Autodesk announced yesterday that Discreet Flame was coming to the Linux platform, which was exciting news for the Flame community. Early Tuesday in Tokyo, the Autodesk Japan site posted information regarding Inferno for Linux being shown at InterBEE. In an fxpodcast exclusive, we speak with Bill Roberts of Autodesk about the recent introductions and get the real translation.

Updated Wednesday afternoon with exclusive fxPodcast

Paul Debevec opened his talk at SIGGRAPH 2005 by showing some images created by teenager Nick Bertle who had used HDR to have his favourite Half Life characters rock up at his place and hang out. Bertle has fast become a phenomenom for his work in HDR — all before he has left high school. fxguide caught up with him to discuss HDR CGI for part 3 of our “Away from Live Action” series.

In this part 2 of our series on post away from normal live action – we look at great new spot from XYZ studios in Melbourne which exploits the most fundamental pencil drawing style to produce a dynamic and entertaining spot for Honda kids Bikes.

This is part one of a new exclusive 3 part series about projects that stay away from traditional live action and instead use animation as their primary focus. These projects range from traditional pencil animation to stop frame, CGI and even origami. We examine how they’re approached in the digital age. We start by looking at the Promax award winner for Nickelodeon’s “Misfit Monsters”. You can also download a comphensive “making of” quicktime.

After more than a year of development, Eyeon Software’s Fusion 5 began shipping over the last several weeks. The new version boasts numerous improvements, the highlight of which is a new 3D compositing environment in the procedural workflow. In this week’s fxpodcast we speak with Isaac Guenard, Senior Product Manager for Eyeon, about the new features in the software and how they have been received by the users.

This week we breakdown shots from the Bill Paxton directed period golf drama, The Greatest Game Ever Played.
“Bill wanted the camera to be another character in the film,” says Dennis Berardi, Visual Effects Supervisor for the film. “He wanted dynamic, exciting shots to put the audience right into the action.” In addition to our fxpodcast covering work by the Mr. X visual effects team, our online print story also features the inventors of Flying-Cam who p

On October 26th in Sydney, Apple begins a three-day Shake SDK seminar. The event will provide an in-depth introduction as well as detailed information on writing plugins using the SDK. In this weeks fxpodcast, we talk about Shake version 4.0 and the SDK with Dion Scoppettuolo, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Apple’s Shake and Motion

In this week’s podcast we talk to Don Shay, the publisher of the world’s leading authority and publication of record for the visual effects industry: Cinefex.

Updated with coverage of Autodesk-Alias joint press conference

After the market close today, Autodesk announced an agreement to acquire Alias for $182 million dollars in cash. Obviously, there are a ton more questions than answers right now, but the fact that Maya is going to be a part of the same company that produces 3DS Max is quite interesting. And now maybe we’ll see Maya camera import in flame….

In this week’s fxpodcast, we discuss the recent release of Autodesk’s Smoke 7 editing product. Our two guests were beta testers for the release and are able to provide insight into the product as they have been using the product for months. We also talk about Smoke’s support for the Final Cut Pro XML standard with Stephane Labrie of Autodesk. What exactly is XML and is it simply an industry buzzword for a text file?

In this week’s fxpodcast, we take a look at Apple’s Motion 2 which brings with it a new fxPlug architecture that allows plugin developers to more easily access the GPU in order to dramatically speed up processing. We look at it from both a Motion-specific angle as well as more general in nature — such as will multi-core CPUs remove the need for GPU speedups? We also examine an offering of new sets of HD resolution Motion templates.