Autodesk announced today that developers of its Autodesk Maya Fluid Effects System have been awarded Technical Achievement Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Maya Fluid Effects System allows digital artists to create realistic animation of liquids and gases, using novel simulation techniques for accuracy and speed, as well as a […]

The 6th Annual VES Awards were held on Feb. 10, 2008 at the Kodak Theatre Grand Ballroom in Hollywood by the Visual Effects Society. Dennis Muren presented Steven Spielberg with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award. This award recognizes the contribution that his vast body of work, as both a director and producer, has made to […]

An article at TV Technology.com spills the beans that Apple will not be having a booth at NAB this year. This follows an announcement in November last year by Avid that they weren’t going to be having a booth in Vegas. Apple has been missing from the list of NAB 2008 exhibitors, so this news […]

Nuke 4.8v1 is now available to download from The Foundry web site. Nuke 4.8v1 includes several feature enhancements, increased stability, and numerous bug fixes. With Nuke 5.0 on the horizon, The Foundry is releasing Nuke 4.8v1 for customers with projects in progress who choose not to upgrade to Nuke 5.0 until their projects have completed. […]

Nominations for the 80th Annual Academy Awards were announced today (Tuesday, January 22) by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis and Oscar® winner Kathy Bates. For Achievement in Visual Effects the nominated films are: The Golden Compass Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End Transformers To reach these nominations seven films […]

This episode features an interview with members of the ILM vfx crew from “Transformers”. The fxphd.com tip shows taking an aerial shot that was filmed from a light plane and turning the footage into the kind of smooth move you would expect from a helicopter with an expensive camera mount. This tip is done by […]

fxphd.com worked on two short films that are in competition in the Sundance Film Festival. Each day for 10 days Sundance makes available one film for free and on the first day (Jan. 18th, 2008) it was “I Love Sarah Jane”. The other film, “Spider” is scheduled to be the closing film of the ten […]

Boris Continuum Complete’s Snow filter is an auto-animated snow generator which can composite snow over a sky color or an image layer. The filter offers extensive options for customizing the effect and allows you to create drifts or make flakes pile up along the edges of an alpha channel. Download the Free Snow Filter Boris […]

January08 term classes start next week over at our online vfx training sister site fxphd.com. We’ve got over 10 new courses with over 30 offerings in total. We’ve got some great new design based courses with Tim Clapham from hypa.tv in the UK, an Apple Motion course taught by Damien Allen, and even a Typography […]

The Visual Effects Society (VES) today announced the nominees for the 6th Annual VES Awards ceremony recognizing outstanding visual effects in over a dozen categories of film, television, commercials and video games. Nominees were chosen Saturday, January 5, 2008 by numerous panels of VES members who viewed submissions at the FotoKem screening facilities in Burbank. […]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced 10 winners of Scientific and Technical Academy Awards, which will be presented at The Beverly Wilshire on Saturday, February 9, 2008. Unlike other Academy Awards, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during 2007. Rather, the achievements must demonstrate […]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that seven films remain in contention for Achievement in Visual Effects for the 80th Academy Awards

Variety is reporting that The Motion Picture Academy’s Oscar will be decided from “Beowulf,” “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Evan Almighty,” “The Golden Compass,” “Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix,” “I Am Legend,” “Live Free Or Die Hard,” “National Treasure: Book Of Secrets,” “Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Ratatouille,” “Spider-Man 3,” “Sunshine,” “300,” […]

From the press releases on NVIDIA site and Mental Images, the chip maker based in Santa Clara, CA has bought Mental Images (Berlin, Germany), makers of Mental Ray. Cash or share details of the transaction are yet to be published. NVIDIA has seen its share price swing between $25 a share to $37 and back […]

A new episode of fxguidetv is available for your viewing pleasure. This week’s episode includes an interview with Theo Bialak, CG Supervisor for Sony Pictures Imageworks, who chats with us about the work that went into Beowulf. We caught up with Bialak at the Digital Media World conference in Sydney. The fxphd.com tip of the […]

There are two stories about visual effects by David S. Cohen in Variety today. Vfx supervisors increasingly important explores how the role has expanded as technology allows us to create lead characters and complete environments, crossing all departments. Should Oscar honor animation effects? discusses the role of visual effects in animated films and how that […]

A group has formed to encourage both sides in the writers strike to come together and reach a deal. They are staging a rally and march this weekend at Hollywood and Highland. From the organizers web site: We are not organized or sponsored by any union, guild or association. We are a spontaneous grass-roots outgrowth […]

In this week’s 100th fxpodcast we talk to Lee Wilson of Anthem FX about the companies amazing work on this weekend’s Tin Man miniseries, which premieres Sunday Dec 2nd 9/8c. As this is our 100th episode we just wanted to thank all of you for listening and supporting the podcast. We really appreciate it and […]

In our last fxguidetv episode, we visited Prime Focus in Mumbai and chatted with two of their smoke editors about their Cannes award-winning spot. The company is one of the largest in India and had been looking to acquire more companies in addition to their stake in the UK-based VTR Group. News came across the […]

Finally. A press release came across the wire announcing Combustion 2008 for Macintosh and Windows. While a full list of features wasn’t provided with the release, it did make mention of the addition of the Colour Warper from flame. Click through to read the press release…..

Mark Stasiuk, co-founder and fluid fx guru at Fusion CI Studios, has been facing tsunami-sized demands for fluid fx work these days — from commercial work, to network idents, to feature film. Fusion focuses exclusively on fluid and particle fx and as a result has become an invaluable resource for production companies and vfx houses […]

John Montgomery visits Prime Focus in Mumbai to discuss post production in India and look at an award winning commercial produced there titled “Happy Dent Palace”. Jaynat Hadke and Sabu Joseph of Prime Focus are John’s guests and discuss the market, break down the spot and show other work. The tip of the week shows […]

Sapphire Plug-ins 4.03 for Autodesk systems is now released and available for download from: http://www.genarts.com/sapphire-sparks.html This fixes a problem with certain combinations of sparks in Batch and some issues with LensFlareAutotrackMask. This is a free maintenance release for version 4 customers and will work with your existing v4 license. If you have not yet upgraded […]

Beverly Hills, CA – Making stops at King Kong’s Skull Island and Darth Vader’s Death Star, the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will take audiences on a movie matte painting journey on Monday, December 10, at 8 p.m. at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. “Fantastic Reality: […]

Cooke Optics Introduces RED Set of S4/i Lenses for the RED ONE Camera . Cooke Optics has announced a new Cooke RED Set, a package of four standard Cooke S4/i lenses offering a range of focal lengths from 15mm through 100 mm. The lenses incorporate /i metadata capture technology that can be read directly by […]

The new commercial for Honda Odyssey lives up to the vehicle’s name, taking viewers on an unexpected ride with the iconography of a time when people knew to “Respect the Van.” Created by design/production company Nylon, the spot uses visual wizardry (literally) to brand one of the leading minivans in the category.

Ken Cato of Cato Purnell & Partner recently completed a 3D title design sequence for the UK feature film Elizabeth: The Golden Age, at Iloura in Melbourne. Ken Cato was approached by renowned Australian editor Jill Bilcock (credits include: Romeo+Juliet, Mouline Rouge, Elizabeth) to create a stylised title sequence for the film. The title sequence […]