Kelseus, developers of the cloth simulation plugin have posted a very nice animated short on their site (the one they used as a demo at last year's SIGGRAPH). Definitely worth a look!

Exluna announced today that Digimation will distribute Entropy 3.1, which includes an integrated interface for 3ds max. Digimation will be offering a promotional price of $1200 on Entropy (a savings of $550) through March 31, 2002. Read on for the whole PR. (more...)

Newplugins have posted an announcement regarding their (his) development effort and the delay of Vehicle Simulator 1.5.

BioWare has posted a cinematic intro of their upcoming Neverwinter Nights game. The animation has been done using 3ds max, Character Studio and Combustion for compositing. Impressive work, check it out!
(Warning: the ending of the animation is a bit violent.)

RE:Vision Effects has released SmoothKit, a set of plugins for compositing programs dedicated to smoothing imagery that combines user-directed controls and feature-sensitive methods. SmoothKit's emphasis is precise control of the filtering process. It has the ability, for example, to smooth out the skin in someone's face without eliminating the details of the hair that hangs in front of the face. In addition to "effects", the SmoothKit toolset can be used to reduce image defects (such as jagged edges, image noise or DV-compression artifacts) in a much more intelligent manner.
The set of plugins is being offered at an introductory price of $134.95 until April 5. Check out SmoothKit's gallery to see some impressive examples. (more...)

The first of four ( o_O ) 4.2.9 patches for 3ds max 4.2 has been put available by Discreet on an 'as is' basis.
ftp://ftp1.discreet.com/web/support/3dstudio/3dsmax429patch1.htm (more...)

A selection of papers from "The 2nd International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR 2002)" are available for download from :
http://spin.s2c.ne.jp/npar2002.html

http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/article026.asp

"CGarchitect.com, the premiere resource site for architectural computer graphic artists, today announced its plans to launch an architectural computer graphics scholarship. The scholarship will be awarded to students who are working to further the art of computer generated architectural rendering, or who have demonstrated excellence in the field of CG architecture.

"Plans are already underway to launch the scholarship for the upcoming 2002-2003 school year...." (more...)