Next Limit have posted a video showing VFX breakdowns from a hero water shot of a harbor created by Mr. X studio for the film Pompeii. Watch it on YouTube.

A tutorial by character artist Ben Douglas on YouTube: Part 1-Part 2-Part 3-Part 4-Part 5.

A script by Bodyul Vladislav for creating spline-based fibers. More on ScriptSpot.

John Hable, author of the Ginger HDR video tonemapping plugin for After Effects has announced that the software will be discontinued. More on 19lights' website.

New features in Itoo Software's set of plugins for creating large extensions of trees and vegetation include: support for V-Ray 3 and Corona Renderer, improved animation, over 30 new presets of wild grass and flowers, etc. More on Itoo Software.

The company behind a number of useful audio processing tools has released a free guide to audio mixing, with in-depth explanations of its concepts. Though it uses some of its software to illustrate the examples in the book, it is intended as a guide for everyone who wants to learn more about mixing. Each chapter demonstrates useful concepts that you can apply in your mixing projects. The guide is available for download from Izotope's site.

Artur Leão has updated his YCDIVFX MaxPlus Packages, which now allow to execute Python scripts in 3DS Max directly from Python in a way that is much easier to setup. The integration code is based on the SublimeMax package created by German artists Christoph Bülter and Johannes Becker. More on You can do it! VFX.

Canadian studio Image Engine have put together two great reels with breakdowns for the VFX they created for Neill Blomkamp's Elysium and Justin Lin's Fast & Furious 6.

Image Engine are developing an open source application framework designed for creating tools for use in visual effects production. It currently provides tools for procedural scene generation, shader authoring, rendering, and image compositing. Watch some demo videos and find out more on Github.

Otoy has disclosed some of the features they're working on for a post-2.0 release of their unbiased GPU renderer. These include deformable object motion blur, render pass output for lighting layers, deep compositing pipeline, out-of-core rendering (for scenes that don't fit into graphics memory) and user-defined GPU procedurals. More on Otoy's forum. (more...)