Cebas has released a service pack for its renderer that brings numerous bug fixes and enhancements. More at Cebas.com.

A Spheron HDR video camera was used by GoHDR and the NHS Media Hub (Heart of England Foundation) to capture lighting from dark body cavities to bright reflections of surgical instruments. Watch a behind the scenes on Vimeo.

Impressive work in this video by ScanlineVFX showing how they created some of the visual effects for Clint Eastwood's Hereafter film, including the opening tsunami sequence. Watch it on Vimeo.

New features in Motiva's software for modifying scenes' lights, colors and textures after rendering include: separate threading that makes controls work much smoother (especially on heavy scenes), anisotropic filtering on slopes, new version of Max2Colimo script, add States from image files, create new states on states manager by selecting image files, etc. A trial version is available. More at Motiva.

Students from Denmark-based The Animation Workshop are producing some interesting films. The Saga Of Biorn, about a Viking determined to reach Valhalla, is one of their most recent ones. You can find them all at AnimWork.dk.

The 30-inch SpectraView Reference 301 monitor features a true 10-bit P-IPS panel that reproduces 1.07 billion colors and 107 percent of the Adobe RGB color space. It's designed for professional color-critical image and video applications. More at NEC (PDF).

The search engine started returning vector graphic image results last December, but searches can now be refined to return only SVG images: you can now add "filetype:svg" to any search in order to find vector-based, non-bitmap images. More at Google's blog.

Chad Ashley from Chicago-based Digital Kitchen discusses how they used Max for completing a couple of recent spots for Cartoon Network and a Las Vegas hotel. The video was produced by Autodesk. Watch it on YouTube.