. This week saw a round of amazing and arresting new spots hit the airwaves. A spot that really caught our attention is an amazing United Airlines Sea Orchestra spot, one of five major spots that will be shown during […]

Many readers will know Richard Szalwinski as one of the founders of Discreet Logic. After having left Discreet a while ago, Richard and a few other ex Discreet friends such as Mike Hughes have surfaced at a new company called Xtranormal. The company produces visualization software based on natural speech and produces simple 3D video […]

fxguidetv is back this week with a special pre-SIGGRAPH episode. Mike Seymour recently sat down with Paul Debevec to catch up on the research Debevec and his team have been doing. It’s very interesting stuff, including a cool discussion about separating the specular and subsurface properties of skin and how it relates to creating high […]

Red Giant, one of our favorite plugin vendors, has acquired the motion plugin portfolio of Digital Anarchy. The plugins include PlaneSpace (formerly 3D Assistant Lite/Pro), a 3D layer animation tool; Datamator (formerly Data Animator), which creates and animates charts and graphs in 3D space; Psunami (formerly Psunami Water), a photorealistic water and wave generator; ToonIt (formerly […]

A revised Red Centre Episode #011 is up – we had some killer server issues this week, but it is all solved and we are sorry for the delay. This week we discuss workflow from a personal point of view. We discuss Jason’s recent baby TVC spot – which was shot all on RED. We […]

After an early summer hiatus, fxguidetv is back on the net. We haven’t abandoned the podcast, but simply had a lot of other work to get done as well had a couple of interviews back out. We know our fxguide visitors love the netcasts and we simply want to keep them at a high level. […]

In this weeks podcast we talk to Motion Theory in California. We speak with Nick Losq (VFX Supervisor) and Matt Winkel (VFX Producer) about their work and the powerful mini-studio concept that they have helped build in Motion Theory the company.

A revised Red Centre episode #009 has been posted, which corrects the issues with the audio towards the end of the podcast. This week the attention is on Shutters with the boys back from shooting Kung Fu in China. RC interviews DOP Peter Holland and talk to Toyko based Paul Leeming in the Red Room. […]

We announced our new July 08 term over at fxphd today and have a line up of 29 courses this term — including a record 15 new courses. This includes a new advanced DOP course covering RED, a miniatures and stop motion course, an advanced After Effects offering with some serious compositing and graphics, and […]

In this week’s Red Centre the guys finally talk about build 16 and explain both the immediate benefit of the new version and also explain some of the the theory behind the improvements. Plus News, Reviews and the Red Room.

In this fxpodcast we talk with Chris Sage, VP of operations at Luma Pictures, an artist driven facility in Venice California that does high end visual effects. From time to time we like to do facility profiles rather than stories about specific films or techniques. Luma Pictures initially caught our attention because they promoted themselves […]

This episode the guys chat with Cinematographer Geoff Boyle, founder of the Cinematography Mailing List, about his recent stereo 3D RED feature film. They also chat about lighting and introduce their first guest into… The RED Room. All this and the winner of last week’s quiz in the “Pimp My RED” competition. If you haven’t […]

REALVIZ was a unique company, one of the first to solve and commercialize a range of outstanding visual effects tools ranging from panoramic Stitching to 3D Tracking. The fxguide founders actually visited REALVIZ about 2 years ago in its location just outside of Cannes, France. This visit cemented our opinion about the quality of the […]

The Visual Effects Society (VES) has published the first ever set of VES guidelines for titles in the visual effects industry. The list has been vetted by VES members and ratified by the VES Board of Directors. Major studios have reviewed the list as well and are encouraged to utilize it. “Through these collective efforts, […]

We’ve got one of the new Autodesk HP xw8600 systems fired up at the fxphd loft in Chicago. The new systems started shipping last month and we got it quickly up and running and paying the bills. But before we shut down our old IBM6217 system, we took the time to run our fxguide suite […]

A new redcenter podcast is now live on the site. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the RSS feed or iTunes podcast on our redcenter page.  We also now have downloadable shownotes in pdf format available on the redcentre page.  It’s a big show this week as the guys look at the RED’s new Nikon mount, […]