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The premiere of the upcoming sequel to the cult hit Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049 (directed by Denis Villeneuve who recently directed Arrival), is being promoted through the release of three related shorts before the film hits theaters. These shorts were directed by three different artists. The first one of the films is called 2036 Nexus Dawn and was directed by Luke Scott (son of Ridley Scott, the director of the original Blade Runner). As implied by its name, the short (and the two upcoming ones) will cover what has transpired between the original Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. You can watch 2036 Nexus Dawn on Youtube.

The popular and pioneering renderer RenderMan has received the showreel treatment covering the work done by many talented studios and artists over the last year. Watch it on Vimeo.

After the recent large price drop of Fusion Studio, Statixvfx decided to release a pack of defaults that will make Fusion behave more like Nuke. This means that you'll get hotkeys that are bound to their Nuke equivalent as well as similar screen layouts and nodes. If you have ideas to make Fusion behave even more like Nuke you are encouraged to contribute. Get the files on Github.

AV3 Software has gone online with an interview with Neil Bloomkamp's Oat Studios and how they have used photogrammetry on the shorts the studio has produced. Chris Harvey, the studio's VFX supervisor, explains the process in the article that you can find by going to AV3 Software's website.

With videos still trickling in from SIGGRAPH 2017, SideFX is the latest company to post their presentations online. These are generally educationally oriented covering a number of areas of the latest version of Houdini. You can watch all the videos on .

Pixar is previewing features from the upcoming release of RenderMan. Among others, "XPU" rendering was showcased which is their definition of being able to render and take advantage of both the CPU and GPU. Another feature mentioned includes "always-on" rendering allowing for instant response to users changing geometry, cameras, lights and materials. Read more on Pixar's website.

Author behind several popular Maxscripts, Miauu, has released a new commercial script for €6 that allows you to replace several objects with other objects. Features include the ability to match original objects' transformation, material, dimensions, name, layer, parent and more. Read more on Miauu's website.

Edd Biddulph has been working on a real-time GPU Path tracer that he has implemented into ID Software's game Quake 2 and has just posted a video of his latest version. The result, running on a Nvidia Titan Xp, is quite grainy and like most GPU renderer these days it uses progressive refinement meaning when you stand still the picture will become less and less noisy. As is evident by the result there's still some ways off before we'll see this running with no noticeable noise but it's perhaps a bit of a glimpse into the future of video-gaming and other real-time applications. Visit Edd Biddulph's website to learn more about the project and watch the video on Youtube where you can also find a direct link to a much higher quality version in the comments section.

Autodesk today published a video of Arnold Development Manager Fred Servant speaking about what's new in Arnold 5 and how it paves the way for exciting new features in the future. Johan Friedman and Andy Jones from Psyop joins Fred Servant later in the video and discuss the Cryptomatte integration into Arnold. Watch it on Youtube.

Unreal Engine 4 has been growing in popularity ever since its release and to show off the hard work of all the developers using the game engine, Epic has posted a new sizzle reel. This reel focuses little on games and more on how the engine is used in other areas of the CG industry which includes Mill's use of it for their car commercials. Watch it on Youtube.