The Finishing School at the NFTS, a Discreet Training Centre based at the UK’s National Film and TV School is running a new 6 month part-time course featuring Combustion, 3DS Max, Flame and Smoke entitled The Visual Effects Artist and Animators Program (or VFXA2 for short).

One of the first “third-party” Training Books for Combustion V2.0 will be called Combustion Ground Rules, written by Todd Petersen (Published by Delmar Learning) and is scheduled for release in October 2002.

In the first of our chats with fellow compositors, we talk to the team at Rhonda Graphics Studios who have just brought musical instruments to life for a new animated 30 min project. The team discuss their views on After Effects and Flame, as well as a few Final Cut Pro tricks they developed.

Latest Version of Discreet’s Flagship 3D Software will be launched at Siggraph.

Version 5 is a highly interesting release, adding Radioisty technology to the very popular animation software.

There are many new features, in modeling, user interface, renderfarm management but it is the radiosity technology that Discreet has now combined into Max that is of perhaps most interest, especially given the lack of radiosity in the products bigg

Quantel held a presentation today on their generationQ product line at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.

UPDATE: More information added from Discreet.

Discreet restructures and changes some staff. Some old faces are gone, some new
blood has been hired.

Post Magazine online, has disclosed that Discreet’s biggest news announcement for this year’s SIGGRAPH show centers around its 3ds max animation, modeling and rendering software. Version 5 is designed to offer animators and artists better control over the creation, animation and management of animated characters. Most significant to Fxguide readers in that Post reports MAX 5 has radiosity.

According to the Silicon Grail website, Apple has acquired technologies from Silicon Grail, including the RAYZ and Chalice product lines…..

Technical Animations just came out with their first Combustion v2 Training Video/DVD from. Here is a brief review written by Jack Pfeiffer, who is a demo artist and trainer for a discreet dealer in Denmark.

“we’re getting results in a matter of minutes and its just great to see it all working straight off. Boujou takes the tedium out of match moving”

-Will Bylkes Head of Aardman’s CG dept.

FXGuide caught up with Chris Steele CEO of 2d3D recently to discuss their market leading Boujou tracking software and sneak a peak at their new “Pixel Dust” product.

Following up on NAB and our coverage of Colossus, we wanted to get more information on what 5D is doing and their other products. We spoke recently with J Miguel Ferros, Products Manager for 5D Solutions about Cyborg, Colossus, Commander, Monster Sparks and more…